BOOKSHOP Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults. Edited
by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Santa Monica,
California: PALH, 2003. 298 pages. $18.95, paper.
Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults
REVIEW BY MELUS, Spring, 2004 by Pearl Ratunil
Growing up is not easy. Adolescence is fraught with misunderstandings, loneliness,
feelings of exile, and bad haircuts. In an anthology edited by Cecilia Manguerra
Brainard, authors explore numerous facets of this time of life. This alone does
not make the collection unique; what does, however, is that all the protagonists
in these stories are Filipino or Filipino American. What comes through is that
being an adolescent is awful, no matter where or who you are, because adolescence
is about awakenings: learning things that one did not want to know and rejecting
things one thought one did know.
The anthology is divided into five sections, each with a theme: family, angst,
friendship, love, home. While this imposes a kind of order and structure on
the stories, it seems unnecessary. What makes the collection compelling is what
Rocio Davis calls in the introduction the "multifariousness of the Filipino
experience" (ix), and it is this variety which cannot be contained within
the five themes. As one reads the stories, one forgets (as one should) that
these stories are examples of the theme. Instead the voice of each protagonist
and narrator comes through individually, speaking a new idea each time. For
example, two stories from the section titled "Family" begin with first
sentences describing grandmothers. Paula Angeles starts her story "Lola
Sim's Handkerchief" with this: "When my Lola Sim, my mother's mother,
died after my sixteenth birthday, no one wanted to open her armoire"(3);
while Veronica Montes begins her story "Lolo's Bride," with this:
"After my grandmother died, Lolo Ting spent three months blinking"
(13). These stories could have repeated each other like bad echoes, but instead
they describe two completely different kinds of grief. Angeles' story describes
a girl's regret about the relationship with her grandmother: "my teenage
years with my grandmother echoed with the volleys of words in our continuous
argument game" (4). In contrast, Montes' story is almost humorous in describing
a girl watching her mother's on-going self-delusion about her grandfather's
new "maid"--in actuality, a much younger wife. So while these stories
may be categorized together because of the common feature of the Lola, or grandmother,
they are very different from each other. That difference enables the anthology
to escape a dull homogeneity.
The anthology's "multifariousness" is heard not only in the voices
of the characters but also in the subject of the stories. M. Evelina Galang's
"Her Wild American Self" is about a Filipino-American girl in love
with her own cousin; Joel Barraquiel Tan writes about a gay man's friendship
with his mother, who upon learning her son was gay, responds: "Okay! Good...."
(125); Oscar Penaranda in "Day of the Butterfly" writes about migrant
workers in the orchards of California. Penaranda's narrator offers an apt description
of the experience of reading the anthology itself. As the storyteller, but not
the witness to the events of the story, the narrator admits to and describes
the challenges of his job. "I had to piece things together, use liberties
to fill in gaps, iron out seeming contradictions, and restrain the implausible,
to make palatable, to make sense out of the whole fiasco that was the roadside
showdown on freeway Interstate 80, about 40 miles northeast of San Francisco
where we were all from. And even then it was still open for several interpretations"
(89). Here too, the reader of these stories must iron out contradictions. How
is it, for instance, that Filipinos can have so many commonalities, and yet
be so distinct from each other? Is it plausible that an old man can marry a
young woman and pass her off as his maid to his family? Then, how can immigrating
for a better life in America turn out to be such a disaster? The challenge of
reading and writing Filipino literature is what makes this anthology exciting.
Growing up Filipino is a valuable addition to Asian American literature. One
feature of the anthology's title, however, may be misleading. The subtitle "stories
for young adults" may direct potential readers away from the anthology,
readers who assume (erroneously, perhaps) that the stories are simplistic or
are themselves adolescent. They are not. The writing, the characters, and the
stories are sophisticated and are appropriate for adult readers as well as young
adult readers.
Pearl Ratunil
University of Illinois at Chicago
COPYRIGHT 2004 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of
the United States
E-mail questions/comments
to cbrainard@aol.com
Copyright © 2004 Cecilia
Manguerra Brainard