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Summary
Summary
Three generations of women from one immigrant family try to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they're building in America. Illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States, Castillo delivers a powerful, increasingly relevant novel about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Castillo's debut, a contemporary saga of an extended Filipino family, is a wonderful, nonpareil novel. It opens with Paz, a long-suffering nurse from Vigan who, having immigrated to Milpitas, Calif., shoulders much of the responsibility for her entire family. Her husband, Pol, a member of the De Vera family in the Philippines and once a successful surgeon, had to flee due to political turmoil and take a job as a security guard in the U.S. When their niece Hero arrives, they take her in, and she leads the rest of the story. Hero is burdened with a disturbing political past that she silently carries with her as she spends her days driving Paz and Pol's daughter, Roni, to school and to the faith healers that Paz finds to treat Roni's eczema. Both Hero and Pol struggle to define themselves. While Hero cautiously tries out new friends and lovers of all ilks-most notably a makeup artist named Rosalyn-Pol's crisis of identity will send him on a journey with Roni that threatens the tenuous American roots Paz has worked so hard to put down for the family. Castillo uses multiple languages-Tagalog, Pangasinan, Ilocano-and the strangest of tenses, hopping around in time and among her characters' heads; that taking all of these risks pays off is a remarkable feat. The result is a brilliant and intensely moving immigrant tale. Agent: Emma Paterson, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This raw and lyrical debut novel tells the story of Geronima Hero de Vera, a young Filipino woman who in her three short decades has seen more than her fair share of strife. After living through the political upheaval of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s, Hero is taken in by her uncle, Pol, and his wife, Paz, in the San Francisco suburbs. She is put in charge of caring for her seven-year-old cousin, Roni, and finds Roni's unconditional, if brash, affection to be the healing power that she needs. Throughout the story, much is learned about Hero's past: her parents' disowning of her, her captivity in a prison camp where she was tortured with cigarette burns and the breaking of her thumbs. Though Hero's new life as an immigrant adjusting to America is complicated, the mundane routines and soulful cast of characters she encounters allow her many-times-broken heart to expand and eventually love. Castillo's direct and urgent voice propels the sprawling epic with impressive skill. This unforgettable family saga is not to be missed.--Eathorne, Courtney Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"IT WAS A CRIME to be a Filipino in California," the poet and labor organizer Carlos Bulosan wrote in his 1943 half-novel, halfmemoir, "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. 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. Elaine Castillo's debut novel, "America Is Not the Heart," with its echoing title, draws a clear line of descent from Bulosan's testament. 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. Gone are Bulosan's pea pickers, drifters and gamblers, hopping freight trains up and down the coast. 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. 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. Some are only a few years removed from crowded apartments where relatives on expired tourist visas slept on couches and floors, and where a newcomer might be offered a bed on the kitchen table, "like a rack of lechon" (the whole roasted pig central to any Filipino celebration). But unlike Bulosan's lonely bachelors, who were ineligible for naturalization under the anti-Asian laws of the time, most of Castillo's immigrant characters have become citizens and planted roots. Their children were either born in America or brought to the States so young they have no memory of their first country. 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. 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.) 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. 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 name of her hometown - Vígan, in the northwestern province of llocos 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. Radicalized under martial law imposed by Marcos in 1972, she drops out of medical school and joins the New People's Army, a communist rebel force that continues to resist the government today. For a decade she serves as a cadre doctor in the mountains of Isabela in the northeast, until she's captured by the military and tortured. When they figure out her lineage, they dump her in a vacant lot in Manila, weighing less than 90 pounds and broken in body and spirit. The government offers her parents financial compensation "for the oversight"; soon after, her father is elected mayor by a landslide. They refuse to speak to the daughter who dedicated her life to destroying theirs, and she has nowhere to go but America, where her uncle takes her in. All this takes place as the novel's back story, but it refuses to stay in the past, resurfacing in flashbacks as Hero tries to adjust to the disorienting lull of peacetime and "a world in which there was still corny music, lechon kawali, heavy but passing rain, televised sports, yearly holidays, caring families, requited love." Once she fought alongside comrades who prized "the ability to put a knife in the chest of a mayor or landlord on a regional bus and walk away with no injuries, minimal witnesses"; now she ferries Roni from school, works the cash register at a strip-mall turo-turo (steam-table restaurant) and wanders through parties at strangers' houses, picking up one-night stands, mostly men and sometimes women. Hero is difficult and prickly, qualities shared by Roni, who loses a tooth in a scrap at school (to her glee), and Rosalyn, a new friend acquired practically against Hero's will. A tough-talking makeup artist who feels uneasy with the ideal of beauty that requires lightening the skin and rounding out a flat nose, Rosalyn bluntly propositions Hero, masking her true feelings as mere lust, an act of bravado that fools no one. Hero in turn rejects what she sees as Rosalyn's simple-minded sentimentality: "A heart was something you could buy on the street, six to a skewer." Their love story starts in stutters, the risk of exposure all the more real with every touch. Prickliest of all the characters is Hero's aunt Paz, whose impoverished origins (in Pangasinan, Bulosan's home province) no distance can be great enough to erase. Although she's not the heroine, in some ways she owns the book. Nothing else in it quite matches the sheer velocity and power of the opening chapter, which recounts Paz's life in the second person, like an incantatory prophecy or benediction: how she scrabbled as a child for crabs in holes that could as easily harbor snakes, weighing danger against hunger ("hunger always wins"); saved up pesos to have a tooth pulled so she could replace it with one made of gold, a sign of status - only to have her other teeth fall out, thanks to the cheap dentist's bungling; and finally landed a husband above her station, not knowing that "marrying someone who's always slept with a full belly will be like being married to someone from another planet." Castillo's prose is less lyrical than propulsive, driven by rises in cadence. At times it reads as if spoken, even declaimed. Like Bulosan, she channels a righteous anger, revisiting America's historical crimes, among them the practice of waterboarding, inaugurated during the Philippine-American War. But her true target is the persistence of social iniquity both in the Philippines and among Filipinos in America. At Roni's school, the term "Igorota," referring to a Filipino hill tribe, is flung at her as an insult; further south, in Glendale, an undocumented Filipina housemaid is kept prisoner by the family that employs her. Everyone still privileges pale skin ("beautiful meant she was white-white-white, practically lavender"). Castillo repeatedly returns to emblems of provincial life as talismans against wealthy arrogance, like a gourd hollowed out by hand to make a rustic bowl, or a dessert of sticky rice cakes sold by the side of the road. The book, like its characters, roams freely among languages: English, Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan. Castillo subtly makes the meaning of words known without direct translation, reminding us how much conversation consists of chain-links and muscle memory - of words that are felt more than understood. Here too are details not entirely translatable, like a picture of Jesus with a flaming heart; instant ramen noodles crushed and eaten raw from the plastic bag; a widow refusing her husband's last wish to have his ashes sent to the Philippines, instead keeping them in a cemetery by the hospital where she works so that on every lunch break she can visit his grave. Such details are strewn like crumbs for Filipino readers like me: moments of recognition marking the way home. ? Castillo's novel reads like a seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another. LlGAYA mishan has written for The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, and is the Hungry City columnistfor The Times.
Kirkus Review
Castillo's debut novel presents a portrait of the Filipino diaspora, told through the lens of a single family.Revolving around Hero de Veraa former rebel (with the scars to prove it) turned au pair of sorts in Milpitas, Californiathis is a book about identity but even more about standing up for something larger than oneself. The idea is implicit in that name, Hero, though Castillo pushes against our expectations by bestowing it upon a woman fighting patriarchy. Her employer, after allher sponsor, reallyis her uncle Pol, scion of an influential family. For the most part, Castillo tracks Hero's experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area, highlighting two sustaining relationships: the first with Roni, her uncle's school-age daughter, and the second with Rosalyn, with whom she falls in love. The most important relationship in the book, however, is the one she develops with herself. It's not that Castillo is out to write a novel of transformation; Hero is on a journey, certainly, but it's hard to say, exactly, that the circumstances of her existence change. And yet, this is the point, or one of them, that this sharply rendered work of fiction seeks to address. "She wasn't killedor didn't kill herself," the character reflects. "Tragedy could be unsensational." Unsensational, yesmuch like daily life. Castillo is a vivid writer, and she has a real voice: vernacular and fluid, with a take-no-prisoners edge. At the same time, she complicates her narrative by breaking out of it in a variety of placesboth by deftly incorporating languages such as Tagalog and Ilocano and through the use of flashback or backstory, in which we learn what happened to Hero before she left the Philippines. There are also two second-person chapters (the rest is told in third-person) that further complicate the point of view. Here, we encounter Pol's wife, Paz, who untangles the intricate ties of family, and Rosalyn, who explains the vagaries of love. Through it all, we have a sense that what we are reading is part of a larger story that stretches beyond the borders of the book. "As usual," Castillo writes, "you're getting ahead of yourself, but there isn't enough road in the world for how ahead of yourself you need to get."Beautifully written, emotionally complex, and deeply moving, Castillo's novel reminds us both that stories may be all we have to save us and also that this may never be enough. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
DEBUT In the 1990s, undocumented immigrant Hero De Vera, disowned by her family for her revolutionary activities, makes her way from the Philippines to Milpitas, CA, seeking refuge with her Aunt Paz, Uncle Pol, and their young daughter, Roni. Paz, a hardworking, exhausted nurse, is the main breadwinner. Pol and Hero were both surgeons in the Philippines. He now has a menial job in the States that barely distracts from his wish to practice medicine again in his home country. Hero's medical career was derailed by the torture she endured in a political prison, where she suffered permanent damage to her hands. Her role in the family, chauffeuring Roni to school and faith healers to cure her extreme eczema, leaves Hero plenty of time for wild partying and a passionate affair with Rosalyn, a makeup expert. This multigenerational family saga teems with endless scenes of exotic foods, multilanguage Philippine dialog, interpersonal clashes, and the ever-present conflicting desire for an adopted country vs. a homeland whose history of chaotic violent politics in the 1980s forced them to flee. VERDICT Castillo's debut novel is particularly relevant in today's toxic political climate. A rich, challenging read.-Beth Andersen, -formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
After the cake, after the singing, after the offering of presents that would only be opened at home, they kept with tradition for the first dance: Roni and Pol took the floor. The live band was made up of four Filipino men, bakla, all dressed in barong tagalogs. They were jokingly calling themselves Mabuhok Singers. The song they started playing was one Hero recognized from some of the karaoke nights at the restaurant, Jose Mari Chan's Beautiful Girl. Coooooorrrny, Rosalyn said, seated across from Hero at a table near the back, but the smile on her face was real. It'd been so long since her seventh birthday; Hero couldn't remember if she, like Roni, had danced with her father alone on some dance floor, or one of the inner courtyards of the De Vera house, to some terrible love song, popular at the time, forgettable forever if not for having been chosen for this moment. Pol had one hand on Roni's shoulder, one hand tucking stray hairs behind her ear, even though earlier in the evening Janelle and Rochelle had made a point of shellacking her ponytail with hairspray, Rochelle covering her eyes to shield her from the mist. Hero watched Roni throw her arms around her father's waist, settling her face snug against his belly, blissful, not even bothering to do anything more than hug him and sway. She had a thought, then, sudden as a knife between the ribs: for all she knew, Teresa, Eddie and Amihan were dead, while she was still alive. Sitting in a community center hall in Milpitas, watching her cousin turn eight years old. That this could be the actual condition of the world--a world in which there was still corny music, lechon kawali, heavy but passing rain, televised sports, yearly holidays, caring families, requited love--seemed to Hero a joke of such surreal proportions the only conclusion she could make of it in the end was that it wasn't a joke at all; and if it wasn't a joke, and it wasn't a dream, that meant it was just. Real life. Ordinary life. There was a feeling in Hero's chest she'd felt vaguely before, but had never thought to poke at, knowing instinctively that to let it lie would be better. Now she knew what the feeling was--hate. Just a tiny, tiny hate, humble and missable, heavy as lead, nothing in comparison to the affection she knew she felt for the girl, the everyday devotion she'd been consecrating to her since the moment they met. Just a tiny, tiny hate, circulating through her blood, occasionally reaching the heart, then passing out again. It was that tiny hate that spoke in her when Hero thought to herself what a formidable thing it was, what a terror, really--a girl who was loved from the very beginning. Then she heard it back, the sound of her own thought, like someone was replaying it through a loudspeaker, lingering on each word, making the playback count. Disgust surged up within her so fast she felt herself dry-heaving, her hand closed in a limp fist on her lap, and when a voice in her head spoke up to admonish her, the voice wasn't her own. Jealous of a kid, donya, really? The lead singer was crooning, I just knew that I'd love again after a long, long while-- Excerpted from America Is Not the Heart: A Novel by Elaine Castillo All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
