The name of her hometown - Vigan, in the northwestern province of Ilocos Sur - strikes fear in her classmates at university in Manila as a “no-go zone, a kingdom of terror” belatedly, Hero realizes that the warlords who rule the region are her godparents and neighbors. It turns out to be only the latest of Hero’s transformations: She was born to a rich, pedigreed family, descended from Spanish colonial officials and Chinese merchants and chummy with President Ferdinand Marcos. The story revolves around the arrival in Milpitas of a damaged woman, Geronima De Vera, known in the Philippines as Nimang but immediately christened Hero by her 7-year-old American cousin, Roni.
She’s of it.” (“America Is Not the Heart” isn’t a rebuttal of Bulosan’s title but a kind of mondegreen, or mishearing - a joke with a kernel of truth, as the younger generation in the book starts to forget the words of their ancestors.) They are American in a way that their parents could only dream of being as one mother notes of her daughter’s relationship with this country, “she doesn’t have to love it.
Their children were either born in America or brought to the States so young they have no memory of their first country. Their world is small and circumscribed, populated almost entirely by fellow Filipinos and not ranging far beyond pre-Silicon Valley Milpitas (where the author grew up), a prosaic suburb of San Jose whose distinguishing feature seems to be the potent scent wafting from the local landfill. They’ve been supplanted by nurses pulling 16-hour shifts and surgeons-turned-security guards, with useless foreign medical licenses and no hope of ever holding a scalpel again. Gone are Bulosan’s pea pickers, drifters and gamblers, hopping freight trains up and down the coast. A portrait of Filipinos in 1990s California, it’s hungrily ambitious in sweep and documentary in detail, and reads like a seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another.
The book - lean as a liturgy, with jags into the sublime - bears witness to the wrongs visited upon them by white Americans who called them “monkeys,” barred them from restaurants, refused to rent rooms to them, assaulted them for befriending white women and sometimes shot them in the back out of sheer boredom.Įlaine Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” with its echoing title, draws a clear line of descent from Bulosan’s testament. “It was a crime to be a Filipino in California,” the poet and labor organizer Carlos Bulosan wrote in his 1943 half-novel, half-memoir, “America Is in the Heart.” The son of subsistence farmers, he came from what was then the American territory of the Philippines to the United States during the Great Depression along with some 100,000 migrant workers, almost all men, almost all poor and desperate.
AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART By Elaine Castillo 480 pp.
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