Bobby Vicente is five months shy of turning 18. His family has just shrunk by
half, after losing his mother to cancer and his older brother to Vietnam. His
father, Antonio, a Filipino American immigrant who once had a glorious boxing
past, is determined that his only family will not only avoid war, but somehow
make it out their Yesler housing project in Seattle. Antonio doesn’t have a
whole lot of time left to both educate and train sweet, kind-hearted Bobby. What
happens in that fast-forward week before Bobby takes his GED—from falling in
love, to having conversations with a dead brother not to mention a martyred
saint, to witnessing murder—will literally determine the rest of Bobby’s life. |
This series of tightly knit tales, which reads remarkably like a novel, is
rooted firmly in the Filipino community of Seattle. The stories introduce
readers to the community’s beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s and traces its
struggles through the present. Bacho’s tales are connected by the narration of
Buddy, the American-born son of a Filipino who labored in asparagus fields and
Alaskan canneries. Although Buddy is not immune to the hardships of migrant
poverty, prejudice, and disease, he is safeguarded because of his strong ties to
the "Community." As Buddy’s father, Vince, succinctly says: "Just remember,
Buddy, you got family, you got friends." This attachment to an extended family
and beyond becomes the book’s central theme, even as Buddy watches the members
of his family age and pass on. |
In 1983 Ben Lucero leaves his Seattle parish
for the burial of his mother Remedios in her homeland, the Philippine city of Cebu. Here he
learns about his mother’s past from her best friend Clara, now a powerful figure
in Philippine politics. The two women endured the Japanese occupation of Manila
in WW II, a harrowing experience that hardened the atheist Clara while
reinforcing Remedios’s faith, which she passed on to the frail son she had by a
Filipino-American soldier. That faith is put to the test when Ben meets Clara’s
seductive assistant Ellen, who helps him lose his virginity and later becomes
pregnant. Ben’s spiritual crisis is heightened by guilt and by the blase
reactions of locals to the crucifixion-style suicide of an old man. Returning to
Seattle, Ben encounters even more brutality in a surprise twist that ends
Bacho’s edgy, emotional novel on a tragic note. |
