Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Debut is tender portrait of Filipino-American culture
The title of Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” riffs on a foundational text of the Filipino diaspora, Carlos Bulosan’s semiautobiographical 1946 novel, “America Is in the Heart.” Not exactly a contradiction of the original title, but a qualification, perhaps even a cautionary statement on its optimistic vision of immigrants coming to love America despite all obstacles, Castillo’s title reflects a certain ambivalence about the Filipino-American experience.
As filtered through the view of her reticent protagonist, Hero, the Filipino diaspora is in many ways obstinately resistant to belonging, riven with many of the same internal divisions of class, region and skin color that mark life in the Philippines.
Home is not easy to find anywhere on the map, Castillo seems to say. Nevertheless, as this impressive debut shows, beauty lives everywhere.
Hero (short for Geronima) is the daughter of a wealthy Ilocano family in Vigan, one of the oldest Spanish colonial cities in the Philippines. Trained for the high-status life of a doctor, Hero instead ran away from school to join the New People’s Army, the insurgent Communist guerrilla group formed in 1969.
Ten years later, she has a pair of broken thumbs to show for it, as well as other, less visible damage. Rejected by her parents, Hero immigrates to Milpitas, a San Francisco suburb where her favorite uncle Pol lives with his wife, Paz, and 8-year-old daughter, Roni. The main action of the book unfolds in Milpitas during the early 1990s, as Hero’s heart struggles slowly back to life with the help of Roni, a pretty, foul-mouthed makeup artist named Rosalyn and the ad hoc family of Filipino-Americans that form their community.
It may sound like a smallscale premise for an intergenerational immigration epic, and indeed, many of the book’s most dramatic events — Hero’s imprisonment and torture, Paz’s impoverished childhood in Pangasinan, Rosalyn’s realization that she’s gay — happen long before the book begins. Yet the choice to focus tightly on Hero’s comparatively mundane daily existence in Milpitas, where she looks after Roni and gradually becomes a part of Rosalyn’s tight circle of friends, is a strong one that anchors the book’s many wanderings.
Milpitas, like the Philippines itself, is at once a tight-knit community governed by traditions and a crossroads of conflicting cultures. The prose — saturated with details of Filipino culture and untranslated snippets of Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan — might be overwhelming in a wider-ranging novel. But grounded by Hero’s perspective, readers unversed in Filipino culture can absorb and come to appreciate the rich texture of life in Milpitas, from lechon kawali to Miyazaki films to Western scents like Tabac and Chanel No. 5.
Hero enters this scene eager to be useful. But then, as Pol, a former doctor himself, observes, “Hands were more complicated than the people attached to them. … Hearts heal. They even improve. Hands are never the same.” The theme of the contrast between hearts and hands — feelings and deeds — is threaded delicately throughout the book, as Hero’s aching hands become a constant reminder of the parts of life from which she is now excluded. Surgery tops the list, of course, but masturbation is also out of the question, a lack that sends her on a jaded quest for sex: “Hero had no truck with people for whom the heart was a dreamed-up thing, held together by divine saliva, a place where gods still made their beds. A heart was something you could buy on the street, six to a skewer or piled on a square of foil, served with garlicky rice and atsuete oil.”
It’s clear early on that by the end of the book, Rosalyn’s heart will prove substantially more nourishing, and the time it takes Hero to get there, and to live up to her nickname, may frustrate some readers.
If America is not the heart, neither is the Philippines, exactly; in this startlingly lovely first novel, home is not a place at all, but the people willing to wait most patiently for your love.