San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Novel finds humor in life on the margins
With the Supreme Court recently upholding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which provides a path to legal status for qualified undocumented immigrants, Lysley Tenorio’s funny and poignant second novel, “The Son of Good Fortune,” couldn’t come at a better time. Concerning an undocumented Filipino American family living in Colma, the book portrays the murky ethics of America’s treatment of the illegal immigrant.
Excel is a 19yearold TNT, tago ng tago, Tagalog for “hiding and hiding.” His mother, Maxima, gave birth on the plane to the U.S. Neither American nor Filipino, Excel is a true nowhere man. “I’m not really here,” he says to his girlfriend, Sab.
Both Excel and Maxima are denied a path to legal status and live a life on the margins. Hotels and passports are foreign to them, and acronyms like TSA require Googling to be decoded. Maxima, a former actress in bad Filipino action movies, is relegated to scamming lonely white men online, while Excel works under the table at a spythemed pizza joint named The Pie Who Loved Me, whose tyrant owner whimsically decides when and when not to pay Excel. Stifled and lovesick, Excel follows Sab to Hello City, a desert artist community, where his life only gets more complicated, driving him back to Maxima for help.
Tenorio skillfully wrings high comedy from his characters’ boxedin lives in a country that doesn’t know what to do with them. At a cinema festival featuring a movie Maxima starred in, a Filipino American filmstudies professor drags the terrible acting while bloviating on the movie’s significance as a “postMarcos, postAquino social document.” Unbeknownst to the scholar, Maxima is in the audience and more than prepared to defend her work.
When, in 10th grade, Excel has to write about a family tree he knows nothing about, he makes up a fanciful tale of being “TNTAmerican,” the greatgreatgreatgreat grandson of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and Nobel’s fictive Filipino maid. Excel fully expects to be called out on his essay, only to have the teacher, white, offer to publicize Excel’s “incredible” story, a “new truth.”
Like the main characters of many comingofage novels, Excel’s retiring nature makes him less compelling than his supporting players. For instance, Maxima, a martial arts expert and internetsavvy firebrand, steals every scene she’s in.
Tenorio nevertheless finds moments to highlight the son of good fortune’s pathos. When Excel watches planes in the sky over Colma, he thinks: “If he’d only had those documents, he could’ve been up in the air too. But he knows that the first flight he took, the one on which he was born, was possibly his last.”
The novel’s back half centers on a big con, with Maxima and Excel teaming up to scam a white guy looking for love (that he can pay for). The line between the exploited and the exploiter blurs in fascinating and uncomfortable ways. “The Son of Good Fortune” is a timely novel that leaves its central question unanswered: Can’t we, as a nation, do better?