One topic of the Marking and Santos readings that we didn’t get a chance to really touch upon in class, but really caught my interest was the very different regions these stories were set in, often rural spaces. Most of what we’ve read so far in class in terms of Asian Americans has taken place on the West Coast, particularly California. As I read through the stories I was particularly fascinated with how the physical space where these various stories took place seemed to necessitate alternate kinship formations than the ethnic enclaves in our previous readings. I wondered how this difference in location would affect the identity formation of the characters in the stories and how they would make sense of their cultural identities and connection with nationalism. Interestingly, I found a common strand that in each of these stories there was a desire to connect with other Filipinos, whether that is through familial relations, living spaces, friendship networks, or an invitation to a stranger for dinner.
Throughout Yay Marking’s “My Filipino Mother,” there is a flow of migration, primarily through Marking’s mother. Her mother’s first migration came as a child where she left her destroyed home in Cebu, leaving behind a drunkard father and the memories of her deceased mother and younger sister. With her kinship ties severed, she had no attachment to the homeland, nothing and no one was keeping her in Cebu. By stowing away in a ship, her mother made the journey from Cebu to a port in California, but she could not enter the port in San Francisco due to the devastating 1906 earthquake. From the port of San Francisco she went north to Canada and later “…a missionary benefactor had taken her [to] Montana,” where she would settle (Marking 17). It is here in Montana where Marking and her mother craft their identities; her mother preferring a “small, tight, blood kinship” while Marking sought a “big, loose, raceless brotherhood” (Marking 10). In a space with few other Filipinos both women sought an environment where they could be Filipina outside of an established Filipino community.
In Santos’s three short stories, “So Many Things,” “Brown Coterie,” and “Scent of Apples,” the characters are also outside of a primarily Filipino enclave. As a result they form other kinship ties and friendship networks to fill a void. Throughout “So Many Things” the main character, Ambo, seems to be in search of a relationship with the Filipino community especially because he is living outside of California in Washington. With so few Filipino people in his area “[t]here was a time when he didn’t see one for years and years” (Santos 148). Because of this absence he was willing to live with a “…Filipino mother and her child, although it would have been simpler to have lived somewhere else,” perhaps a place where he wasn’t despised by the daughter (Santos 150). “Brown Coterie,” also set outside of California, is centered on a woman’s, Clarita’s, loneliness as her Filipino husband is away working as a doctor. To mask her loneliness Clarita plans a dinner for her Filipino friends from Michigan to get together. The title itself already alludes to the creation of an alternative space where a Filipino identity can be enacted. This exclusive group of friends is distinct in two ways, firstly with their separation from a large community of Filipinos, and secondly through their class status as Filipino elite. It is precisely because of this dual isolation that they have formed this coterie. Finally, Santos’ third story, “Scent of Apples” is also a story of being isolated from a geographic community of Filipinos as well as the alternative formation of kinship to disguise the void. This becomes painfully obvious when the old Filipino farmer, Celestino Fabia from Kalamazoo, MI, invites the narrator to dinner at his farm, although the two men do not know each other. Fabia left the Philippines “…over twenty years ago,” and lives on a farm inhabited by only himself, is white wife, and their mixed race son (Santos 181), devoid of any Filipino community. Thus his invitation to a complete stranger, purely on the basis of a shared cultural background, can be read as an alternative kinship formation. The narrator, who remains nameless in this story, also understands the kinship void he is filling for Fabia saying as they part, “Tell Ruth and Roger I love them” (Santos 190).
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