America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan

I knew that as long as there was a hope for the future somewhere I would not stop trying to reach it. I looked at my brother and Alfredo and knew that I would never stay with them, to rot and perish in their world of brutality and despair. I knew that I wanted something which would ease my fear and stop my flight from dawn to dawn.

I really feel it's important to read more classics by people of color, so last year I decided to make that a permanent category in the annual Back to the Classics Challenge. I know I don't read nearly enough books by nonwhite authors, and this year I really wanted to read a classic by an Asian author. I was really happy to discover America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino-American author. It's a really personal connection to me because my husband is Filipino, and I'm always trying to learn more about his culture.

Published in 1946, this semi-autobiographical novel is the story of Carlos, a young man from the rural Philippines who tries make a better life for himself in America. It's been compared to The Grapes of Wrath, and since Steinbeck is one of my favorite writers, I was even more intrigued. 

The story begins after World War I, when young Carlos is just a boy and his oldest brother returns to the family in Binalonan after several years' absence as a soldier. The family struggles to keep the family farm and pay for the education of another brother, Macario -- basically, the only way out of poverty. The family endures hardship and heartbreak, and Carlos is badly injured more than once, just trying to make a little extra money to keep from losing their land. They are too poor for him to go to school regularly but he picks up what education he can, and reads on his own. 

At just 17, Carlos makes his way to America, but there are few jobs for Filipinos other than canning factories and migrant work, picking crops. He makes his way up and down the West Coast, from Alaska to California, sometimes barely managing to stay alive. Eventually he reconnects with Macario and another brother who had previously emigrated. Carlos also gets involved with Filipino union organizers who are fighting for better working conditions. His English improves and he also begins writing. However, the attempts to organize labor unions is violently opposed, and Carlos and the other organizers are constantly threatened by arrest and violence. He also becomes ill with tuberculosis and at one point is hospitalized for two years.     

This was a tough read for me. The writing isn't difficult, but it was really painful to read about how badly Carlos and the other minorities were treated -- terrible working conditions, no benefits, unable to find housing in any place but the worst parts of town, unable to own property, unable to become a citizen. The racism is just appalling. For me, it was even worse than reading about the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath because at least the Joads had some rights -- and they wouldn't be subjected to generations of racist bigotry because of the color of their skin. It's so infuriating that Filipinos and other Asians had so few rights -- Asians weren't allowed to become US citizens until the 1940s, and there were still immigration quotas until 1965.

It's not a long book, 327 pages in my edition, and there are lot of very short chapters. But the subject was so difficult to read that it took me a long time to finish for such a short book. This did make it harder to keep some of the recurring characters straight -- Carlos would run into an old friend or colleague and I couldn't always remember how they'd met. But I'm really glad I finished it. Immigrant stories are really important and this was especially personal to me. 

Carlos Bulosan

I glanced out of the window again to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only to discover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. I felt it spreading through my being, warming with its glowing reality. It came to me that no man -- no one at all -- could destroy my faith in America again. . . . It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines -- something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in American that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever.

I'm counting this as my Classic by a BIPOC author for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman

I think the best thing about Adam's TBR Pile Challenge is that it inspires me to read those books that have been hanging around the bookshelves for far too long -- it's just wonderful to find treasures that I've been ignoring for far too long. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is exactly that -- one of those books that I really regret putting off for so long.

This award winning book is the story of the clash of cultures between the immigrant Hmong refugee community in Merced, California, and the doctors treating a young Hmong girl, Lia Lee, who showed symptoms of severe epilepsy starting at three months of age. She was first diagnosed in 1981. Her parents were refugees from Laos who resettled in California after the Vietnam war. The Hmong people are an ethnic minority living who are originally from the mountainous region of Southeast Asia, including China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, but they are fiercely independent and have never assimilated into any of those national cultures. Many Hmong people fought secretly for the CIA during the Vietnam War and for the Laotian Civil War in the 1970s. After fleeing to Thailand, the Lee family eventually settled in Merced, about two hours west of San Francisco, where there is a large population of Hmong refugees and their families. 

The book traces the cultural clash between Lia's family and their beliefs in traditional Hmong medicine and the American hospitals and staff, but it's also much more than that. There's a lot of background about the Hmong people and the wars in Southeast Asia, and most of the book is really about the cultural differences and how difficult it is for immigrants to adapt. It also makes a serious point about medical practitioners and cultural sensitivity. After I finished the novel, I went online to read more about Ms. Fadiman, and I found that this book is now required reading at Yale Medical school, and has had a strong influence in how medical professionals are now interacting with immigrant groups.

I found this book to be absolutely fascinating, extremely well-written and organized -- it's definitely one of my top reads of the year. I could hardly put it down and read it in just a few days, and I've been recommending it over and over to co-workers and library patrons. It would be a great selection for my non-fiction book group at the library, but unfortunately our system doesn't have enough copies -- maybe I'll have to persuade them to order some more so that we can put it on our reading list for next year. 

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior is the seventh book I read from my 2015 TBR Pile Challenge. I chose it in honor of Asian-Pacific American Heritage month, and though I finished this book almost two weeks ago, I'm having a really hard time writing about it. 

Published in 1975, The Woman Warrior is Maxine Hong Kingston's memoir is the story of growing up as a child of Chinese immigrants, but it's not just about her -- it's really about the experiences of the women in her family, both in China and after arriving in the United States. It's a fairly short book, just over 200 pages, and is divided into five sections. Each of the sections is centered around a different woman in her family -- herself, her mother, and her aunts. The book is beautifully written, but mostly heartbreaking. The parts that really got to me were how badly women and girls were treated. The first chapter starts with story of an aunt, her father's sister, who got pregnant after her husband had left for America to make his fortune, and her shame was so terrible she threw herself and her newborn child into a well. Kingston doesn't even know her aunt's name -- the shame is so terrible that her name is never mentioned, and she is instructed never to speak of it to her father. 

There's also a chapter about her mother's sister, who came to the United States to confront the husband that had left her and a daughter behind in China years before; a chapter about her mother studying to be a doctor in China after her husband had gone to America; and a retelling of the Fa-Mulan woman warrior myth. Although it's considered a nonfiction memoir, there are definitely elements of fiction woven throughout. Like some of the earlier memoirs I posted about this year, I did wonder a bit how much was fact and how much was fiction. 

Not the edition I read, but I really like this cover from 1977.

Overall, I liked it, but it was a difficult read at times -- it becomes really painful sometimes to read how badly women are treated in many cultures. It's also tough to read about how difficult it is for the children of immigrants who are caught between two different cultures. 

I Married Adventure: The Lives of Martin and Osa Johnson by Osa Johnson

I've owned I Married Adventure since 2008, just before I moved to Texas.  We were still living in Florida and we made one last trip to DisneyWorld before we left.  Believe it or not, there are excellent books for sale all over the Disney parks in the gift shops, and not just about Disney characters and animation.  In particular, the Epcot theme park has tons of great books in the World Showcase -- nearly every country represented has books from or about that country.  I actually bought this book in a little gift shop where they had a lot of African gifts.  I think I had just read West With the Night by Beryl Markham, and was hoping it something similar.

So, this is the memoir of Osa Johnson, who was born in Kansas in 1894 and was a world traveler along with her husband, photographer and filmmaker Martin Johnson, in the early 20th century.  They had amazing adventures.  It's a really interesting story, and though I did have a few issues with the book, I'm sorry I took so long to read it.

Martin was born in a small town in Kansas in 1884.  Martin was fascinated by the cameras his father had in the family's jewelry shop, and was a self-taught photographer.  He got expelled from school at sixteen, and decided to see the world and make his fortune with his camera.  After an unsuccessful attempt on his own, he had a big break saw a magazine advertisement from the author Jack London, who was building a ship and was planning to circumnavigate the globe.  Amazingly, Martin got a spot on the ship, despite having no sailing experience. 

Though they didn't quite make it around the globe (London suffered health problems and had to cut the trip short), Martin was determined to continue with his travels.  He started speaking about his amazing voyage to groups, and began to attract enough of an audience that he rented out theaters back in Kansas, where met his wife Osa, nine years his junior.  After a whirlwind courtship, they married, and Osa joined Martin on his speaking tours, where they struggled to earn enough to go on another photography tour.  Through hard work and determination, they became an amazing team, and created groundbreaking photographs and films about wildlife (and to a lesser extent, native people), mostly in the South Pacific and Africa. 

Overall, I liked this book.  I'm really fascinated by adventures stories.  I liked reading about all the obstacles they overcame, with weather, terrain, and technical issues with early cameras. Some of their adventures were quite harrowing and even a little gruesome.   In the South Seas, where they sought out natives who'd had little contact with Western culture, some of whom were actual cannibals and head-hunters.  (I used to think this was a myth.  It is not.)  Osa and Martin also met some really fascinating people, including legendary explorers and even royalty.  For example, while on an extended trip in Kenya (then British East Africa) in 1925, they ended up meeting the Duke and Duchess of York -- the future George VI of England (for us Yanks, that's the same monarch from The King's Speech, who took over when his brother abdicated and was the father of the current monarch, Elizabeth II). 

Osa Johnson and a friend. 

However, I did have a few issues with the book.   It was first published in 1940, and as you might expect, some of the attitudes toward other racial groups are not what they are today and some of the references to native peoples is occasionally tinged with racism, though it isn't constant.  And though Osa states repeatedly that she and Martin are primarily photographers interested in recording animals and are appalled by big-game hunters who merely want trophies, she does discuss instances in which animals get shot, though it's always for food, or in self-defense.  It's probably hypocritical of me to be uncomfortable about this, as I'm not a vegetarian.  Martin and Osa were concerned even back in the 1920s about endangered species, but there's quite a few instances of shooting animals.

The writing in this book isn't what I'd call great -- Osa has kind of a gee-whiz style, not what I'd call lyrical or beautiful.  I wish she'd been more specific about dates, though they're not altogether left out.  Also, the end of the book felt rather rushed, and it just sort of stops.  There's a copy of a news article at the end which explains why, but I still felt a bit unsatisfied.  This book isn't a beautiful, lyrical example of travel writing, but overall, it's very entertaining if you can ignore some of the outdated attitudes of that time period. 

Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin

Please Look After Mom was the library book group selection for my evening group this past month.  I chose it because I'd heard a lot about it last fall when it was published in America.  I don't read that many books in translation, though I'd like to read more, and I'd never read a Korean book before, though I have read books set in Korea.  I thought this would be a good choice for the group to read during Asian-Pacific Heritage month.  It wasn't until later that I realized that we'd be discussing it the week before Mother's Day.

If you don't know anything about it, here's the setup:  told from different points of view, this is the story of a family's search for their missing mother.  The sixty-something parents are traveling by train to visit one of the adult children, and in the busy Seoul train station, the parents get separated in a crowd.  The father accidentally gets on the train without the mother, not realizing she's left behind.  She seems to have vanished without a trace, and the book is about the search for the the mother, and the impact of her absence on the family.  It's told in four sections, from four points of view. 

This book really resonated with me for a couple of reasons.  First, I lived in Japan for a couple of years, and though the two cultures are obviously different, there's enough similarity that I was able to picture a lot of the scenery, both in the countryside and in the cities.  I could absolutely believe the part about the parents getting separated -- I've been in the Tokyo JR (Japan Rail) train station during rush hour, and it's overwhelming.  I've seen how crowded the platforms are and how many people are trying to get on those trains.  Several times I was traveling with my children, who were quite small, and it was horrifying to imagine getting separated from them (though Japan is an extremely safe country for tourists; I'm not implying we were ever in danger.)

Secondly, my husband is Asian, and even though his mother has very little in common with the missing mother from the novel, I could absolutely relate to this mother's devotion towards her children.  For example, in one scene in the book, the mother is having dinner with her eldest grown son, and she keeps taking the best pieces of meat out of her own bowl and putting them in his -- my mother-in-law used to do this all the time.  And like the the woman in the story, my in-laws would do absolutely anything to help her children with their education.  She's not like the tiger mother that published that book last year, but there's definitely a lot of commitment to higher learning in Asian families.

This book was really well-written and the story really captured me, but I did have a little trouble getting used to it because it's written in the second person.  It's not a writing technique I encounter much, and it's really not my favorite.  The different narrators always used "you" and it took me awhile to figure out who they were talking about.  

I liked how this book slowly revealed different layers of the characters, especially the mother.  The author really showed how little we know about our own family members and what made them they way they are, especially the mother.  However, I wasn't really thrilled with the ending.  Some of it seemed very unresolved and even though I can sort of assume what happened, a lot of it seemed unexplained.  Overall I did really like it and would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to read Asian literature in translation.  It was a really good book selection for a discussion group so I'd highly recommend it for those also, as long as you can get enough copies which is always a problem in my library system.

The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

I’m reviewing this book together with my good friend Amanda of The Zen Leaf.

Synopsis:  Set in the 1920s in England, Hong Kong, and China, The Painted Veil is the story of  Kitty Fane. Young, beautiful, and shallow, she marries Walter Fane after realizing she was running out of time and needed to catch a husband quickly.  After a short courtship, she accompanies Walter to Hong Kong where he is working as a bacteriologist. She soon becomes bored with Walter, and has an affair with a diplomat. Walter discovers her infidelity and decides to punish her by forcing her to accompany him on a dangerous medical mission to a cholera-stricken village in China. Oddly enough the worst circumstances bring out the best in Kitty.

Amanda: Hi Karen! Thanks for buddy-reviewing with me!

I think I want to start out by talking about William Somerset Maugham. I first read one of his books in January 2001 – Mrs. Craddock – and fell in love with it. I’ve since read 12-15 of his books, several of them more than once. He’s one of my favorite classic authors. His books are easy to read and well thought out. The Painted Veil is one of my favorites of his. This is the third time I’ve read it, and I think I love it just a little bit more with each reread! So how did you discover Maugham?

Karen: I discovered Maugham back when I was a freshman in college. I had a huge crush on a boy in my dorm who had read Maugham the year before in a lit class. He insisted on lending me Of Human Bondage to read during the winter break. Of course, since I was crushing on him, I had to read it, and I loved it. It was one of the first classics I read for pleasure. I didn’t read any more Maugham until I met the man who is now my husband, also a Maugham fan — The Razor’s Edge is one of his favorite books. (Obviously, I’m attracted to men with great taste in literature!) So I read Razor’s Edge, and a couple others, but then I didn’t read hardly any more Maugham for quite awhile. Then, in 2008, our classics reading group chose the books for this year, but The Painted Veil wasn’t scheduled for almost a year! I couldn’t wait that long and read it right away. It’s just as good the second time around.

I agree, Maugham’s works are not difficult reads. I’ve been reading quite a few Victorian authors this year, so he’s really a refreshing change. I remember that I was pleasantly surprised at how easy Of Human Bondage was — it’s quite long, more than 600 pages (depending on the edition), yet it’s pretty fast for such a long book. The Painted Veil is much shorter, only about 250 pages, and I could probably read the whole thing in one day.

Amanda: One of the things I find most fascinating about Maugham was how little respected he was amongst his fellow authors. He was a pulp novelist. Often his writing tended more toward the cliche, and his prose was straightforward. With people like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Woolf as contemporaries, he was looked down on for not being experimental like them. He was old fashioned. But really, it was his straightforward, easy prose that hooked me on classics. Without him, I’m not sure what sort of reader I’d be today, or if I’d be a reader at all.

So. The Painted Veil. I loved it. All three times. One of my favorite things about it is the characterization. Each character is so round. None of them are all good or all evil. I personally find Kitty obnoxious, and really sympathize with her husband, but others might find Walter cruel and callous. Personally, I understood him and while I didn’t think he always made the best of judgments, I really admired his dedication to the people he was taking care of. What did you think of the characters?

Karen: There aren’t that many characters, but I agree, they’re well-rounded, especially Kitty. When I started the book, I really wanted to smack her, but I kept on reading — which just shows what a great writer Maugham was. These are seriously flawed people, yet the story is so fascinating that it holds the reader.

Anyway, I’ve really been thinking about some of these flawed characters lately, I’ll probably write a blog entry about it soon. I always think of them as Fascinating Train Wrecks. However, I’m not sure if I’d put Kitty in this category, because she actually makes changes to try and improve the situation. She’s proactive, and as annoying as she was, I actually ended up respecting her. Not that she’s perfect, she still makes mistakes, but you can see at the end that there’s hope for her.

So, Amanda, what did you think of Walter? Did he deserve Kitty?

Amanda: I think the real question is – did Kitty deserve Walter? Taking them back, prior to the affair and him taking her to the cholera epidemic. Walter is smart, hardworking, and sensitive. He has a very hard time relating to other people, and he has no patience for frivolity and social customs. Kitty, on the other hand, is empty-headed, self-centered, and a bit of a bimbo. Why he ever fell in love with her is beyond me – I suppose we can’t always explain why we fall in love with someone – but I think it’s interesting that he went into the whole marriage with his eyes open. He knew what she was. He knew she was like a doll – beautiful but empty. He was willing to put up with that in order to be near her, and he was always very kind. I don’t think Kitty ever realized – not even at the end – how badly she hurt him. She kept thinking it was pride, that her infidelity didn’t matter, shouldn’t matter, but to him, it killed his love.

I do think she became a better person, to a certain degree, but even at the end, she’s still selfish. I hope she’ll be better, and I do like that she plans to have daughters and raise them to be strong and smart, unlike her. That brings up another point, though – I thought this book said a lot of interesting things about the role of women at the time. It seems to take place in a very transitional time when women were gaining some independence but could not entirely be strong. Did you feel Maugham had a feminist slant in mind when he wrote it?

Karen: I think Kitty’s definitely less selfish at the end than at the beginning. Without spoilers, there are several instances when she tries deliberately not to hurt people. And she’s much better at reading people, and reacting to them.

The feminist angle didn’t strike me at all when I read it, but I can see it as a possibility. There are some strong female characters — even the Mother Superior, and Charlie’s wife Dorothy. They’re in traditional roles, nun and wife, but they’re a lot stronger than Charlie and maybe even Walter. I wish Maugham had developed Walter a little more. I think he was the least developed of the main characters. My favorite male character was definitely Waddington, but he was also tragic in his own way. Do you think in general the male characters were as well developed as the female?

Amanda: I actually thought Walter was very well developed, but that might be because of how much I could understand him. He wasn’t traditionally developed – it was just a brushstroke of information spattered here and there throughout the novel, leading to a whole picture. I think about things and feel things in very much the same way he does, so it was easy for me to relate to him and make a full picture of him in my mind, I suppose. I could see other people relating to him less, though, because he’s the sort of personality that many people have trouble relating to in real life. I think Maugham wrote the social awkwardness well.

I have read, though, that Maugham tended to understand women better than men in his own life, so it’s possible that’s why the women characters felt more developed. I loved the Mother Superior. I don’t normally like reading about Catholics, having grown up Catholic, but the Sisters in that convent were so different from traditional Catholics. Take, for example, one of my favorite quotes from the book:

Beauty is also a gift of God, one of the most rare and precious, and we should be thankful if we are happy enough to possess it and thankful, if we are not, that others possess it for our pleasure.

I love this. This goes against most traditional viewpoints of beauty. Most books treat beauty either as a precursor to emptyheadedness, or as a great evil. To hear someone speak this way – especially the head of a Catholic convent – is just amazing. I loved that the Sisters were so open, forgiving, and loving. They were the very picture of charity. Even though normally I don’t like to read much about religion in books, the passages with the Sisters just blew me away and I think they played an integral role in how much Kitty changed. What do you think?

Karen: I completely agree! They’re much more forgiving than Catholics are usually portrayed. It’s no wonder Kitty was really drawn to them. I wish I knew them! And I loved that quote also. I don’t normally make notes when I write, but I think I have to go back with sticky notes and tab all the passages I loved in this book.

One thing that did bother me about this book was the racist way in which the Chinese are portrayed, mostly the way they’re described — ugly, yellow, etc. That’s the one thing that really put me off in this book. But it’s possible that Maugham was merely reflecting the attitude of the British of that time, or Kitty’s attitude. What do you think?

Amanda: I do think that was reflective of Kitty’s attitude. It’s possible there was a certain amount of British superiority to it – I think that’s almost a given in that time period – but the main characters other than Kitty seemed to have compassion for the Chinese. The nuns, Waddington, Walter. They saw past the racial differences and did everything they could to help. The Chinese were just other people to them, not some strange foreign race that repulsed them. Even Kitty tried to get over her prejudice against them once she was surrounded by the children every day. I liked that. I thought it was a good message – that to overcome prejudice, one must spend time with those one is prejudiced against.

Without giving away spoilers, what did you think about the fate of Walter and Kitty’s relationship? Do you think, given the chance, they could have ever come to live together peacefully? Or were they, as Kitty says at one point, “Two little drops in the river that flowed silently towards the unknown; two little drops that to themselves had so much individuality and to the onlooker were but an indistinguishable part of the water?” (That’s my other favorite quote.)

Karen: That’s going to be tough without giving away the ending. I went back and forth as I read the book. Kitty seemed to really be growing and maturing as a person, so I began to feel hopeful, but then I didn’t know if Walter would ever forgive her. It sort of bothered me that Walter was so unforgiving, though he was surrounding by people dying horrible deaths. I would have thought it might have put her transgression in perspective somewhat — but that also relates to him deliberately bringing her into a situation where she might get infected and die, which is so bitter and vengeful. I saw Kitty changing as a person more than Walter, and I began to actually like her better than him.

This book has so many issues that are great for discussion, but it’s really hard without giving away major plot points — and I reaaaallly hate spoilers. I would highly recommend this book for a face-to-face discussion group — not too long, an easy read, a great plot and interesting characters. This was a great choice, and I am so looking forward to reading more by Maugham. There are three more on my to-read bookshelf right now, and I am so tempted to go back and reread Of Human Bondage.

So, I know you’ve read most of the Maugham oeuvre. How does this compare to the others? Is it one of your favorites? Definitely one of mine.

Amanda: Well, I haven’t read his entire works – he was an extremely prolific author. Wikipedia has 54 entries for him under the “Novels, Travel, Criticism, and Assorted Pamphlets” section, plus another 24 plays, 187 periodical contributions, and 123 short stories. I’ve only read a mere glancing of that. I haven’t read a single play or short story, though I hope to fix that next year. Of the novels I’ve read, though, I count The Painted Veil among my favorites, alongside Mrs. Craddock. Some other good ones are The Razor’s Edge, Of Human Bondage, and Theatre. In fact, there have only been two Maugham novels I disliked (The Magician, and The Moon and the Sixpence). I would definitely recommend his books as easy-to-read classics that are fun but also deep.

Thanks again for doing this review with me, Karen! I was having such a hard time figuring out how to review this book, since I love it so much.

Karen: Thank you, Amanda, for inviting me! It was really fun! We’ll have to do it again soon!