Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City

Chapter 8. Pinoy Capital

8 PINOY CAPITAL  O n a summer day in 1931, the writer Carlos Bulosan stood on the deck of a ship after almost a month in steerage and saw America for the first time. He felt he had come home. We arrived in Seattle on a June day. My first sight of the approaching land was an exhilarating experience. Everything seemed native and promising to me. It was like coming home after a long voyage, although as yet I had no home in this city. Everything seemed familiar and kind. . . . With a sudden surge of joy, I knew that I must find a home in this new land (Bulosan 1973, 99). His reaction to the view, as described in his semi-fictional memoir America Is in the Heart, comes as a surprise. It almost seems drawn from the stereotypical arrival scene in immigrant novels (and later, films), dictated by the demands of the narrative and the genre, and dramatically enhanced by hindsight. Indeed, there is little foreshadowing in his account that he would set off for America, much less embrace it with such excitement. We are told, for instance, about the kindly American librarian who teaches him about Abraham Lincoln, but this is the extent of his fascination; mostly, we read about the discouraging letters his brother sends him from California, and this is all we know of the United States. Yet he arrives in Seattle already recognizing the “familiar” and the “native.” PIN OY CAPITAL 193 That this was Bulosan’s actual reaction upon first seeing America is unlikely . Writing for an American audience, Bulosan was very much aware of the form of the immigrant narrative, and his grand entrance fits squarely within this tradition. The memoir is, in any case, unreliable in its historical veracity. The “Carlos” of his semi-autobiography is actually a composite of other Pinoy migrant workers, including his brothers, and their experiences. The poverty that pushed Bulosan off the land and out of the Philippines is somewhat exaggerated; his parents were actually able to send him and his siblings to school, despite the loss of their lands. But the moment of recognition of home is important: how is his ecstatic reaction possible? How does one recognize home? How does one belong to a place one has never seen before? On these matters Bulosan is silent. Paramount throughout the book is his unswerving determination to find a land of freedom in America—a country that, surely at the time of his many beatings and days of hunger, would make the Philippines look like paradise in comparison. By the end of the semifictional memoir, the narrator affirms his faith in the United States as a nation of equality and independence: “the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me” (1946, 326). Escaping relative poverty and finding freedom, however, were only a few of Bulosan’s many reasons for migration. His friend and fellow writer P.C. Morantte writes, rather romantically, that Bulosan migrated simply to become a writer—and a famous one, at that—in America. But Morantte adds as well, “Carlos, like most of his contemporaries, was fascinated by the flood of all kinds of American commercial literature. . . . He said he liked to see the pictures of numerous goods being sold by mail which for him spelled the material abundance of America. He saw people rushing . . . orders for shoes, shirts, undershirts, handkerchiefs, and many other tempting items in the catalogs” (1984, 49). Bulosan was hardly a typical figure—he was educated, ambitious, and highly talented, and affiliated with the American left, to boot—but he had similarities with his fellow Filipino immigrants. Like other immigrants, both then and now, Bulosan came to the United States with pictures of “material abundance” in his mind. Like other immigrants, he knew, even if misguidedly , what America represented, and he sought to uplift his economic condition . Like other immigrants, he also wanted to experience the freedom America was supposed to bestow. Like other immigrants, he came to reunite with his family (his brothers, who had left for the United States earlier) and make a new life for himself; like other immigrants, he left his home to find a new one. 194 CHAPTER 8 Oscar Handlin’s extreme image of dislocation in the “uprooted,” alienated immigrant and Robert Park’s paradigm of assimilation were the cornerstones of the study of American immigration for many...