Carlos Bulosan (1911?–1956)
From
American Flash Fiction: An Anthology
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Carlos Bulosan, illustration by Frances O’Brien Garfield for the cover of the March 9, 1946, issue of The Saturday Review of Literature, which contained William S. Lynch’s feature review of Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart. This image was also used for the front cover when the book was reissued in 1973 by the University of Washington Press.
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At the end of 1956, Chris Mensalvas, the president of Local 37 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, a confederation of Filipino American cannery workers, published this short piece in the
Daily People’s World:
Come the first week in January, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service will miss the annual “report card” of one Carlos Bulosan, a requirement of the more than three million non-citizens residing in this country provided for under the much hated Walter-McCarran Act. For Carlos Bulosan, Filipino-American writer, is no longer around to comply with the law of the land.
If there is any doubt on the part of the Justice Department, I volunteer to testify thus:
Carlos Bulosan, 38 years old, died 11 September 1956, Seattle. Birthplace: Philippines; Address: Unknown; Occupation: Writer; Hobby: Famous for his jungle salad served during Foreign-Born Committee dinners.
Estate: One typewriter, a twenty-year old suit, unfinished manuscripts, worn out socks; Finances: Zero; Beneficiary: His people; Cause of Death: Malnutrition and Tuberculosis.
So, without invoking the Fifth Amendment, I am willing to testify that Carlos Bulosan is dead . . . but . . . will never die in the hearts of the people.
Mensalvas had been close friends with Carlos Bulosan for more than two decades; they met soon after Bulosan, who was probably nineteen years old at the time, arrived in California via Seattle in 1930 or ’31. After a short spell working as a dishwasher in a Santa Barbara County restaurant, Bulosan—physically frail and often sick—moved to Los Angeles and joined his brother Aurelio, who was able to support them both. Carlos spent his days at the public library, soon befriended such local writers as John Fante, and began writing short pieces for Filipino newspapers. In 1932 four of Bulosan’s poems were selected for inclusion in
California Poets, an anthology assembled by Helen Hoyt.
“Between 1931 and Pearl Harbor day, I lived violent years of unemployment, prolonged illnesses and heart-rending labor union work on the farms of California,” Bulosan later wrote for the 1955 edition of
Twentieth-Century Authors. For much of the late 1930s, he was hospitalized with tuberculosis and kidney ailments. “I had the opportunity to seriously read books which opened all my world of intellectual possibilities—and a grand dream of bettering society for the working man. I stayed in the hospital for two years. But it took me another five years before I was able to put my grand dream on paper in a literate form.” Among those who aided him during his illness were the novelist Sanora Babb and her sister Dorothy, while Harriet Monroe, the influential editor of
Poetry Magazine in Chicago, “discovered” and promoted his writing to the wider publishing world. By the opening of World War II, Bulosan’s short stories and poems had begun appearing in such magazines as
The Saturday Evening Post,
The New Yorker, and
Town and Country.
The war in the Pacific fueled interest among the American public in both the Philippines and Filipino Americans. Bulosan published three slim volumes of poetry in 1942 and 1943, including
The Voice of Bataan, a tribute to the 75,000 American and Filipino soldiers killed during the last stand against the invading Japanese army. In 1944, he became something of a celebrity with the publication of
The Laughter of My Father, a collection of satirical short stories. The first printing quickly ran out, the book was translated into a dozen languages, several of the quirky, witty tales were broadcast to troops, and, all told, more than 150,000 copies were sold. Two years later, he published the work for which he is best known,
America Is in the Heart, a fictionalized memoir that earned him front-cover treatment in
The Saturday Review of Literature.
In the early 1950s, Mensalvas, now in Seattle, hired his old friend to work as a public relations manager for Local 37 and to edit the union’s yearbook. The end of World War II, the independence of the Philippines from American governance, the Cold War, and the Second Red Scare combined to create new burdens and difficulties for Filipino American laborers. Before 1946, Filipinos were U.S. nationals; now they were immigrants. Bulosan’s labor activities—as well as his association with Mensalvas, who had been a member of the Communist Party—led him to being placed under surveillance by the FBI, and the two men and their friends lived under constant threat of deportation. Bulosan was finishing up a new novel about resistance fighters in the Philippines when he was overcome by a recurrence of tuberculosis; he spent the last three years of his life rotating among the Firland Sanatorium, the Mensalvas family home, the union hall, and homelessness.
Among the manuscripts left at Bulosan’s death are his last novel,
The Cry and the Dedication, first published in 1977 following a renewal of interest in his work, and “The Soldier,” a 1,400-word tale that was probably drafted around the time he wrote
America Is in the Heart. The story first appeared in a 1983 collection edited by E. San Juan Jr. It is included in the forthcoming Library of America anthology
American Flash Fiction, and we reprint it below as our
Story of the Week selection.
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There continues to be uncertainty about the year of Bulosan’s birth. His baptismal record indicates he was born in 1911, and his sister confirmed that date when she was interviewed by biographer Susan Evangelista. Later documents, other family members and friends, and Bulosan himself gave the year as 1913 or 1914.
Mensalvas’s obituary for Bulosan, quoted above, was reprinted in Carlos Bulosan and His Poetry (1985), by Susan Evangelista.
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For this week’s selection, we reproduce Bulosan’s story in its entirety below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.
The Soldier
They were arguing in the living-room.
“You’ve invited him to come here?” the mother asked.
“Why not?” the daughter said. “He’s nice and intelligent.”
The mother looked at her daughter with horror. “A soldier?” she said. “A Filipino soldier?”
The father came from the kitchen with a glass of wine in one hand and a bottle in the other.
He had heard his wife and daughter arguing when he came home but had gone straight to his room as though he were unconcerned. At the dinner table his wife and daughter had been very solemn. At the end of the dinner his wife had looked strangely at the girl. The daughter had rushed to the living-room and she threw herself into a chair. He had looked at his wife then, long, questioning her purpose. Their argument had already touched him. He had looked at his wife through the years of their life together, trying to put his thoughts together.
“Would you like your daughter to bring a Filipino here?” she had asked him.
He had merely looked at her with the great patience of a husband who had worked dutifully for years to have a decent home.
“Would you?” she had cried.
He had walked to the living-room without answering her. He had stood near the chair where the girl was weeping. He had wanted to understand her. He had bent over to touch her, but suddenly he had straightened up, stood for a while, eager, then walked to the kitchen for the bottle of wine.
Now he came out of the kitchen with a glass of wine in one hand and the bottle in the other.
“Go up to your room, Marcella,” he said.
The girl looked up at her father the way she had always looked at him when she had pleaded for understanding. All through the years she had always looked at him that way. There was a time when she had come home from school and cried to him. It seemed that she had met a boy that time. If it were not for him, she would have neglected her studies that year.
She looked now at her father as though all the years were crowding in upon her, challenging his victories and deep convictions. He could see in her eyes the light of other years, the strong light that once glowed warmly in his eyes; the immortal light that has shone in other lands and times.
If only I could go back to the beginning, he thought. Instead he said to his daughter, “Go up to your room now, Marcella.”
She knew that she was defeated. She jumped from the chair and fled across the room and rushed up the stairway. She slammed the door and flung herself upon the bed, sobbing and kicking the air.
“Martha,” he said to his wife, looking up the stairs. “Where did she meet him?”
“In the public library.”
He walked to his chair and sat down. “Well, he must be a nice boy.”
“Walter!” she cried with horror.
He made a motion to go to her, hesitated, sat back and shook his head. Then he got up and walked to the table for his pipe. Suddenly, the doorbell rang out loud.
“That’s probably he now,” he said.
She brushed the tears from her eyes. The bell rang again. The man walked to the door and opened it. A Filipino soldier was standing in the light rain. He was holding a box of candies.
“Is this Miss Marcella Roberts’ house?” he asked.
“Yes,” the man said, hesitant, pondering. Then he said, “Come on in.”
The soldier walked into the house and stood on the threshold for a moment, the cold of the night outside still clinging heavily on him. The man closed the door and took the soldier’s cap, walking over to the far corner of the room where his wife was waiting.
“You are Marcella’s mother?” the soldier asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“I thought so,” the soldier said. “You look exactly as I thought you would, only you are much younger.”
The man gave him a chair. He stood waiting for the young man to speak. The book and the box of candies were still in his lap.
“Where is your station?” the man asked.
“
Fort Ord,” the soldier said.
“How is it out there?”
“It is great,” he said. “Nice bunch of fellows in that camp. I like the place. I’ve been studying seriously.”
The man was still standing before the soldier, fumbling deliberately with his pipe.
“I was in the first war—” he started and stopped.
There was a sudden interest in the young man’s voice. “Were you?” he said, jumping to his feet.
“I’ve served ten months in France.”
“Then you understand the feelings of a soldier. They say the other war was fought for democracy. Some of those who fought in it say it’s a lie. I don’t interpret it that way, though. It was fought for democracy all right, but somewhere the ideals were gobbled up by powerful men.”
The man was beginning to feel that he had something in common with the soldier. The only difference was that when he was a soldier, he did not have the chance to clarify his beliefs. He was glad that at last, some twenty-five years later, he had met another soldier who though born in another part of the world, could have been himself, bringing with him the bright hopes he had fought for in that other war.
He walked back to his chair and sat down, facing the soldier. He glanced at his wife swiftly. Looking back at the soldier, he felt a yearning to confide something personal surge through him.
“Have you ever lived in this city before?” he asked.
“Yes,” the soldier said. “Ten years ago. But most of the people I knew are gone. This afternoon I walked around looking at the new stores and buildings. I stopped at the newsstands and touched the magazines and newspapers. I like this city very much indeed. Life itself reacts in the city streets. Ten years ago I used to stand in the station watching the people, and always there was a powerful yearning in me to go away. ‘Someday,’ I used to say to myself, ‘I’ll go away and never come back.’ But I never went away. I remember when I was a little boy my father and I used to go to the mountains just for the sheer joy of walking long distances. I’m like my father, who had a yearning for far away places. It took a war to take me away, though. I may not come back to all this wonderful—” He stopped and looked around the house with a strange affection and sincerity, as though he were storing up the bright image of the room in his mental world. He appreciated all of it.
The man stirred in his chair. “Marcella is ill and she can’t come down,” he said.
“Ill?” the soldier said, frightened.
“She has the flu, but she’ll be all right.”
“I hope she’ll be all right.”
“We’ll tell her that you called,” the mother said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Roberts,” he said. He walked across the room and put the book and box of candies on the table. “I’ll leave these candies for Marcella. This small book of poems is written by a Filipino who lived in this city. He was the first of my people to write a book in English.”
The man felt the strong pride in the soldier’s voice. “We’ll give them to her,” he said.
“Tell her to get well soon,” the soldier said. “Tell her not to get flu any more. Tell her the weather is dangerous this year.”
He walked to the door and the man followed him.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Roberts,” he said, and stepped out of the house.
“I’ll walk with you to the street,” the man said.
The rain had stopped falling and there was a misty moonlight in the trees. There was a fresh smell in the air. The man and the soldier stood under a wide arc of light in the street.
“What you’ve said there,” the man said with feeling, “is what I’ve always wanted to say.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, sir,” the soldier said.
The man gave his hand eagerly. “Good luck, young man,” he said.
The Filipino soldier walked into the night. He did not look back to see that the man was watching him walking away.
Written c. 1946. First published in 1983 in Bulosan: An Introduction with Selections, edited by E. San Juan Jr.
Sherwood Anderson:
