The Midwestern Fiction of Bienvenido N. Santos
[In the following essay, Bresnahan discusses the Midwestern locales in Santos's work and investigates how landscape affects his fiction.]
At first it might seem odd to examine the treatment of Midwestern places in the work of a Filipino author who has been only intermittently and temporarily in the Midwest. Yet there is a quality to Bienvenido Santos' writing which makes geographical place a felt presence without becoming the central focus of the narrative. It is a quality which is present not just in his Midwestern stories but in his New York locales, his Washington, D. C. locales, his West Coast locales, and his Philippine locales. Yet the setting is not altogether incidental in his fiction. A case might be made for a quasi-Midwestern mentality in the writing of Santos and other English-language Filipino authors of his generation: the literary models offered to aspiring writers in the Philippines by their American teachers in the twenties and thirties were those which had currency in the United States at the time. Thus, it has often been observed that Philippine short fiction holds haunting reminders of Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. It is more modest to examine the Midwestern locales of several of Santos' stories to see how they affect the narrative and to suggest similar profitable lines of inquiry.
Even to those who have grown up with it, the bitter cold of the Midwestern winter, its unrelenting cruelty, is a fact to be reckoned with. This bitter cold always stings the flesh of Santos' characters, as with Bernie, the former flyweight fighter who is going blind:
Winter came early that year in Chicago. The mild autumn had become increasingly violent, the trees shedding their leaves before they had turned deep gold. By October the flurries of wind raking the dead leaves on the twilight streets and parks bore the snow-dusts of winter. Now in November there was slush and ice on the avenue and the lake winds bit into the covered flesh like thrusts of pain into the naked body.1
The actual arrival of the snow, however, is an event that never loses its joyful excitement for his tropically-raised characters, as the knowledge of snow and the ability to endure the cold of America distinguishes the Filipino old-timer from his inexperienced countrymen who may be newly arrived in the U. S.:
As soon as Fil woke up, he noticed a whiteness outside, quite unusual for the November mornings they had been having. That fall, Chicago was sandman's town, sleepy valley, drowsy gray, slumbrous mistiness from sunup til noon when the clouds drifted away in cauliflower clusters and suddenly it was evening. The lights shown on the avenue like soiled lamps centuries old and the skyscrapers became monsters with a thousand sore eyes. Now there was a brightness in the air and Fil knew what it was and he shouted, “Snow! It's snowing!”2
The peculiar excitement about the arrival of snow in this story, “The Day the Dancers Came,” is caused by Fil's desire that the youngsters of the travelling Philippine dance troupe would experience as their first snow. It would be a physical introduction to America that the old-timer could live all over again in its glorious newness and which would thereby join them to him. Fil is an old man who has worked all his life in America at menial jobs. Even since he heard the dancers were coming to Chicago he felt they were coming just for him, that he would be their guide in Chicago and that this would both bring him closer to the memories of his youth in the Philippines and make him a bigger man in America. He thinks to himself:
… how wonderful it would be if he could join the company of dancers from the Philippines, show them around, walk with them in the snow, answer their questions, tell them everything they wanted to know about the changing seasons in this strange land. They would pick up fistfuls of snow, crunch it in their fingers or shove it into their mouths. He had done just that the first time, long, long ago. …3
But when Fil shows up at the hotel the youngsters avoid the shabby old man. He feels like standing on a chair and telling:
Beloved countrymen, lovely children of the Pearl of the Orient Seas, listen to me. I'm Fil Acayan. I've come to volunteer my services. … Tell me where you wish to go, what you want to see in Chicago. I know every foot of the lakeshore drive, all the gardens and the parks, the museums, the huge department stores, the planetarium. Let me be your guide.4
Of course no one takes him up on his unspoken offer of a free tour of Chicago and dinner at his apartment. Instead they push past him to get on the tour bus. Fil drives around the city hoping to run into them, and here again the geography of Chicago gives substance to his yearning:
From the hotel, he had driven around, cruised by the lakeshore drive, hoping he would see the dancers somewhere, in a park perhaps, taking pictures of the mist over the lake and the last gold on the trees now wet with melted snow, or on some picnic grounds, near a bubbling fountain. Still taking pictures of themselves against a background of Chicago's gray and dirty skyscrapers. He slowed down every time he saw a crowd, but the dancers were nowhere along his way. Perhaps they had gone to the theatre to rehearse. He turned back before reaching Evanston.5
This story ends with a pathetic comedy. Unable to get the dancers to come to his apartment or to even approach them, Fil takes his tape recorder to the theatre where he records the entire performance. But when he returns to his apartment to play the tape for Tony, his roommate, he accidentally erases it. Then he realizes he has nothing—not the connection with the young people of his homeland who had treated him like basura (garbage), not his dream of being a big man in their regard since they had probably been warned to avoid the old-timers—the Pinoys—as bums, and not Tony either. For the whole story, a dream played out against the physical backdrop of Chicago, is counterpointed by the secondary theme of the story—the slow deterioration of Tony from skin cancer and the refusal of Tony, another old-timer like Fil, to participate in Fil's elusive dream. It is significant that Santos blocks out the physical presence of the city once Fil realizes he will lose Tony. Fil is no longer permitted the props of the Chicago scenery as this realization comes at the end of the story. Even though he is looking out the window at the first light of dawn, for Fil there is no scenery outside that window as he realizes he has lost his dream, his friend is about to die, and his whole life is meaningless.
Two of the most solidly Midwestern stories of Bienvenido Santos are “My Most Memorable Christmas in America” and “Scent of Apples.”6 Both are clearly autobiographical. The former—“My Most Memorable Christmas in America”—relates the experience of a Filipino student at University of Illinois in the context of the whole Filipino experience of America. The latter relates a touching scenario which occurred when Santos toured the U. S. during World War II to familiarize Americans with their ally and colony which by then had been occupied by Japan.
The Philippines, for 350 years a Spanish colony, in 1900 had become an American possession. The relentless desire of the Filipino people for independence, together with increasing uneasiness about American vulnerability to Japan in the Pacific, resulted in an American promise which was kept at the end of the war. During the forty years of U. S. sovereignty, English became the language of the schools and, to a lesser extent, of commerce and government. During this period two classes of Filipinos, widely separated in the class-conscious Spanish-based culture, sojourned and sometimes settled in America. Upper-class, well educated youths were sent to American universities at the expense of the Insular Government. These pensionados, as they were called, studied in their chosen fields so that the civil service could be turned over to native talent. Santos was among the last groups of such pensionados to come to America before the war broke out. Trapped here while his wife and three young daughters hid out in the mountains with the resistance, Santos was employed by the government-in-exile to lecture of the Philippines throughout the United States. At these lectures he frequently came into contact with the other class of Filipino who had settled in America. These lower-class Filipinos, all of them men, were brought to the U. S. to work as contract laborers in West Coast and Alaskan canneries. When the terms of the contract expired they frequently settled in the U. S. working as migrant farmers, houseboys, waiters, dining car stewards, and as extras in Hollywood movies where they invariably played the Indian roles. Their lives and loneliness has been lovingly documented in the semi-autobiographical novel of Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart and in many of Ben Santos' stories.7
By the time the American and Filipino defenders surrendered Corregidor and with it the whole of the Philippines in 1942, there was a large number of Filipinos living in the United States. Some like Santos were students, but most were the so-called ‘Filipino old-timers’ like Fil and Tony, the two old men in “The Day The Dancers Came.” Like most of the government-sponsored students, Ben Santos was put to work by the Philippine government-in-exile. His assignment, to lecture on the Philippines throughout the United States, put him into contact with those old-timers whom the pensionados rarely met. “Scent of Apples” relates Santos' encounter with a Filipino old-timer who owned a small farm near Kalamazoo, Michigan. Celestino Fabia drives the pensionado out to his farm so that his American wife and young son can meet a real high-class Filipino. Here, again, the scenery makes a strongly felt presence that acts as an underpinning to the narrative:
The trip seemed interminable. We passed through narrow lanes and disappeared into thickets, and came out on barren land overgrown with weeds in places. All around were dead leaves and dry earth. In the distance were apple trees.8
This reflection of the narrator on the rural Michigan scenery is balanced by the farmer's recollection of his homeland:
In this old Visayan town, the streets are narrow and dirty and strewn with coral shells.9
The overwhelming physical sensation for the narrator, however, is the scent of apples. Celestino Fabia has an apple orchard, the house itself is filled with apples and apples are served by Fabia's wife at the end of the meal. Apples do not grow in the Philippines, though they are highly prized there and very costly. To Filipinos who received their education in English under American teachers and who thus learned that “A is for apple,” the apple trees of this story and the pervasive scent of apples signify everything that is American. The scent of apples in this story thus symbolized the Americanization of Celestino Fabia. It is an indefinite yet highly evocative symbol which reminds the reader of all such old-timers whom Santos described in the title of one of his story collections as You Lovely People.
The other solidly Midwestern story, “My Most Memorable Christmas in America,” takes place in the winter of 1941. That first Christmas of the war was a particularly painful one for the narrator who relates that his mailbox was filled every day—not with cards from well-wishers but with his own letters home returned with the notation “Service Suspended” since his country had been invaded by Japanese forces. The other Filipinos and foreign students had all gone away for the holidays, so the narrator pretends he is going away as well. He goes down to the train depot and sits in the waiting room “… reading the schedule of departure and arrival printed on the wall as if I had to be somewhere at some time because someone was waiting for me.”10 This typically Midwestern seriocomic romance with the train depot is finally broken by some American friends who offer the narrator a ride to the Hyde Park YMCA in Chicago.
Once in Chicago and settled at the Hyde Park Y, Santos used the geography of the city to give substance to the narrative. He tells us, for example, that the Y was “not far from where the IC train roared by day and night.”11 The lobby of the Y had a large Christmas tree with a blazing fire in the fireplace. By the day before Christmas the place was deserted except for three exiles from the American dream—Joe Governar, a Jew from Boston; Paul Hicks, the Negro janitor; and the Filipino narrator. So the three resolved to make their own holiday dinner and to keep the fire burning. On Christmas day they gather around the fire for their meal of salami, pickled herring, canned shrimp, dill pickles, pumpernickel bread, and beer. They speak to one another of their homes and their loneliness, and the Filipino tries to be unsentimental since an American teacher had told him that Filipinos are too sentimental. The snow and the cold, the city of Chicago, the Hyde Park Y, the IC trains are all present in a strongly felt way, as are the Christmas tree, the fire, and the narrator's two companions. But they are primarily evocative of the larger concerns of the story—individual loneliness and desperate friendship. For Paul Hicks and Joe Govenar who expect to be in uniform before long, and for the narrator who is caught away from home during wartime, the whole experience is sort of an emotional treading water. That it is done in a Midwestern context makes this story particularly evocative of Sherwood Anderson, many of whose Midwestern characters similarly tread water.
Although Santos has spent many years in the Midwest at various time of his life, his primary identification is as a Filipino writer—one of a large group of Filipinos who write in English for consumption both at home in the Philippines and in the rest of the English-speaking world. Yet in a broader sense Santos may be considered a Midwestern writer. Much of his writing is about the Midwest, much of his inspiration comes from his own Midwestern experience; and much of his writing is evocative of Midwestern writers, particularly Sherwood Anderson. His return to the Hyde Park Y after twenty years, for example, is especially evocative of Anderson's return to the Chicago roominghouse where he had lived with those he called “the little people of the arts”:
I took my wife and grown-up son to the Y on Hyde Park. We had been three years in America and they knew why I wanted to visit the place. They came willingly. It was a shabby building now. It didn't look like the old place at all as I remembered it, but this was all right. Here, I said, mostly to myself, the big Christmas tree stood. There was a warm fire here and our faces glowed—Joseph's and Paul's and mine—and we kept the fire burning although everything was wrong outside, the blinding snowstorm and the many young dead. I wanted to call out their names. Perhaps I did. But no. No, I must not be sentimental.12
Notes
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Bienvenido N. Santos, “The Contender,” Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), p. 129. “The Contender” was first published in Santos' story collection, The Day the Dancers Came (Manila: Bookmark Press, 1967).
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Bienvenido N. Santos, “The Day the Dancers Came,” Scent of Apples, p. 113.
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Ibid., p. 115.
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Ibid., p. 120.
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Ibid., p. 122.
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Bienvenido N. Santos, “My Most Memorable Christmas in America,” The Day the Dancers Came: Selected Prose Works (Manila: Bookmark, 1967) and “Scent of Apples,” You Lovely People (Manila: Bookmark, 1955), reprinted in Scent of Apples.
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Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1946; rpt. Seattle: University of Washington, 1973).
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Bienvenido N. Santos, Scent of Apples, p. 25.
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Ibid., p. 25.
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Bienvenido N. Santos, “My Most Memorable Christmas in America,” The Day the Dancer Came, p. 163.
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Ibid., p. 164.
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Ibid., p. 166.
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