Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories

7/25/2019 Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories

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F O R E W O R D B Y J E S S I C A H A G E D O R N

I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y A L L A N I S A A C


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S C E N T O F A P P L E S


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C L A S S I C S O F

A S I A N A M E R I C A N

L I T E R A T U R E


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F O R E W O R D B Y J E S S I C A H A G E D O R N

I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y A L L A N P U N Z A L A N I S A A C

UNIV ERSITY of WASHINGTON PRESS

Seattle & London


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1955, 1967 by Bienvenido N. Santos

Introduction and preface to the 1979 edition 1979 by

the University of Washington Press

Foreword to the 2015 edition 2015 by Jessica Hagedorn

Introduction to the 2015 edition 2015 by the University of Washington Press

Printed and bound in the United States of America

18 17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmied in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, withoutpermission in writing from the publisher.

Immigration Blues rst appeared in the June 1977 issue of New Leers.

The Day the Dancers Came, The Contender, Quicker with Arrows, and

Footnote to a Laundry List rst appeared in the Philippines in The Day the

Dancers Came(Bookmark Press, 1967). The remaining stories in this volume rst

appeared in the Philippines in You Lovely People(Bookmark Press, 1955).

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Santos, Bienvenido N.

Scent of apples : a collection of stories / Bienvenido N. Santos ; foreword by

Jessica Hagedorn ; introduction by Allan Punzalan Isaac.

pages cm (Classics of Asian American literature)

ISBN 978-0-295-99511-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Filipino AmericansFiction. I. Title.

PR9550.9.S22S3 2015

823dc23

2015018740

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum

requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, 39.481984.


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To my wife, Beatriz


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C O N T E N T S

: ,

ix

: , xv

, xxxiii

xl i

,

:


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ix

M Y L O S T C O U N T R Y

Jessica Hagedorn

San Francisco, circa 1967. We are a restless, homesick pair, my mother

and I. Ensconced in a gloomy at, we are trying desperately to

adjust to a new world and act like everythings ne. But there are

visible chinks in our armor. At least once a year and no maer

how lile money we have, my mother nds a way to go back to

Manila and visit everyone and everything weve left behind. Shejust cant seem to let go. I, on the other hand, stay put and nd my

solace in reading books and writing sappy poetry. No way am I

going back or admiing that I miss anyone or anything. Weve

been in America for only four years, but the Philippines and my

beloved Manila are like a distant planet. Ive decided its best to

forget and deny.

During one of her trips back to Manila, my mother comes

across The Day the Dancers Came, a collection of stories by one Bien-

venido N. Santos, in a local bookstore. Intrigued by the books

evocative title and bright yellow cover, she decides to buy the

book as a gift for me.

* * *Reading those stories was an eye-opening experience. My educa-

tion in the Philippines was of the convent-school variety, over-

wrought and colonial. We were taught the literature of Longfel-low, Kipling, and their ilk, but nothing by Filipino writers. It was

as if they didnt exist. Ironically, it took emigrating to the United

States to shock me from my sleep.


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x Foreword

Though Bens stories are wrien from a male perspective (and

from the perspective of another generation, at that) they struck a

nerve. The isolation and homesick yearning felt by his characterswere easy for my teenage self to identify with. I, too, was con-

icted about nding myself in America. I, too, felt lost and was

not sure where I really belonged.

Recurring characters like Ben, Teroy, Val, and Ambo in the

stories reminded me of the complicated men in my extended

familymen who were proud, wounded, fatalistic, often infu-

riatingly resigned. It didnt maer if these characters were im-poverished farmers in rural Michigan or highly educated, dap-

per young men stuck in Washington, D.C., on a student visa. The

writer Bienvenido N. Santoswhoever he washad these guys

down, rendering vividly their insecurities and need to please,

their self-deprecating sense of humor, their pain and sorrow. I

was too young to fully comprehend what it meant to write with

empathy, but I knew Bienvenido N. Santos could teach me some-

thing about creating memorable Filipino characters.Many of the stories I rst encountered in The Day the Dancers

Cameare reprised in Scent of Apples, whichin this timely new

editionresurrects the work of this largely forgoen master sto-

ryteller for another generation of readers. There is much pleasure

and insight to be found in this rich and satisfying collection. The

title story, Scent of Apples, is a classic, the language spare and

elegant, the observations keen. Against the backdrop of the Sec-

ond World War, the narrator, an unnamed Filipino writer who

happens to be in the United States, is invited to speak to a college

crowd in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It appeared that they wanted

me to talk about my country; they wanted me to tell them things

about it because my country had become a lost country. Every-

where in the land the enemy stalked, Santos writes (22). The au-

dience is made up primarily of women, except for one hardscrab-

ble Filipino farmer named Celestino Fabia, who has driven thirtyarduous miles in a beat-up car to hear the narrator speak. Ive

seen no Filipino for so many years now, the humble farmer tells

our worldly narrator. So when I saw your name in the papers


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Foreword xi

where it says you come from the Islands and that youre going to

talk, I come right away (21).

Scent of Apples breaks your heart in the quietest and sub-tlest of ways. But there are plenty of other Santos gems in this

collection: Immigration Blues, The Hurt Men, and the sur-

prising, griy Nightclub.

* * *I met Bienvenido N. Santos when I was twenty-nine years old.

We were part of the Talk Story Writers Conference held at the

University of Hawaii in Manoa in 1978. The historic gatheringbrought together younger writers like myself, Garre Hongo,

Laureen Mar, Shawn Wong, and Oscar Pearanda with renowned

pioneers like Ben Santos, Toshio Mori, Wakako Yamauchi, and

N. V. M. Gonzalez. Talk Story was an incredible conuence and

collision of literary sensibilities, fraught with drama. Frank Chin

was invited but didnt come. Instead he sent an outraged mani-

festo, which someone read on his behalfmaybe Shawn Wong?

at the welcome session. Frank was on the warpath with MaxineHong Kingston, who was living in Hawaii at the time, had just

published The Woman Warrior to much acclaim, and was desig-

nated as the ocial host of our conference. I remember Maxines

unappable demeanor while the manifesto was being read. Many

audience members began muering, aghast at Frank Chins rude

behavior. Needless to say, it was an entertaining and culturally

signicant moment, a bit of brilliant performance art, with Frank

Chin playing the role of agent provocateur. But where was Bien-

venido N. Santos in all this?

I saw him in the audience, siing next to his pal N. V. M. Gon-

zalez. The veteran Filipino writers watched and listened but re-

mained above the fray. I remember going to Bens reading later

and working up the nerve to introduce myself. I probably said

something dumb like: Hi, Mr. Santos. I love your work. Im Jes-

sica, a Filipino American writer. Meaning I lived here in theUnited States, not over there. But why the hell did I need to say

that? I remember his amused smile, how he shook my hand and

said, Call me Ben.


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xii Foreword

Youll note I keep calling him Ben, the name he preferred. In

his memoir,Memorys Fictions,Ben writes aboutamong many

thingsgrowing up in Tondo, his dream of becoming a poet, andnot being fond of his given name. Perhaps being saddled with a

name like Bienvenido Santos, which in Spanish means welcome

saints, was too ostentatious for this modest and unpretentious

man.

I feel lucky to have known him. And many years after meet-

ing him, I was determined to include Ben Santos in Charlie Chan

Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction,which I edited. It was a no-brainer, as far as I was concerned.

Bienvenido N. Santos was the quintessential immigration blues-

man singing for all the stranded Filipino men in America: the

diligent pensionados, the melancholy exiles and expats. Men who

work hard, men who love the verbal joust, men who love to drink,

dance, gamble, and drink some more. Men who wax nostalgic

about the Philippines and the demure, purehearted women they

left behind. Lonely men who frequent seedy nightclubs wherewhite women agree to dance with them for a price. The dream of

a far-away Philippines and the specter of a brutal world war loom

large in their compelling, poignant stories.

* * *The last time I saw Ben Santos in person was in New York City on

July 27, 1993. I had organized an impromptu despedida luncheon

in his honor at Woodys, a popular bistro in the West Village that

no longer exists. Ben, then an eighty-two-year-old widower and

somewhat fragile, was on his way back to the Philippineshis

other, sweeter home, as he called it. As I recall, he was trav-

eling with one of his daughters. The luncheon was a festive,

lighthearted aair that went on for hours, with plenty of food,

wine, picture-taking, literary chismis, and laughter. Pinoy puns

and corny jokes owed nonstop, mostly courtesy of Ben. Even in

his old age, Ben retained his playful sense of humor, especiallywhen there were women around. Young, old, fat, thin, smart, not

so smart, prey, not so prey: none of it maered. Ben was a born

irt and loved us all.


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Foreword xiii

A photograph exists somewhere of that memorable gathering

twenty-two years ago. I cant remember who took the picture,

but I do remember the lively group of Fil-Am writers and art-ists who were there: Han Ong, Ching Valdes-Aran, Luis Francia,

Noel and Angel Velasco-Shaw, Ramon Hodel, Ninotchka Rosca.

We stood on either side of Ben, smiling brightly for the camera.

Ben remained seated at the head of the table, delighted to be at the

center of all the fuss. The moment was biersweet. There was a

sensefor me, anywaythat we would never see him again. And

in fact, Ben would die three years later, on January 7, 1996, at hisfamily home at the foot of the volcano Mount Mayon. His work

had always grappled in one way or another with home and loss,

with memory and acute feelings of displacement. So very Fili-

pino. About Bens passing in the shadow of that active volcano, I

remember thinking at the time: How romantic, how perfect, how

Ben.

* * *

New York City, 2014. Books by Bienvenido N. Santos on myshelf: You Lovely People, The Day The Dancers Came, The Man Who

(Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor, Memorys Fictions, Scent of

Apples. All the books were published in the Philippines except

for Scent of Apples, which was rst published by the University of

Washington Press in 1979.

All but one of the Santos books on my shelf were gifts from Ben

himself. To give you an idea of his playful and sweet personality,

here are some of his inscriptions (reproduced exactly as he wrote

them):

Dear Jessica, Heres hoping youd be everything you

want to become, and in any languagePilipino or

Croatian !

(Hawaii, June 23, 1978)

With all my love, or whats left of it . . .

(New York City, July 27, 1993)


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xiv Foreword

For a dear friend . . . shortly before leaving for the

other, sweeter home . . . as a token of nothing much and

everything memorable for which there are no words.

(Naga City, Philippines, September 22, 1993)


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xv

F O O T N O T E T O M E M O R Y

Allan Punzalan Isaac

What keeps us living on like this from day to day, from loveless kissto loveless kiss, from venomed touch to venomed touch. Thrill of the

gaming table, what keeps us alive, thrill of a womans arms, sight of

her body, sharp eeting moments of dying.

Bienvenido N. Santos, The Door

But the story became many stories, growing bigger and uncontrol-

lable, and many times I would sit and begin as I am beginning now.

But beginning is always.

Bienvenido N. Santos, personal papers

Gathered in a Spanish-themed caf in old Manila, longtime friends and I

were talking about Mang Benas his students and friends af-

fectionately referred to him, using the Tagalog honoric. One

recalled a writing class back in the early 1990s in which Santos

was a guest speaker: I remember him saying, Dont kill your

characters. The greatest pain you can inict on your characters is

to let them live.1What strikes the reader in the now-canonical

short-story collection Scent of Applesthe 1979 collection that is

Santoss only book published in the United States, created fromworks spanning dierent eras, from the 1940s to the 1970sis

the refusal of easy closure. Death and decay are all around the

charactersFilipinos from all social classes living, working, and


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xvi Introduction to the 2015 Edition

dying in the Midwest and on the East Coastbut no protagonist

enjoys a proper ending, certainly not the propriety of death. By

surviving, characters must endure to mark time, make memories,and, worse, make demands on readers.

In these quiet, laconic stories, Bienvenido Santoss characters

inhabit the dangerous kiss and touch and the erotic thrill and

sights of longing. These eeting but sensory-lled moments of

dying have undergirded the power of Santoss writing since he

rst published in the Philippines, in the 1930s, when the islands

were still U.S. territory and Filipinos were American nation-als. Each of the sixteen short stories collected in Scent of Apples

grounds the reader in the American landscape during the war

years and the Cold War era. At the same time, Santos manages

to lead the reader to an equally real alternate landscape zeal-

ously kept by each character.2He points us to the solitary pathos

dening the character, only to look away politely to let us linger

uncomfortably a bit longer.

Although he was cited as one of the rst Filipino Americanwriters, alongside Carlos Bulosan, Santos suggested in a 1981 in-

terview: I want to be called a Filipino writer writing in English.3

The borders between Filipino English and Filipino American lit-

erary tradition are as fraught as the borders between the Philip-

pines and the United Statesblurred borders forged out of the

violent history of war, occupation, colonialism, forced incorpora-

tion, and a vexed friendship between the two nations. Santos was

born and educated during the years the Philippines spent under

U.S. administration (18981946), which is also the period when he

began publishing. He loved the sound of English in books lled

with beautiful sounds, he said in the same interview, recalling

the days of his youth when he would walk to the National Li-

brary in Manila. Like Bulosan, he grew up in poverty and left

for the United States as a young man. But unlike Bulosan, who

had a rural past and made a West Coast sojourn, Santos emergedout of the inner-city slums of Manila and entered the mainland

United States as a privileged, if impecunious, student, aending

elite institutions of higher education in the Midwest and on the

East Coast.


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xvii

Bienvenido Santos was born in 1911 in Tondo, Manila, which

appears in his stories as Sulucanin Tagalog, literally his cor-

ner of the world. Mang Ben was a miracle child, born twenty-three years after his older brother. Santos never stopped moving:

he lived and worked intermiently in the United States from 1941

to the 1980s, returning to the Philippines between those inter-

ludes.4Leaving Tondo in 1931, Santos aended the University of

the Philippines, the premier state university set up by the Ameri-

can administration in 1908, the same decade other U.S. colonial

universities were established: the University of Puerto Rico (1903)and University of Hawaii (1907). He and his wife, Beatriz, would

nd a new home a couple of years later in the province of Albay in

the Bicol region of Luzon Island, at the foot of the perfectly cone-

shaped volcano Mount Mayon. This idyllic seing was to become

the backdrop for many stories, including his rst two novels, The

Volcano(1965) and Villa Magdalena(1965).

He rst left the tropical archipelago in 1941, as a pensionado,

a scholarship student sponsored by the Philippine Common-wealth, to specialize in the teaching of English; he did graduate

work at the University of Illinois and then at Columbia and Har-

vard. The outbreak of war forced him and other pensionadosto

remain in the United States, unable to reunite or communicate

with their families in the Philippines, which was by then occu-

pied by Japanese imperial forces. Many of these students, includ-

ing Santos, were called to serve the Philippine government-in-

exile in Washington, D.C. As Americans fought alongside Filipi-

nos in the Pacic theater, the War Department, under the auspices

of the American Association of Teachers Colleges, sent Santos on

a speaking tour across the United States. He traveled the country,

talking about the Philippines, where many husbands, sons, and

brothers of those who had never heard of the archipelago were

ghting the Japanese. Many of Santoss stories published in the

Philippines were set in Chicago, D.C., and New York as a resultof these travels.

In January 1946, Santos was able to return to the Philippines.

He did not come back to the United States until 1958, when suc-

cessive grants allowed him, as a Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and


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xviii Introduction to the 2015 Edition

Iowa Literary Foundation Fellow, to aend the University of Io-

was Writers Workshop. Unlike his past state-sponsored travels,

these cultural grants gave him the opportunity to nish writinghis rst novels. He returned to the Philippines in 1961, holding

various posts as a high-ranking administrator at the University of

Nueva Caceres in Bicol. For his writing he received the Republic

Cultural Heritage Award in Literature from the Philippine gov-

ernment in 1965. However, he would go back to the University of

Iowa twice more, in 1966 and in 1970.

Santos planned to stay at his forever home at the foot ofMount Mayon, but the declaration of martial law by the U.S.-

backed Marcos regime in 1972 made it dicult for him to con-

sider a return home: one of his novels, The Praying Man, had

criticized Philippine corruption. The book was refused publica-

tion by the Marcos government. (It was, however, published in

the Philippines years later, in 1982.) Scrambling for work, he and

his wife, as an academic couple already in their sixties, seled at

Wichita State University in 1973, where Santos took a post as dis-tinguished writer in residence. Three years later he became a U.S.

citizen in anticipation of his eventual return to the Philippines.

He did return in 1982, with much fanfare, having published, in

1979, the critically acclaimed Scent of Apples, winner of the 1980

American Book Award. This Philippine homecoming was bier-

sweet, however, because he had come to bury his beloved wife,

Beatriz, his dearest Aquing as he addressed her in his leers.

After retirement, he became a visiting writer and artist at De La

Salle University in Manila, where a museum with his papers has

since been established and a creative writing center named in his

honor. Santos died in 1996.

Santoss peripatetic life from the 1940s to the 1980s traced the

ever-changing geographic outlines of Philippine America, and

this is reected in the stories collected here. The stories also cover

a good portion of Santoss publishing career since the 1940s, andso they bear signs of the evolving landscapes of, and blurred bor-

ders between, the United States and the Philippines. During this

period the term Filipino Americanwas redened many times, re-


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xix

ecting the shift from an imperial to a neocolonial relationship

between the two nations. Santos was witness to the changes and

experienced the overlapping categories of Filipinos status undervarious economic and political conditions: feudalism, U.S. colo-

nialism, neocolonialism, corporate capitalism, and conjugal dic-

tatorship. As fellow travelers, readers across generations in both

the Philippines and the United States have followed Santoss elu-

sive character, the collective Pinoy in America, tracing his socio-

historical permutations as pensionado, student, teacher, worker,

government bureaucrat, taxi driver, porter, farmer, landed elite,immigrant, and exile.

Scent of Appleswas rst published by the University of Wash-

ington Press in 1979, at the tail end of the civil rights movement

and at the advent of multiculturalism. The collection compiled,

for an American audience, stories from two previous collections

published in the PhilippinesYou Lovely People (1955) andThe Day

the Dancers Came (1967)as well as two previously uncollected

stories, including the opening story, Immigration Blues (1977).Sol Solberg of the University of Washington had introduced San-

toss work to Marilyn Waesche, then an editor at the university

press. (Solberg would later write Introduction to Filipino Ameri-

can Literature, part of the 1983 reissue of the pioneering pan

Asian American literary anthologyAiiieeeee!, originally published

in 1974.)

In the summer of 1976, when Waesche turned her aention to

Santoss work, Americans had barely recovered from the Vietnam

War, which had ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The term

Asian Americanwas not yet a decade old, having emerged from

the ethnic-studies and antiwar movements of the late 1960s. The

ethnic studies movement had been led by an interracial coalition

of college students and community activists demanding not only

increased access to higher education but also the development

of curricula that included the often overlooked cultures and so-cial histories of Americans of color. In a leer to Santos, Waesche

commented on the importance of Santoss writing to the growing

Asian American community. Asian America had seen a dramatic


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xx Introduction to the 2015 Edition

rise in its numbers as a result of the Immigration and Nationality

Act of 1965, which banned the use of the national-origins quota

and race as a consideration for entry into the United States, a quotathat had severely limited immigration from Asia since 1924. This

restriction was replaced by a U.S. preference for immigrants with

certain occupations and by an emphasis on family reunication.

In this historical light, readers today nd in Santoss works emer-

gent cultural sensibilities and possibilitieswrien as they were

before terms such as multiculturalism and diversity had become

commonplace and depoliticized as market segments and were nolonger considered to be evolving critiques of institutions.

A few stories in the collection, including the title story, are of-

ten anthologized or used in high school and college curricula to

illustrate pre-civil-rights racism against brown foreigners who

were in fact American nationals. These very American outsiders

appeared as part of the American landscape because a new U.S.

empire had claimed seven thousand, one hundred islands for its

own (18981946) after the brief, three-month Spanish-AmericanWar (1898) and the protracted Philippine-American War (1899

1902) that had taken the lives of a hundred thousand Filipinos,

by conservative estimates. Inhabitants of the newly colonized is-

lands were brought to the U.S. mainland as laborers (19061934)

after other Asian groups had been barred from entering. Still

other Filipinos came as university students (pensionados) start-

ing in 1904, funded and sent to the mainland by the colonial

government, which regarded them as future leaders and colonial

bureaucrats of a nation-state as yet unrealized. As labor substi-

tutes or as citizens of a nation deferred, Filipinos (already Ameri-

cans) were colonial subjects in the greater American scheme and

storyone not of their makingwho had already incorporated

the mainland United States and its culture into their imagina-

tions. These contingencies of history and colonial policy brought

into existence dierent types of Filipinosvoluntary and forcedexilesmapped along ten thousand miles, from Manila across

the Pacic to New York, and over one hundred years of Philip-

pine America.


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xxi

Leonard Casper observes, in the introduction to the 1979 edi-

tion, that Santos was less concerned with history perceived as

ocean current or successive waves, than with culture as an entirearchipelago of diverse islands in that stream (xv; page xxxix in

this edition). As ad hoc colonial policies created multiple Filipino

subjects across the U.S. empire, the reach of the Philippine archi-

pelago and its inhabitants extended beyond their Southeast Asian

corner of the world to Hawaii and Alaska, and to Boston and New

York. Todays readers will recognize the scope of Filipino migra-

tion, which has widened to include virtually every corner of theplanet. Well into the twenty-rst century, the reach of the archipel-

ago continues to expand and includes labor migration to Europe,

the Middle East, the rest of Asia, and back again. Thus we might

understand Santoss collection as having begun to tell the tales of

concurrent and episodic Filipino histories and identities in the di-

aspora. Contemporary Filipino American writers such as Jessica

Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Eric Gamalinda, Miguel Syjuco,

Gina Apostol, and Sabina Murraymany of whom were born andraised in the Philippines and have lived there intermiently, as

peripatetic as Santos wascontinue to explore this complex land-

scape of layered and disrupted histories that forge convergences

and variants of Filipino and American lives and deaths. These

works of ction record emergent and varied Filipino cultures, as

Casper asserts, but also map out Filipino movements andtrans-

formative identities gured as as an entire archipelago of diverse

islands inhabiting a historical stream that has no clear origin

or endpoint. Political and sociohistorical conditions of migration

and return (often, failed returns) shape storytelling, turning it

into an act of memory and forgeing designed to recover, even

conjure, lives and deaths out of the imagination.

Speaking about the craft of ction: in 1985, Santos likened cre-

ative writers to magicians, because out of our imagination we

create a world that was not there before, in the same way that amagician would create something out of nothing.5In the short-

story genre, Santos oers lives always already in decline. His

stories are deceptively simple. They are character driven, tracing


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xxii Introduction to the 2015 Edition

changes in emotional landscapes. However, these changes do not

add up to a bildungsroman,or progressive coming-of-age narra-

tive, that can provide closure to the characters, given the dividebetween the inner and outer lives of his boys. For example, San-

tos describes the hurt men of his stories: Most of us boys kept

a smarting hurt beneath our brown skin, a personal tragedy of

the war zealously kept, as we walked the streets of the big cities

of America, seemingly gay, and uncaring; eager for friendship,

grateful for a kind word, the understanding look, the touch of

love (The Hurt Men, 44).Disrupted by war, distance, or circumstances, some lives and

relationships disappear from sight and are rendered impossible;

and others, by necessity, emerge through desire for transitory

connections. Characters mourn and shed parts of themselves in

order to continue living with the loss. What Santos oers in his

stories is the obverse of the bildungsroman: a continual paring

down of character to the point of irrecoverability. However, these

physical movements and emotional displacements not only endmany stories abruptly but also challenge characters to begin oth-

ers. The tentative or even transitory relationships at this point

of irrecoverable loss raise more existential questions about life

choices, intimacy, and how characters await death, players all in

a waiting game they ultimately are bound to lose.6

* * *The opening story, Immigration Blues, which won the New Let-

ters Fiction Award in 1977, features two people from seemingly

dierent historical eras coming together in a marriage of con-

venience. Two sisters, Mrs. Zafra and her older sister, Monica,

visit Alipio Palma, a Pinoy old-timer recently widowed and re-

covering from a car accident that had happened a year before and

left him with limited control of his legs. Mrs. Zafra, a more re-

cent migrant, is married to another old-timer, whom Alipio knew

when both were young men. Alipio extends his hospitality andplays the gay host, but this is not simply a social visit. Monica has

overstayed her tourist visa and will be deported in a few days

unless she is quickly married to an American citizen. The sisters


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xxiii

know all about Alipios recent hospital stay and the fact that his

now-deceased wife had married him for citizenship purposes. A

silent crisis between the two sisters ensues when Monica losesher nerve, at which point Mrs. Zafra bursts out with the real rea-

son for their visit.

On the surface, Immigration Blues relates the troubles of two

generations of Filipinos at the margins of society, the older one

needing care in his dotage and the younger one hoping to avoid

deportation. Because the delicate negotiation has to be framed as

a mutually benecial relationship rather than simply a transac-tion, much of the story is about the art of polite diversion and

subterfuge, designed to avoid the unseemly discussion of crass

utilitarianism. Yet, national borders having shifted between the

two generations, such unseemliness is necessitated. The older

American national had become a permanent resident, then

a U.S. citizen after Philippine independence in 1946, and the two

sisters had arrived a generation later as foreigners. The historical

changes in the relationship between the U.S. mainland and thePhilippines had constructed these episodic identities of the older

Filipino and the sisters, the former most likely as a laborer in the

canneries and agricultural elds of California and the laer two

as tourists or new immigrants after the 1965 Immigration and Na-

tionality Act.

If we understand the blues in the title as being less about

the plaintive note and more about the musical form, Immigra-

tion Blues is also about improvisation in the call-and-response

between the two generations. Rather than seeing these charac-

ters as pitiable gures forced to use each other out of desperation,

Santos plays out the complexities in how manners, pragmatics,

and fantasies come together to create an alternative household

for Filipinos on the margins. The margins are not simply sites of

abject invisibility but also vibrant sites of reinvention, sociality,

and creativity for migrants.After the revelation, Mrs. Zafra leaves Alipio and her sister

alone and goes out for groceries, returning after a long while

to speak to them in Filipino, not English, for the rst time: Co-


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musta? Santos writes, The one word question seemed to mean

much more than How are you? or How has it been? (20). With

the question asked in another, shared language from home,Mrs. Zafra thus begins a new refrain for the storys conclusion as

well as for the lives of Monica and Alipio. The intervening events

between Alipio calling Mrs. Zafra back and her loaded question

upon her return remain unnarrated. The reader can only infer

what might have transpired. Perhaps those moments gave Alipio

and Monica time to perform a semblance of courtship and to ne-

gotiate for themselves the terms of a legal, companionate relation-ship acceptable to each of them and, at least on the surface, to im-

migration ocials. Alipio, in his twilight years, watches Monica

in the end to be sure she wont lose her way(20) as she carries

the groceries to the kitchen. The emotional and relational shift

is signaled only by the shift in language, mood, and the much

more that lies between the two languages. The blue note might

signify a plaintive sentiment for each party, but two sets of mem-

ories and desires have had to improvise and reshape each other toproduce an agreeable though not ideal outcome.

This story of precarious American subjects dislocated through

the shifting national borders between the United States and the

Philippines, one a potential deportee and the other an aging citi-

zen, reveals a long and widespread history of imagining living

arrangements beyond procreation and heterosexual reproduction

of the nuclear family. Santos touches upon a challenge that many

citizens and migrants alike face today: how to transform, recog-

nize, and create intimacies at the margins in order to survive. Both

Alipio and Monica nd alternative moorings, however imperfect,

for their desires: Monica was in search of a new home, and Alipio

was in search of a home for his fading years and memories.

Many of Santoss old-timers articulate the unspoken anxieties

of the newcomers, who fear not only that they have been forgot-

ten but also that what lile hope they had left, even as fantasy,has been destroyed or forgoen because of times passing. When

Ambo, an old-timer and recurring character in the collection, an-

nounces Nanoys death in Of Other Deaths, one of the young


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xxv

men, Teroy, exclaims in amazement: Why do I keep forgeing

that? said Teroy as though talking to himself. Yes we can also

die in America, he added as though it were a brilliant idea (80).It had never occurred to Teroy that one could map not only Filipi-

nos lives in America but also their deaths, and that return itself

might not be an option. In one way, exile is not so much about

where ones life belongs as about asking whom ones death be-

longs to in the end. Thus, Ambo laments in Lonely in the Au-

tumn Evening not simply the loss of home but also the loss of a

resting place for his lifes memories:

But I keep thinking of home, Ben. How would they

know out there of our passing? Would we come to them

in a dream, speak to them out of a cloud, and tell them

goodbye, we have just passed away? No? Then perhaps,

suddenly in the midst of a days work on the farm, or

silent in the old wooden house by the sea, our name

would mingle with their thoughts. Or perhaps it wouldseem as though someone passed by and he looked like

us, a remembered movement of the head, a manner of

walking, or a ash of likeness in a strangers face. (83)

Shall ones life and death be part of a greater collective story out

there even if only as a possible moment or passing memory? Or

shall it simply disappear?

In his stories, Santos captures moments and their uncomfort-

able duration as metonyms for displacement and solitude. He

writes in For These Ruins: And moments. Graduation time and

you, looking around for someone to shake your hand; Christmas

in far-o places; New Years eve without music and the tinkle of

ice on glass or wine drops staining white table linen (99). The

poignant details Santos leaves for the reader demand a provi-

sional investment of meaning, but these moments and meaningsdo not accrue toward neat closure. Entrusted with the image of

the characters unacknowledged pain, readers linger upon these

moments to gure out how to safeguard and not betray them


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as they fade into the past. Memory itself is unfaithful, as Santos

himself admits by naming his own autobiographyMemorys Fic-

tions. Memory, he says, ctionizes a lot, but the ction makeswhole that momentary fragment.7

Scent of Apples, the title story, tells of another call-and-re-

sponse between past and present, between another Filipino old-

timer and a privileged representative of the Philippine govern-

ment in exile. In the story, set during World War II, the young Fili-

pino narrator is giving a talk about the Philippines to an Ameri-

can college crowd, mostly women in Kalamazoo, Michigan (22).They are concerned about their boys in the Pacic, young boys

all, hardly men, thinking of harvest moons and smell of forest

re. Celestino Fabia, just a Filipino farmer as he called him-

self (21), has driven thirty miles on a cold October night just to

hear the narrator speak, because he has seen no Filipino for so

many years. Fabia stands up to ask, Are our Filipino women

the same like they were twenty years ago?(22) Literary critic De-

nise Cruz has astutely signaled how the repeated anxieties overtranspacic women in this and much of Santoss prose reect

how the role and place of Filipina women have shifted alongside

the political and social reconguration of the emerging post-

colonial nation.8The narrator says in response to Fabias public

question that the change in the Filipinas has been on the outside

only, that inside, here, pointing to the heart, they are the same

as they were twenty years ago (23). Fabio later invites the nar-

rator to come visit for dinner before he leaves, so that his white

American wife and mestizo son can see a rst class Filipino.

At the modest shanty, the narrator smells the strong aroma of

apples ripening in storage throughout dinner. While scent per-

meates the story, evoking the ne line between ripening and rot-

ting, apples are also a powerful symbol for the American colonial.

The apple is the mythical nontropical fruit by which he learned

the colonizers alphabet: A is for apple, the pedagogic refraingoes. In lands without apple trees, the singing and the gold (21),

the narrator, like many Filipinos, encountered American English

through this nonnative fruit, the disciplinary entry to power and


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Introduction to the 2015 Edition xxvii

the colonial bureaucracy. Critic Victor Bascara has explored how

Santoss early stories oer a record of Philippine-U.S. relations in

transition from formal colonialism to neocolonialism. Scent ofApples and the heart-wrenching The Day the Dancers Came,

according to Bascara, are twin stories wrien from the viewpoint

of visitor and host, respectively, and reveal their desire to make a

connection while also pointing to their dierences at this histori-

cal juncture.9Ruth, the white American wife, serves the apples

to the narrator, her husband, and her mestizo son. No longer an

abstraction, the apples, reduced to a meager commodity for thefarmer, are roing and would soon be rendered worthless. For

the narrator as guest, the new American family enables him to

experience the apple as a physical sensationtaste, smell, and

touch. The Filipino old-timer has created a dierent trajectory,

one that sustains another dream, a challenging one to be sure but

not necessarily a substitute for a lost original or even a colonial

one.

Taking his leave of Fabia later that evening, the narrator oersto visit the mans hometown upon his return home. Fabia refuses

the oer, saying, But, you see, nobody would remember me

now (29). Perhaps in that refusal of the sentimental gesture, Fa-

bia signals that the evening together was enough; it has allowed

him to acknowledge a shared loss with someone who could con-

nect past and present, the Philippines and America. Furthermore,

while Fabia might have been quite sure of his social death back

home, the evening with the narrator has guaranteed that at least

one person would remember me as he was now, in his new life.

Thus, his lifes memories are entrusted not to a faraway place al-

ready lost to him but to a living person. At issue, I suggest further,

is not just Fabias fantasy homecoming but also the narrators de-

sire to connect with the older Filipino, given the narrators own

inability to return home because of the war. Fabias story does not

even depend on the narrators answer to the question about thepast at all. The diplomatic answer in response to the earlier ques-

tion about an absent female gure was a compromise designed to

maintain what the narrator thought would be a nationalistic con-


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xxviii Introduction to the 2015 Edition

nection between the two generations. The Filipina woman from

twenty years before is an impossible and fantastic gure, as faded

as the picture on the mantle, of a woman that Fabia never knewin the rst place.

Unlike the condence with which the narrator answered the

question in publicI knew what I was going to say (23)the

narrators equally extemporaneous oer in the end is lled with

doubts about his own return: One of these days, very soon, I

hope, Ill be going home (29) Three anxious qualications stand

in the way of his return home. After all, the war was still on be-gins the rst-person narrative and is the backdrop of the genera-

tional encounter. The narrators fear is that, as in the case of Fabia,

no one will remember him in his absence, because his loved ones

might not even be alive in the occupied and war-torn country. His

oer is less about remembering Fabia to his hometown, and more

about the narrators desire to proclaim his own wish to return

home. This would explain his abrupt and sentimental message

after the silent drive home: Tell Ruth and Roger, I said, I lovethem. Most likely, like others stranded by the war, the narrator

was not aorded the opportunity to say this to his own family,

because the war cut o all communication.10His visit with Fabias

family becomes the narrators substitute but short-lived home-

coming, knowing, as he does, that the war has brought devastat-

ing changes back home.

In contrast to the previous evening, when he fullled his bu-

reaucratic function on a tour as the abstract representative of an

unknown archipelago (that is, unknown to most of his American

audience) somewhere in the war-torn Pacic, the evening with

Fabias family acknowledges the narrators presence, place, and

inner life. The sense and sensations oered to the narrator at the

dinner make communality and home immediate. The newly ar-

rived narrator needs Fabia and his very real though precarious

family life more than Fabia needs his recognition. The emotionalshift in the end, when the narrator could hardly see Fabias face

(29), begins to strip the narrator of his connection to Fabias world

and his temporary place in it. The lonely and desperate narrator


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gripped Fabias extended hand, the touch replacing sight, as if

to hold on to a memory, only to be left alone in the cold night

waving back into the darkness. But the old-timer, for whomautumns a lovely season has learned to live with ambivalence

both vibrance and death, ripeness and decay: The trees are get-

ting ready to die, and they show their colors, proud-like (25).

In Of Other Deaths, when entreated by his friends to write

about his tour of the United States as a representative speaker,

in order to recover old-timers lives and deaths, Ben the narra-

tor says, I have nothing to tell, really. What I remember mostwill not make a book; it will not even make a song, or a poem. It

will be all sensation, all feeling (77). Many critics have remarked

on the theme of the alienation and displacement of hurt men

in Santoss stories, men who are forgoen children of long lost

mothers and fathers, . . . grown up men without childhood, bas-

tards of an indierent country (The Door, 96).11Displacement

is not simply an abstraction. It is corporeal: bodily sensations of

yearning, eeting connections, and even scents. Deferring desireand the return home, the exiles body endures to mark time; the

exile can hope at best to make a temporary, even if inconvenient,

place for himself and his memories.

Often bodies, and memories too, cease to cooperate as stable

markers of identity in the stories. In And Beyond, More Walls,

when Ben the narrator reunites with his cousin, once a young

violinist who had come to America years before him, he sees

his handsthese had aged, unlike his face, they had died long

ago (36). Back in my own room, the narrator mourns, I felt

as if someone I knew had died, and in the darkness I was miss-

ing him. He mourns not Manuels death but his past dreams,

the time when, as Manuel said, all that maered was I wanted

to play. In Leer: The Faraway Summer, Pablo, after a snub

by a doctor whom he had known in the United States, ponders

the idea of publishing an obituary to announce the death of thefriend he once knew who had died without memories (112).

Senses fade in The Contender, as Bernie Canlas slowly loses

his sight while waiting in his room for the next visitor and the


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next act of kindness. Fil Acayan of The Day the Dancers Came

loses even his substitute for memory, the sounds of the dancers in

his magic sound mirror. What he is left with is a fading awayinto nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming,

senseless kind of nale detached from the body of a song in the

background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell (127).

Through Ambo, in The Door, Santos asks the reader to stop

to mark time with the characters: Oh, the stories I can tell you,

if you but have the time to listen, but you are going away. Every-

body is going some place. They are all in a hurry, they will notlisten to me (86). These memories in search of a home are the

momentary connections between characters who inhabit dier-

ent times, places, and rhythms within the larger Filipino Ameri-

can archipelago. Santos oers interlinked sensations that map the

time and place of deferred desires. In each story, a realization of

something lost becomes palpable, but it also becomes the point of

connection between characters, as well as between narrator and

reader. Santos conjures Ben and Ambo from dierent historicalmoments as narrators in order to guide us to that suspended blue

note. He leaves us to linger and hear the call for our response, to

take part in an ephemeral performance. Narrator, character, and

reader all dwell in, and dwell upon, that eeting moment of dy-

ingreal and gurativethat also marks our ultimate disconnec-

tion from each other.

1 I am grateful to Gary C. Devilles of Ateneo de Manila University for shar-

ing this story. My gratitude to Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Shir-

ley O. Lua of De La Salle University, as well as Lito B. Zulueta and Ferdi-

nand M. Lopez, both of the University of Santo Tomas, for their generosity

in sharing memories of Mang Ben and thoughts about his work. Many

thanks to Dr. Lua for the welcome to, and use of, the Bienvenido SantosMuseum and papers at De La Salle University. My gratitude to my research

assistants, Camille Ungco and Rachel Landingin.

2 Santos, The Hurt Men, 44.


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3 Santos quoted from an interview by Linda Ogawa Ramirez, Focus: Au-

thor in Love with the Sound of English, Philippine News, June 3-9, 1981.

4 His mother, Santos reported, prayed to the Virgin of Antipolo so that shemight have another child at her advanced age. Because his birth had been

dedicated to the Virgin, Santos, and sometimes one of his daughters in his

stead, made pilgrimages to the church of the Virgin in Manila throughout

his adult life. The Virgin of Antipolo is also known as Our Lady of Peace

and Good Voyage (Nuestra Seora de la paz y buen viaje). Since arriving in

the Philippines from Mexico in 1626, the gure has had an illustrious his-

tory, making several trips across the Pacic to the Americas. The Virgin of

Antipolo also served as the patron saint of the Manila galleon that served

the trade route between Acapulco and Manila for over two centuries. Fili-pinos traditionally make a pilgrimage up to the shrine in the mountain to

ask for her blessing for a good trip. And travel Santos did.

5 Leonor Aureus Briscoe, Ben on Ben: Conversations with Bienvenido Santos

(Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2011), 152.

6 Bienvenido Santos, Pilipino Old Timers: Fact and Fiction,Amerasia9, no.

2 (1982): 90.

7 Briscoe, Ben on Ben, 150.

8 Denise Cruz, Pointing to the Heart: Transpacic Filipinas and the Ques-

tion of Cold War Philippines-U.S. Relations,American Quarterly63, no. 1(March 2011): 9.

9 Victor Bascara, Up from Benevolent Assimilation: At Home with the

Manongs of Bienvenido Santos,MELUS20, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 65.

10 This interpretation is suggested in part by the pages of Santoss own anx-

ious, repeated, and continual leers to his wife and family at the outbreak

of the war in the Philippines, sent with lile hope that the leers would

actually reach his family.

11 Those critics include the following: N. V. M Gonzalez and Oscar V. Cam-

pomanes (Filipino American Literature, inAn Interethnic Companion toAsian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung [Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1997]); Maxine Hong Kingston (Precarious Lives, re -

view of Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories, by Bienvenido N. Santos, New

York Times, May 4, 1980); and Paul B. Phelps (The Philippines: An Exiles

Dreams, Washington Post,April 20, 1980). Isagani Cruz, in his introduc-

tion to the 1991 edition of The Day the Dancers Came, challenged Philippine

readers to reconsider that volume, pointing out that, in 1967, we thought

that the book was just another book wrien by an exile about exile. (Bien-

venido N. Santos, The Day the Dancers Came: Selected Prose Works[Manila:Bookmark, 1991, no page number.])


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Documents

Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories