Sketch: Two Stories by Bienvenido Santos, with the theme, "The Immigrant as a Permanent Exile"
According to Rocio Davis (1996), "Filipinos writing in the U.S. have constantly dealt with the themes central to all Asian American literatures: the pain of immigration, homesickness, the cruelty of racism and the creation of a new identity." Using this description as framework, I will emphasize what I take to be major elements in Santos's "The Door" and "Scent of Apples": contradiction and paradox, tension, and irony.
The pain of immigration in "The Door"
America as embodied on the one hand by Mildred, who repeatedly makes a cuckold of her husband Delfin, and the perverted love of Delfin for his wife and on the other hand, America is also embodied by Mildre's daughters, Anne and Esther, who have a tender and caring love for Ambo (and calls him "Uncle").
We see the irony and tension in these two relationships, on the one hand, a love that resembles having a disease (which he compares to being sick with leprosy, but tells himself that it is love because they have moments of beauty). The Filipino calls this leprosy love, since he has no choice, being an immigrant or an exile dependent on a foreign country to survive (as Delfin says, he can neither kill nor live without her). This is a sincere sentiment evoking only pity and a little kindness from Delfin’s friends: there is resignation in the fact that they are all in this place together.
The narrator talking to Ben observes: "Lord, the things Filipinos do in this country. The things we say. The things that happen to us. What keeps us living on like this from day to day, from loveless kiss to loveless kiss, from venomed touch to venomed touch. Thrill of the gaming table, what keeps us alive, thrill of a woman, sight of her body, sharp fleeting moments of dying…" The strong description is existential: it is caught between the absurdity of realizing the fleeting lovelessness of their lives while still striving to feel alive through gambling and women, who in the end remind them that they are dying every day in this land. When Ambo gets angry with Delfin and suggests taking out Mildred, Delfin refers to his children, who embodies another aspect of America and its relation to immigrant Filipinos.
So at the same time and on the other hand, there is the irony in a love that also makes the Filipino feel "moments of beauty," like the feelings Christmas, as well as Anne and Esther, evokes in Ambo. Ambo selects gifts for the children carefully, with a happiness in his heart and as he says, "no hesitancy, no sluggishness in the movement of my hand as I wrote in each, 'Love, Uncle' as though my hand for such thing need not have to tremble, since there was nothing to hide, and something deep to say which I was just saying now, after these many years, love to you, to anyone." This is reminiscent of Carlos Bulosan’s love for America in the sense of what the Filipinos find in exile, amid (or perhaps because of the loneliness and isolation, or, as a commentator put it, "of the emotional and cultural starvation" which fosters both a sense of love for America almost with no bitterness as well as a compensation for these feelings of loss by gambling and visiting night clubs.
In the end of the story we find Ambo not defending himself against the inevitable conclusion that Delfin arrives to when the door opens. There is also a tension and an irony here: Ambo gets caught in the irony of being mistaken for one of Mildred’s lovers, and he does not clarify or defend himself. Amid his fellow immigrants, which a Filipino ordinarily finds or pretends solidarity with and solace in, he is still isolated. On the one hand, Ambo lies to Mildred by pretending that he knows all of his friends well: "When we talked of boys we liked to our American friends, we always said we knew each other in the Philippines; and we talked about our families as though we had deep ties of association and kinship. Mostly it was just talk. Perhaps it gave us strength to talk like that. We didn’t wish to be known as the forgotten children of long lost mothers and fathers, as grown-up men without childhood, bastards of an indifferent county."
On the other hand, Ambo and his friends are exactly that, despite their pretension of knowing one another, they are at bottom bastards of an indifferent country, isolated among their fellow exiles (like Fabia in "The Scent of Apples"). Ambo not defending himself to the friend that he did not mean to hurt is a picture of that isolation, an isolation mirrored by Delfin when he rhetorically asks, in the dialect, "why you too, Ambo?" The tension is captured within that scene: Delfin uses the dialect (which unifies Filipinos in a communal language) to mark the fundamental separation even among countrymen, "why did you, my countryman, also cheat on me?"
Homesickness in "Scent of Apples"
Although "The Door" also talks of homesickness, it is in "Scent of Apples" that this theme is more pronounced, manifested in the general nostalgia of the farmer Fabia. He travels all the way from his house in the country to hear a talk from a public relations lecturer (who is also the narrator of the story) and asks whether Filipinas "are the same like they were twenty years ago," to which the narrator gives a yes and no answer, caring for Fabia’s "certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile."
The exile, embodied by Fabia, also holds on to certain things reminiscent of his life in the Philippines almost twenty years past, like the photograph of an unknown Filipina (which he has kept), as well as his story about the Visayan town where he used to live with his family. This story highlights the contradictions between his former life and his life now: they were a family whose house was "the biggest in town" where he "grew up into a pampered brat." His house in the country was a "shanty, all but ready to crumble into a heap on the ground, its plastered walls were rotting away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground." It was like the hovels of the colored folk, but even they seemed to despise and be ashamed of it and stayed away. Even among the lowliest classes of citizens in apple-scented America there is racism.
Whereas his father drove him out of the house and his family eventually hated him for breaking their hearts, his brothers and sisters taking "up my father’s hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own broken hearts," his life in the country was pleasant, though poor: his wife, though old and calloused, was very dedicated (as seen in the events surrounding his hospitalization, when she was pregnant and nearly froze to death still saying "I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you") and his son was well-mannered, "a nice boy" who goes to school.
The starkest contradiction can be seen in the scents surrounding the houses (the Visayan and the country house) and the feelings they evoke in Fabia. Remembering the smells of "chickens roosting on the low-topped walls," along with the Visayan house itself, makes Fabia again nostalgic for his life back in the Philippines (he says, "you know, sometimes, I miss that house, the roosting chickens and the low-topped walls. I miss my brothers and sisters"), while the scent of apples permeates the whole of his house in the country (and indeed the whole story) and the only remarkable statement made about it was that the apple prices have been low and they will be fed to pigs when unsold.
At the end of the story we see again, more explicitly, the isolation that besets the Filipino even from his countrymen. Fabia says goodbye with a handshake by saying "Well, I guess I won’t see be seeing you again." When the narrator reminds him of how lovely his wife and child are ("Tell Ruth and Roger… I love them"), Fabia abruptly drops the handshake and says they will be waiting for him, in contradiction to the "defeated but brace" tone of his voice when he says that nobody in the town where he spent youth in will remember him now.
Creation of a New Identity: The Immigrant as a Permanent Exile
The tension and contradictions I chose to highlight in the stories are also reflected in their titles, and these can be related to the third theme, which is the creation of a new identity.
In "The Door," we see this tension in the image of a door itself. A door at once opens and closes, like America both indifferent and welcoming. More importantly, a door is almost a non-place, it is a conduit to and from one place from and to another. I see this as the life of an immigrant, keeping with the theme of cultural schizophrenia in second-generation Asian American writers: the immigrant is neither here nor there, but occupies both spaces of his nation and adopted country, with all the trials this entails. The door is locked to Delfin with Mildred cheating on him behind it; it only opens when the act of cheating is done. Delfin comes back to it again and again – out of both love and resignation to his dependence on it. It becomes worse when his fellowman Ambo goes out of the door. The door, apart from isolating the Filipino exile from America while in America, ultimately isolates a Filipino from his fellow Filipino, no matter where they are together.
In "The Scent of Apples," the paradox, it seems to me, is fundamental: it takes place between the scenes surrounding Fabia in the story and the story’s general feel or setting. Fabia’s nostalgia for things and memories long past and in certain ways idealized can be seen in stark contrast with the scent of apples, a very American fruit, permeating the whole story. One interpretation I came across takes the contradiction further: Fabia, while surrounded by good things (a loving wife, a well-mannered kid, more apples than they know what to do with), Fabia’s character in the story only develops in relation to his memories of his homeland and hometown. As such, the interpretation goes, he misses all the good things in his present life in America because he is too nostalgic of the things he has left behind. Personally, I think we need not go that far: Fabia’s vivid memories relived in a setting that is heavily scented with foreign smells is enough of a contradiction. It speaks of a creation and eventual sustenance of an identity even in and especially when in a foreign land, and when Fabia states "but you see, nobody would remember me now," he embodies the very tension of identity building based on nostalgia: what exiles remember and consider to be important in themselves will stay as memories, shared with their countrymen, but because they are all in a foreign land with its foreign customs, foreign social dynamics, and foreign smells they are caught up in a place only permeated with only fragile stuff: the stuff of memories and the stuff of smells. The exile will thus remain a permanent exile, carrying two worlds within him and belonging to neither one. It is perhaps a testament to the determination of the Filipino that he chose to change the title of the book from where these two stories come into "You Lovely People," from "The Hurt Men," although these characters are certainly hurt, and will continue hurting. Pain is thus the source of identity for the immigrant as exile, and in that lies his loveliness.
America as embodied on the one hand by Mildred, who repeatedly makes a cuckold of her husband Delfin, and the perverted love of Delfin for his wife and on the other hand, America is also embodied by Mildre's daughters, Anne and Esther, who have a tender and caring love for Ambo (and calls him "Uncle").
We see the irony and tension in these two relationships, on the one hand, a love that resembles having a disease (which he compares to being sick with leprosy, but tells himself that it is love because they have moments of beauty). The Filipino calls this leprosy love, since he has no choice, being an immigrant or an exile dependent on a foreign country to survive (as Delfin says, he can neither kill nor live without her). This is a sincere sentiment evoking only pity and a little kindness from Delfin’s friends: there is resignation in the fact that they are all in this place together.
The narrator talking to Ben observes: "Lord, the things Filipinos do in this country. The things we say. The things that happen to us. What keeps us living on like this from day to day, from loveless kiss to loveless kiss, from venomed touch to venomed touch. Thrill of the gaming table, what keeps us alive, thrill of a woman, sight of her body, sharp fleeting moments of dying…" The strong description is existential: it is caught between the absurdity of realizing the fleeting lovelessness of their lives while still striving to feel alive through gambling and women, who in the end remind them that they are dying every day in this land. When Ambo gets angry with Delfin and suggests taking out Mildred, Delfin refers to his children, who embodies another aspect of America and its relation to immigrant Filipinos.
So at the same time and on the other hand, there is the irony in a love that also makes the Filipino feel "moments of beauty," like the feelings Christmas, as well as Anne and Esther, evokes in Ambo. Ambo selects gifts for the children carefully, with a happiness in his heart and as he says, "no hesitancy, no sluggishness in the movement of my hand as I wrote in each, 'Love, Uncle' as though my hand for such thing need not have to tremble, since there was nothing to hide, and something deep to say which I was just saying now, after these many years, love to you, to anyone." This is reminiscent of Carlos Bulosan’s love for America in the sense of what the Filipinos find in exile, amid (or perhaps because of the loneliness and isolation, or, as a commentator put it, "of the emotional and cultural starvation" which fosters both a sense of love for America almost with no bitterness as well as a compensation for these feelings of loss by gambling and visiting night clubs.
In the end of the story we find Ambo not defending himself against the inevitable conclusion that Delfin arrives to when the door opens. There is also a tension and an irony here: Ambo gets caught in the irony of being mistaken for one of Mildred’s lovers, and he does not clarify or defend himself. Amid his fellow immigrants, which a Filipino ordinarily finds or pretends solidarity with and solace in, he is still isolated. On the one hand, Ambo lies to Mildred by pretending that he knows all of his friends well: "When we talked of boys we liked to our American friends, we always said we knew each other in the Philippines; and we talked about our families as though we had deep ties of association and kinship. Mostly it was just talk. Perhaps it gave us strength to talk like that. We didn’t wish to be known as the forgotten children of long lost mothers and fathers, as grown-up men without childhood, bastards of an indifferent county."
On the other hand, Ambo and his friends are exactly that, despite their pretension of knowing one another, they are at bottom bastards of an indifferent country, isolated among their fellow exiles (like Fabia in "The Scent of Apples"). Ambo not defending himself to the friend that he did not mean to hurt is a picture of that isolation, an isolation mirrored by Delfin when he rhetorically asks, in the dialect, "why you too, Ambo?" The tension is captured within that scene: Delfin uses the dialect (which unifies Filipinos in a communal language) to mark the fundamental separation even among countrymen, "why did you, my countryman, also cheat on me?"
Homesickness in "Scent of Apples"
Although "The Door" also talks of homesickness, it is in "Scent of Apples" that this theme is more pronounced, manifested in the general nostalgia of the farmer Fabia. He travels all the way from his house in the country to hear a talk from a public relations lecturer (who is also the narrator of the story) and asks whether Filipinas "are the same like they were twenty years ago," to which the narrator gives a yes and no answer, caring for Fabia’s "certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile."
The exile, embodied by Fabia, also holds on to certain things reminiscent of his life in the Philippines almost twenty years past, like the photograph of an unknown Filipina (which he has kept), as well as his story about the Visayan town where he used to live with his family. This story highlights the contradictions between his former life and his life now: they were a family whose house was "the biggest in town" where he "grew up into a pampered brat." His house in the country was a "shanty, all but ready to crumble into a heap on the ground, its plastered walls were rotting away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground." It was like the hovels of the colored folk, but even they seemed to despise and be ashamed of it and stayed away. Even among the lowliest classes of citizens in apple-scented America there is racism.
Whereas his father drove him out of the house and his family eventually hated him for breaking their hearts, his brothers and sisters taking "up my father’s hate for me and multiplied it numberless times in their own broken hearts," his life in the country was pleasant, though poor: his wife, though old and calloused, was very dedicated (as seen in the events surrounding his hospitalization, when she was pregnant and nearly froze to death still saying "I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you") and his son was well-mannered, "a nice boy" who goes to school.
The starkest contradiction can be seen in the scents surrounding the houses (the Visayan and the country house) and the feelings they evoke in Fabia. Remembering the smells of "chickens roosting on the low-topped walls," along with the Visayan house itself, makes Fabia again nostalgic for his life back in the Philippines (he says, "you know, sometimes, I miss that house, the roosting chickens and the low-topped walls. I miss my brothers and sisters"), while the scent of apples permeates the whole of his house in the country (and indeed the whole story) and the only remarkable statement made about it was that the apple prices have been low and they will be fed to pigs when unsold.
At the end of the story we see again, more explicitly, the isolation that besets the Filipino even from his countrymen. Fabia says goodbye with a handshake by saying "Well, I guess I won’t see be seeing you again." When the narrator reminds him of how lovely his wife and child are ("Tell Ruth and Roger… I love them"), Fabia abruptly drops the handshake and says they will be waiting for him, in contradiction to the "defeated but brace" tone of his voice when he says that nobody in the town where he spent youth in will remember him now.
Creation of a New Identity: The Immigrant as a Permanent Exile
The tension and contradictions I chose to highlight in the stories are also reflected in their titles, and these can be related to the third theme, which is the creation of a new identity.
In "The Door," we see this tension in the image of a door itself. A door at once opens and closes, like America both indifferent and welcoming. More importantly, a door is almost a non-place, it is a conduit to and from one place from and to another. I see this as the life of an immigrant, keeping with the theme of cultural schizophrenia in second-generation Asian American writers: the immigrant is neither here nor there, but occupies both spaces of his nation and adopted country, with all the trials this entails. The door is locked to Delfin with Mildred cheating on him behind it; it only opens when the act of cheating is done. Delfin comes back to it again and again – out of both love and resignation to his dependence on it. It becomes worse when his fellowman Ambo goes out of the door. The door, apart from isolating the Filipino exile from America while in America, ultimately isolates a Filipino from his fellow Filipino, no matter where they are together.
In "The Scent of Apples," the paradox, it seems to me, is fundamental: it takes place between the scenes surrounding Fabia in the story and the story’s general feel or setting. Fabia’s nostalgia for things and memories long past and in certain ways idealized can be seen in stark contrast with the scent of apples, a very American fruit, permeating the whole story. One interpretation I came across takes the contradiction further: Fabia, while surrounded by good things (a loving wife, a well-mannered kid, more apples than they know what to do with), Fabia’s character in the story only develops in relation to his memories of his homeland and hometown. As such, the interpretation goes, he misses all the good things in his present life in America because he is too nostalgic of the things he has left behind. Personally, I think we need not go that far: Fabia’s vivid memories relived in a setting that is heavily scented with foreign smells is enough of a contradiction. It speaks of a creation and eventual sustenance of an identity even in and especially when in a foreign land, and when Fabia states "but you see, nobody would remember me now," he embodies the very tension of identity building based on nostalgia: what exiles remember and consider to be important in themselves will stay as memories, shared with their countrymen, but because they are all in a foreign land with its foreign customs, foreign social dynamics, and foreign smells they are caught up in a place only permeated with only fragile stuff: the stuff of memories and the stuff of smells. The exile will thus remain a permanent exile, carrying two worlds within him and belonging to neither one. It is perhaps a testament to the determination of the Filipino that he chose to change the title of the book from where these two stories come into "You Lovely People," from "The Hurt Men," although these characters are certainly hurt, and will continue hurting. Pain is thus the source of identity for the immigrant as exile, and in that lies his loveliness.
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