Unfastened: Globality and Asian North American Narratives

1. The 1.5 Generation: Filipino Youth, Transmigrancy, and Masculinity

3 Globalism is not an abstraction but a concrete activity whose mode of being has its effect on the local body. —Dana Polan, “Globalism’s Localisms” Half a century after its independence from the United States, the Philippines is still very much in a neocolonial stage.1 Epifanio San Juan Jr. notes that “the Filipino has been produced by Others (Spaniards, Japanese, the Amerikanos), not mainly by her own will to be recognized” (Articulations of Power, 118). Filipinos are transnational subalterns, used in many countries as cheap and temporary labor: the “‘warm body export’ of Filipino workers to the Middle East; Filipinas as ‘mail-order brides,’ ubiquitous prostitutes around enclaves formerly occupied by U.S. military bases; and ‘hospitality girls’ in Tokyo, Bangkok, Okinawa, and Taipei” (San Juan, The Philippine Temptation, 79). The more than six million Filipinos scattered around the world earn an average of “$3.5 billion a year for the Philippine government” (92) but at a great cost to Filipinos, especially to women and children. Propelled by dire economic conditions in the Philippines and fed by the American dream of wealth and success, Filipinos migrate in large 1 The 1.5 Generation: Filipino Youth, Transmigrancy, and Masculinity numbers and have become what Rhacel Parreñas calls “servants of globalization .” The movement of people, goods, and culture in the new global capitalism entails, as Arif Dirlik writes, the “transnationalization of production , [ . . . ] the decentering of capitalism nationally,” the increasing importance of the transnational corporation, and the “fragmentation of the production process into subnational regions and localities” (“The Global in the Local,” 30). Negative effects of this migration and globalization include the separation of family members, perpetual states of exile and displacement, and self-hatred that results from the neocolonial mentality of seeing oneself as other. What faces Filipino immigrants in their adopted countries is often not a life of ease but of difficulties due to prejudice, racism, and alienation. Two recent novels by Filipino American writers, Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao, document these problems and reveal the ways in which global capitalism takes its toll on the young.2 Roley’s and Ong’s narratives are told from the perspective of young adults whose familial and social lives have been changed by transnational migration, who see themselves as failures because their everyday lives do not match up to the high expectations of the American dream. Fueled by Hollywood ideals of glamor and power, various characters in these novels suffer and, in turn, lash out against others when they fall short of capitalist notions of success. Examples from these novels show the impact of global American culture on Filipinos and Filipino immigrants, problems in the construction of Filipino American ethnic subjectivity, and the violent effects of racial abjection on the body. In general, these novels reveal a number of common negative effects of globalization on young Filipino Americans: (1) The overvalorization of and desire for wealth, First World products, and material goods. In these narratives, the children whose family members are separated often compensate for their lack of familial bonds and/or dysfunctional family situations by coveting, buying, or in some cases stealing, goods. Transnational production does not just affect people’s work and labor conditions; it also affects libidinal desire. (2) Overdetermined and unattainable ideals based on Hollywood models of masculinity and beauty. Because “the global distribution of power still tends to make the First World countries cultural ‘transmitters’ and to reduce most Third World countries to the status of ‘receivers’” (Shohat and Stam, “From the Im4 The 1.5 Generation perial Family to the Transnational Imaginary,” 147), the young protagonists in these novels identify with American images of success. These images affect the way one perceives one’s own body and also affect one’s romantic and sexual relationships. When Filipino American men find themselves unable to live up to the seductive or forceful celebrity images they see in films and on television, they frequently resort to violence or aggression against those around them. (3) Emotional and psychic transnationalism . Diane L. Wolf argues that “second generation Filipino youth experience emotional transnationalism which situates them between different generational and locational points of reference—their parents’, sometimes also their grandparents’, and their own—both the real and imagined” (“Family Secrets,” 459). Children of first-generation Filipino immigrants and Filipino American children who belong to the 1.5 generation group are...