The Heart of the Diaspora
Review of America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo (USA: Penguin Books, 2019)
by Jocelyn Suarez
“Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.”—Elaine Castillo
The title of Elaine Castillo’s debut novel grabs you and, if you’re part of the Filipino diaspora, it kicks you in the gut. For as long as I can remember, America has been placed on a pedestal by many Filipino families, mine included. The story goes, with invincible confidence, that America, the land of freedom and opportunities, is the one sure-fire path to a better future. The greatest measure of success is to be able to write one’s story in the fabled book of The American Dream.
The prologue of America Is Not The Heart, delivered in fluent and powerful second-person, portrays a life familiar to many Filipinos: Paz—born poor, plain, but resourceful—becomes a nurse; gets a job in America; naturalizes as American citizen; and works 12-hour shifts every day so that she can move her whole family to America. It harks back to every successful Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) story ever told, defined by effective transplantation from the home country to a better, shinier destination. Through a series of not small sacrifices (from discrimination to heartbreak to resignation), much in the same way that a new liver or kidney goes through years of drug therapy and transfusions to become a part of a new body, Paz’s struggles find fruition in the birth of her daughter, Roni, her beloved only child and true-blue American. Castillo describes every OFW in Paz: “You know what you really are—before being loved, before being missed. You’re a pathway.” Her story is so accurate and poignant that it is almost a shame that she is not further developed in the rest of the novel, although she remains a vital secondary character. But it is for good reason. Paz’s story is a story that has been told over and over, by movies and well-meaning elders. It is reminiscent of Carlos Bulosan’s seminal novel about the immigrant Filipino-American experience, America Is in the Heart, which Castillo briefly defers to and then gracefully moves past.
As the prologue ends, the use of the second person “You” acquires a double meaning: “You know what it’s like to have a fate; you also know what it’s like to escape one…. As for loving America or not loving America, those aren’t your problems, either. Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.” In writing this, Castillo recognizes that the narrative of The American Dream limits the possibilities of other stories, even the reader’s. Although the novel begins with The American Dream, it does not linger for long on it.
Enter Hero De Vera. This novel is, ultimately, her story. Unlike Paz, she is born into a respectable family with ties to the then-ruling Marcos regime. Her life in the Philippines is, however, less than idyllic, the precociousness of her personality and sexuality resulting in clashes with her parents. Their relationship falls apart when Hero runs off with a group of militant rebels fighting against the tyranny of the government. With these rebellious spirits, she moved from town to town before settling in a rebel camp in the mountains. As a child, I was taught about Marcos’ rise to power, his eventual spiral down into megalomania, his institution of martial law that evolved into a military dictatorship full of violence and bloodshed. I also learnt of how the masses rallied together in the form of “People Power” to bring that regime down. Hero lived—fought—through that time.
Castillo captures the urgency and fear of that pivotal period through snapshots of Hero’s memories: the comrades she shared bread with, the friends she lost, the chaos and the suffering, and the determination of the rebellion despite the lack of food and weapons. She paints the rebellion with the scarlet hues of admiration and wonder, and Hero’s fellow cadres emerge unflinchingly heroic. None of the books I studied ever brought such heart and pain to my grasp of history, my understanding of what invigorates people to organize. In Castillo’s own words:
What Hero loved most wasn’t the cadre names people chose, but the word kasama itself: kasama, pakikisama. In Ilocano, the closest word was kadwa. Kadwa, makikikadwa. Companion, but that English word didn’t quite capture its force. Kasama was more like the glowing, capacious form of the word with: with as a verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, with as a way of life. A world of with-ing.
Hero, contrary to her name, tragically does not see the rebellion win. Unlike the protagonists of simplistic narratives of struggle and triumph, Hero is eventually captured and imprisoned for ten years, her doctor’s thumbs broken by torture. After her release, she moves to the USA to live with her favorite uncle Pol in California. Pol’s hardworking wife is Paz, by then the family’s sole breadwinner. And so Hero’s story intersects with the prologue, initiating a different version of The American Dream.
We see Hero living a new life, her third life, in Milpitas, California, with a family she did not know existed until then. We see her struggle with feelings of gratitude and awkwardness towards Paz—utang na loob, the feeling of owing someone something, it is called—and her curiosity and surprise at witnessing that her once-renowned doctor-uncle has been relegated to the job of a security officer. She fosters an overprotective sympathy and love for Paz and Pol’s child Roni, who feels as displaced as Hero because of the Morena color of her skin.
Unlike Paz who gave blood, sweat, and tears to achieve what to Hero was so easily offered, Hero does not wish for this new life in America. This new life is reminiscent of the experience of the many immigrant children torn away from their homes to start afresh in a new world. It recalls the otherness that comes with it. That said, Hero’s otherness is unlike the otherness that many of us share. Her alienation is twofold. Not only has she been geographically separated from the life that she had known, the only life that Hero ever knew had ceased to exist—washed away by the flow of time. The martial law she was familiar with was lifted and Hero herself came out of prison without friends. There is no one she can share her past with, to recall the kasama she loved. We see in Hero a kind of resilient despondency, a sadness that refuses to call itself that. Hero’s interiority is depicted by Castillo in aching prose, all the sadder for its lack of sentimentality:
Hero knew then, with a wry, bleak, doubtless humor, that life was long, that this third or fourth life she was on was long, long, long, not even all the way started up yet, not even close. She’d fallen down another slope; now she was being carried back up the mountain.
America Is Not The Heart is not just an immigrant story; it is also a love story. Hero finds love in the form of Rosalyn, a Fil-Am who having lived most of her life in California had already lost her country’s tongue. The romance between Hero and Rosalyn, written beautifully and sensitively, complete with the ache of yearning and the awkwardness of new love, draws the enduring rejection of homosexual relationships by many Filipinos, immigrant or not. In many a Filipino family, issues regarding sexuality are largely ignored until a breaking point, when they end explosively. Smoothly woven into the family drama, the love story develops organically with engaging tension and delicious banter.
The cast of this novel is diverse—its Filipinos come from different classes and regions, speaking different dialects—and so the novel reflects the vastness of the Filipino diaspora, the vastness of the Philippines itself. Castillo’s interchangeable use of dialects—Tagalog, Pangasinense, Ilocano—is seamless and unapologetic. Some words are given without explanation or translation, a manifestation of the common incomplete assimilation that happens to many immigrant families. In this way, a sort of creole becomes the means of conversation, the center of language, a reflection of the mixed identity of most immigrant families, who have one foot in one country and the other in the motherland. This hybrid language is also a testament to the resilience of one’s tongue.
Ultimately, this debut novel explores the many facets of The American Dream to the different Filipinos who strive to achieve it. For Paz, it is a pathway to a better life. To deny this truth is to deny the brutal reality of poverty in the Philippines: “You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it; you don’t need to emigrate to America to feel what you already felt when you were ten… You’ve been foreign all your life. When you finally leave, all you’re hoping for is a more bearable kind of foreignness.”
For Hero, however, The American Dream is family, a family that learn to love you in the way that only families can, with broken arms thrown open to your own brokenness. As Castillo puts it, “There are reasons people live in places…. There are consequences too.” For Hero, what she is given, perhaps as a reward for working towards the emancipation of her country or perhaps just out of sheer luck, is a family, including a lover, that she never had in the land where she was born.
At the heart of every Filipino narrative is a family. We are a culture of families. In her ambitious debut novel Castillo portrays the complex layers of a Filipino immigrant family spanning three generations on two continents in magnificent prose, with the grandeur it deserves. She reminds us that although a place can never truly be the heart of a person or a family, it is nevertheless where bodies can grow and flourish, bodies in which the heart resides, bruised yet ever-beating.
Jocelyn Suarez writes poetry and prose. Her works have appeared in collections like My Lot Is A Sky, Anima Methodi and past SingPoWriMo anthologies, as well as online journals such as Dying Dahlia Review, Eunoia Review, and Pressure Gauge Journal. She is part of the poetry collective, ATOM, and has just finished her first novel.