Carlos Bulosan's The Laughter of My Father: Adding Feminist

and Class Perspectives to the "Casebook of Resistance"

Marilyn Alquizola, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi
From: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
Volume 32, Number 3, 2011
pp. 64-91 | 10.1353/fro.2011.0025

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

In this essay we focus on a cycle of twenty-four short stories published in 1944 by Filipino American poet
and author Carlos Bulosan entitledThe Laughter of My Father. Although this work is less commonly
treated than Bulosan's novels, we draw from one of the most compelling analyses to date, presented by
literary critic L. M. Grow. In an article published in 1995 Grow proposed that Laughter could be read as a
kind of casebook, illustrating peasant resistance against the colonial structures and the comprador class
found in northern agricultural areas on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Here we propose that it is
possible to expand critically on Grow's analysis by adding feminist and class perspectives to Grow's
interpretation. This in turn reveals that Bulosan had more to say about Filipino women than has been
suggested in the published literature on the author and his work to date.
Specifically, by sifting though each of the stories in Laughter, it is possible to elucidate lessons regarding
gendered social relations based on the specific manifestations of male domination encountered by the
women in a neocolonial social formation. Through an analysis of the individual stories, as well as the
book as a whole, an assessment can be made of the work's lessons regarding possible responses to
male domination vis--vis interpersonal relationships, the family, and social institutions.

Why Bulosan? Why The Laughter of My Father?

For any reader who is not familiar with the life and work of the late Filipino author Carlos Bulosan, we
should start with a quick overview. Although not widely known in the larger domain of North American
popular culture, Bulosan, the writer and the activist, is iconic within the field of Asian American studies.
Controversies during his lifetime, however, and criticism of his most famous book, America Is in the
Heart, over the last two decades may have served to limit his audience.
Bulosan, who remained a Filipino national even though he spent his entire adult life in the United States,
was a new Asian immigrant who landed in the port of Seattle in 1922. As an immigrant he was a prolific,
well-recognized author for his age and educational background. A little more than a decade after his
untimely death, Bulosan's legend exploded in the late 1960s. His work as a poet and author, as well as a
prolabor militant, was foregrounded in the earliest classes in Asian American history, literature, and the
Filipino American experience, after Asian American studies classes and programs were established at the
university level circa 1968-69.
Carlos Bulosan's writing, especially his semiautobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, had a special
significance in Asian American and ethnic studies for a wide variety of reasons. First, and perhaps most
important, Bulosan developed a race and class perspective on behalf of his compatriots, the generation of
Filipino migrant workers known as the Manongs (or "respected elders") who worked in the fields,
fisheries, and canneries up and down the West Coast during the 1920s and 1930s.America Is in the
Heart, especially, was widely used in Asian American studies courses across the country because many
of the field's founders thought that this book, in particular, most explicitly exposed the racial prejudice and
discrimination that the Manongs faced before World War II. What differentiates Bulosan from most other
prewar Asian immigrant authors is that, along with race, Bulosan was highly focused on the local and
global class dynamics that also shaped the Filipino immigrants' labor experiences and tribulations. In this
same sense Bulosan was also able to position the Filipino laborers' plight within an international context,
rare in terms of nonfiction Asian immigrant authors of the time. In America Is in the Heart, specifically,

Bulosan spends chapters developing the portrait of how American colonial intervention in the Philippines
created the macrodynamic that forced peasants from the collapsing agrarian sector in the northern
Philippines to consider international migration as a possible solution to their constant cycle of poverty and
debt.
In particular it is worth remembering that the Philippine context that frames the short stories that appear
in The Laughter of My Father entails a historical...

Carlos Bulosan
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Carlos Bulosan
Born

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan

November 24, 1913
Pangasinan, Philippines

Died

September 11, 1956 (aged 42)

Seattle, Washington, United States

Cause of death

Bronchopneumonia

Occupation

Novelist, essayist, labor union organizer

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (November 24, 1913[1] September 11, 1956) was an Englishlanguage Filipino novelist and poet who spent most of his life in the United States. His best-known
work today is the semi-autobiographicalAmerica Is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943
essay on The Freedom from Want.
Contents
[hide]

1 Early life and immigration

2 Labor movement work
3 Writing
4 Death and legacy
5 Quotes
6 Works
7 References
8 Sources
9 Further reading
o 9.1 Archives

10 External links

Early life and immigration[edit]

Bulosan was born to Ilocano parents in the Philippines in Binalonan, Pangasinan. There is
considerable debate around his actual birth date, as he himself used several dates, but 1911 is
generally considered the most reliable answer, based on his baptismal records, but according to the
late Lorenzo Duyanen Sampayan, his childhood playmate and nephew, Carlos was born on
November 2, 1913. Most of his youth was spent in the countryside as a farmer. It is during his youth
that he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would
become one of the main themes of his writing. His home town is also the starting point of his famous
semi-autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart.
Following the pattern of many Filipinos during the American colonial period, he left for America on
July 22, 1930 at age 17, in the hope of finding salvation from the economic depression of his home.
He never again saw his Philippine homeland. Upon arriving in Seattle, he met with racism and was
forced to work in low paying jobs. He worked as a farmworker, harvesting grapes and asparagus,
and doing other types of hard work in the fields of California. He also worked as a dishwasher with
his brother and Lorenzo in the famous Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo.

Labor movement work[edit]

Bulosan was active in labour movement along the Pacific coast of the United States and edited the
1952 Yearbook for International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 37, a predominantly Filipino
American cannery trade union based in Seattle.

Writing[edit]
There is some controversy surrounding the accuracy of events recorded within America Is in the
Heart. He is celebrated for giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor
movement in America and for telling the experience of Filipinos working in the U.S. during the 1930s
and '40s. In the 1970s, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Islander American activism, his
unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to
posthumous releases of several unfinished works and anthologies of his poetry.
His other novels include The Laughter of My Father, which were originally published as short
sketches, and the posthumously published The Cry and the Dedicationwhich detailed the
armed Huk Rebellion in the Philippines.
One of his most famous essays, published in March 1943, was chosen by the Saturday Evening
Post to accompany its publication of the Norman Rockwell paintingFreedom from Want, part of a
series based on Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech.[2] Maxim Lieber was his literary
agent in 1944.

Death and legacy[edit]

As a labor organizer and socialist writer, he was blacklisted. Denied a means to provide for himself,
his later years were of flight and hardship, probably includingalcoholism.[3] He died
in Seattle suffering from an advanced stage of bronchopneumonia. He is buried at Mount Pleasant
Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
Bulosan's works and legacy is heralded in a state of the art permanent exhibition known as 'The
Carlos Bulosan Memorial Exhibit" displayed at the historic Eastern Hotel in the heart

of Seattle's International District highlighted with a massive centerpiece mural titled: 'Secrets of
History'[4] created by renowned artist Eliseo Art Silva.[5]

Quotes[edit]
"The old world is dying, but a new world is being born. It generates inspiration from the chaos that
beats upon us all. The false grandeur and security, the unfulfilled promises and illusory power, the
number of the dead and those about to die, will charge the forces of our courage and determination.
The old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony on the living ...
"
"We in America understand the many imperfections of democracy and the malignant disease
corroding its very heart. We must be united in the effort to make an America in which our people can
find happiness. It is a great wrong that anyone in America, whether he be brown or white, should be
illiterate or hungry or miserable."
- from America Is in the Heart

Works[edit]

America Is in the Heart

The Laughter of My Father
The Cry and the Dedication
My Father's Tragedy
The Romance of Magno Rubio

KIRKUS REVIEW
In the vein of humor for which The New Yorker is justly renowned (examples, -- My Sister,
Eileen and Hyman Kaplan and others), here are exploits of a fabulous father, told against a
Philippine setting as Simeon Sampayan's high spirited, low moraled activities lead from triumphs
to tragedies. He circumvents a rich neighbor in court; he builds a wine store for ex service men;
he gives away his house to a nephew and alienates Marta, his wife; he wins Marta back again by
staging his own funeral; he elects his brother president of the town; he legalizes his marriage at
fifty odd; he is caught in flagrante delicto with the widow next door; he stakes his youngest son
against a new house in a cock-fight; he is a reservoir of alcohol and a master of obscenity:- all
this and the love and law suits of his offspring and kin provide boisterous, bawdy moments a
new -- and fresh comic spirit for a series of enterprises ranging from the lusty to the legendary.
Good escape.
CARLOS BULOSAN: PHILIPPINES AMERICAN WRITER

Carlos Bulosan

The Gift of My Father

from the book, The Laughter of My Father
by Carlos Bulosan
My uncle Sergio had three sons, who had all left the Philippines for other parts of the
world by the time Father had moved Mother and us children from his farm on the
island of Luzon into the town where Uncle Sergio lived. I was six years old when the
move took place. I did not know where my uncle Serigo's two older sons were living,
but I did know that the youngest had gone to America and was in business there as a
building contractor, in California. His name was Poltron and he was fair of
complexion, and before he left home he used to strut about the town like a peacock.
One day Father and I were coming home from a wedding when we saw many people
in the year of my uncle Sergio's house, which was a block away from our house. A big
automobile was parked in the street and the house was bright with oil lamps and
lanterns. It was one of those dark Philippine nights. We stood under a tree, watching.

I saw my uncle coming down the wooden ladder of his house with a flashlight in his
hand. He stood in the yard, talking to the people. He was a gambler by profession, and
most gamblers in our province had big houses and lived more luxuriously than those
who worked hard for a living. Uncle Sergio's flashlight was new, and he kept flashing
it at random against the house and among the coconut trees, as if he were enchanted
by a marvelous new toy. Suddenly he focused the beam on us.
"Is that you, Simeon?" my uncle called in Ilocano, the language of northern Luzon.
"Yes," Father said.
"It's the night of all nights!" my uncle shouted.
"Did you bring home a wife?" Father asked.
"My son Porton came home from America and brought a beautiful girl," my uncle
said.
Father and I jumped over the barbed-wire fence and pushed our way through a crowd
of people in the yard. We climbed the polished ladder of Uncle Sergio's house and
rushed into the living room.
My cousin Porton was standing smoking a cigar in the center of a ring of barefooted
men and women. He was wearing a heavy fur overcoat, although it was a hot night,
and was sweating profusely. An old man rubbed his face against the soft fur of the
coat. A young man snatched the cigar out of Porton's mouth and took a bite of it,
chewing the tobacco with great satisfaction. Then a girl grabbed the feather in
Porton's hat and put it in her hair. There were naked children on the floor, smelling
and licking Porton's shoes.
Father pushed the people away and stepped up to my cousin. "Welcome home!" he
said.
"You are Uncle Simeon?" my cousin asked. "I've something special for you." He
produced a beautifully wrapped bottle of Manila rum from the pocket of his coat.
Father grabbed it. "I came to see your wife," he said.
"Sweetheard!" my cousin called in English, turning toward the little private room
where my uncle kept his most precious belongings.
"Yes, sweetheart," answered a girl's voice.

"Are you ready, sweetheart?" my cousin asked.

"Yes, sweetheart!"
The small door of the private room opened and a beautiful girl emerged from it. She
stood at the door and her black eyes beamed. Wonder filled the house. The men
opened their mouths to say something, but could not because joy filled their throats.
The women and the young girls sighed. Then my cousine approached the wonderful
creature and put his arm around her slender waist.
"Meet the people, sweetheart," he said.
"I'm glad to meet you all," she said in Spanish.
"This is my uncle Simeon, sweetheart," my cousin said.
"I'm glad to meet you, Uncle Simeon," she sid, reaching eagerly for Father's hand.
Father sparkled with gladness. "Sweetheart," he said, shaking the girl's hand.
"Where are my cousins, Uncle Simeon?" Porton asked.
"Your youngest cousin is here," Father said, pushing me forward.
"My youngest cousin is here, sweetheart," Porton said to his wife.
The girl knelt on the floor and put her arms around me.
"Hello," she said.
"Say 'Sweetheart,'" Father said to me.
"Hellow, sweetheart," I said.
The marvelous girl got up and laughed beautifully. "I like you very much," she said.
"Let's go outside now," my uncle said. "Let's give the young couple some rest."
The crowd started to go, but the young men all stopped before they went out the door
and looked back at the girl.
"Good night," she said.

My uncle Sergio killed three pigs the next day and asked the neighbors to attend a
feast in honor of his won and the wife he brought home from America. Father was
enchanted by the girl. He went to our arm and came back to town with two sacks of
fresh vegetables for the feast and a pair of old shoes he had used as a soldier during
the revolution. He even collected the white juice of a calachuchi tree and smeared it
on the dusty shoes to improve their appearance before he put them on.
Uncle Sergio's yard was full of people who had come from the villags to look at the
fabulous girl from America. They brought many gifts and put them in the yard. There
were three Igorots there, too, headhunters from the mountains of Luzon. They wore
G-strings and carried bows and poisoned arrows. They sat under the house with their
dogs and talked among themselves.
Father and several men gathered under the granary to talk.
"I tell you she is americana!" Father said, looking toward my cousin's wife.
"No!" my uncle protested, "She is espaola!"
"Her hair is curly and light, isn't it?" Father asked.
"But her skin is olive," my uncle said.
"I tell you she is americana," Father said. "I saw one likeher in Manila when I was
fourteen."
Just then my cousin Porton came over to the group, "What's all the argument about?"
he asked.
"It's about your wife," his father said. "Your uncle says she is americana. I say she
is espanola."
"You are both wrong," my cousin said. "She is mejicana."

(To be continued)
~the end~
The Laugher of My Father was published by Harcourt, Brace, and Company in 1944

Bio of Carlos Bulosan

Noted Filipino American author, Carlos Bulosan was born on November 24, 1914 in
the town of Binalonan, Pangasinan, to a peasant family of five brother ands two
sisters. After several years of secondary schooling, he left for the U.S. to join his older
brother Aurelio. Bulosan arrived in Seattle on July 22, 1930. He became a migrant
worker and union activist, and blossomed into a writer during his hospital
confinement from tuberculosis. Bulosan wrote short stories, essays, editorials, letters,
poems, plays, and his autobiographical novel, America is in the Heart. He died in
Seattle on Septemer 11, 1956.
The Laughter of my Father is a reprint of a book originally printed in the 40's. Carlos Bulosan was
quite well-known in the Philippines, but came America and died at the age of 44 in virtual obscurity.
Because of the efforts of the University of Washington his work is being read again. The Laughter of
my Father is a compilation of humorous sketches showing rual life in the Philippines during
Bulosan's youth.

Editorial Reviews

Review
This collection of short stories is both humorous and amazing in their rural detail.
One minute you laugh, the next you cry, but what you always do is turn the page.
It's an enjoyable read from beginning to end and is invaluable as a historic tool to
that era in the Philippines. --Louella Turner
Bulosan's literary works _ buried and forgotten during the later stages of his life _
have been resurrected and are now read widely, thanks to the efforts of AsianAmerican scholars and the University of Washington Press --The University of
Washington

About the Author

From the best available information, Carlos Bulosan was born in the province of
Pangasinan in the village of Mangusmana, near the town of Binalonan, which in turn
is located on the northern island of Luzon in the Philippine Islands. There is a wide
range of dates cited in the extant literature, as well as in the FBI files, in regard to
the exact year of his birth. Examining both the files and a range of published
sources, at least seven different years are cited in terms of Bulosan's actual birth
date: 1911; 1913; 1914; 1915; 1916; 1917; and 1919. While we realize that new
immigrants are prone to alter details of their biography such as their birth date,
such a set of years, that span almost a decade, seem unusual.