America Is Not the Heart

by Elaine Castillo

  VIKING

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Elaine Castillo

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A portion of this novel appeared as “America Is Not the Heart” in Freeman’s: The Future of New Writing.

  ISBN: 9780735222410 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 9780735222434 (ebook)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_3

  I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one of them.

  Carlos Bulosan, America Is in the Heart

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue, or Gali-La!

  Ate Hero

  Milpitas

  The First Picture of You, 1990

  Ang Dalagang Pilipina

  Flores de Mayo

  True Love Comes for Mine Fujiko

  Bíba, Babaero

  America Isn’t the Heart

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue, or Gali-La!

  So you’re a girl and you’re poor, but at least you’re light-skinned—that’ll save you. You’re the second eldest child and the second eldest daughter of a family of six children, and your parents are subsistence farmers—your mom sells vegetables at the local market and when that doesn’t make enough to put food on the table, you sell fruit and beans by the side of the road. That is, until your father manages to get a job working as a clerk for the American military in Guam, where he acquires a mistress and regularly sends money back to the family, the latter gesture absolving the first. He returns every three years for a visit, which is why you and nearly all of your siblings are three, six, or nine years apart in age. On those rare visits, you treat him with rudeness out of loyalty to your mother, who neither thanks nor acknowledges your efforts or, for that matter, your existence: eczema-ridden you at eight, hungry adolescent you at twelve, all your early ragged versions. When you’re old enough to know better but not old enough to actually stop talking back to him, your father will remind you, usually by throwing a chair at your head, that the only reason you’re able to attend nursing school is because of his army dollars. It’s your first introduction to debt, to utang na loob, the long, drawn-out torch song of filial loyalty. But when it comes to genres, you prefer a heist: take the money and run.

  Growing up, everyone says you’re stupid, you’re clumsy, you get into at least one fight a week, and even your light skin, while universally covetable, is suspicious; your father often accuses your mother of having taken up with a Chinese merchant or Japanese soldier or tisoy businessman while he was away. Did that happen? You don’t know. Is that unknown man your father? You don’t know. If it happened, was it your mother’s choice; was it an affair, or was it a case of—a word you won’t say, can’t think, a word that drifts like smog, through your life and the lives of all the women around you. You don’t know. Looking at your own face doesn’t tell you. There isn’t anyone you can ask.

  When you’re hungry, sometimes you go out into the fields and stick your stumpy arm down the pockmarks in the earth where tiny dakomo crabs like to scurry away and hide, your fingers grasping for the serrated edge of the shell. Some days you collect enough to carry home for your mother to steam, using the lower half of your shirt as a basket, but sometimes you can’t wait, yanking one out by the leg and dashing it on the ground to stun it, then eating the whole thing right there, live and raw, spitting out bits of calcium. Sometimes instead of a crab you pull out a wiggling frog, but most of the time you throw those away, watch them hop to safety. People warn you that those holes are also the favored hiding places of some semipoisonous snakes, but when you weigh the danger against the hunger, the hunger always wins. On the days when there are no crabs, no frogs, not even a weak snake, you go around picking dika grass, the kind that the farmers usually feed their horses. You sell makeshift bundles of them by the side of the road, alongside the mangoes and chico. On good days, the dika grass sells so well you produce a little side economy that gives you enough money to buy some ChocNut and maybe the latest issue of Hiwaga so you can catch up on your komiks, even though at the end of every one you have to read the most hateful words you’ll ever encounter, in any language: abangan ang susunod na kabanata. Look out for the next chapter.

  Around this time your mother’s great love affair is with Atse Carmen, your eldest sister, who’s room-silencingly beautiful in the way older sisters often are, and who gets away with everything. Atse Carmen somehow gets a gold tooth fitted in her mouth despite the fact that everyone in the family eats one meal a day, if that. So when you’re eleven or ten years old, you get your brightest of bright ideas: you’re going to get a gold tooth fitted, just like Atse Carmen. Not only that, but you’re going to pay for it yourself. You take to pocketing even more of the money you make at the roadside—work that Atse Carmen was never asked to do, just you. But you’ve got three new siblings, a scrappy Rufina, Gloria the toddler, Boyet the infant, so the scant attention that might have been rationed out for you in the past gets allocated elsewhere. This time, though, it’s a blessing—you can carry out your plan in peace. Well, if not peace, then: alone. It’s the same thing.

  You begin to save up. You go to the only dentist you know in town; not the same dentist who gave Carmen her gold tooth, but another one who apparently doesn’t balk at accepting dirty and wrinkled pesos from an adolescent promdi girl. The dentist doesn’t ask where your parents are; he doesn’t ask if you have their permission. He doesn’t ask any questions at all. He takes your money, and puts you under anesthesia, and you wake up with a gold tooth.

  The pain is like nothing you’ve ever felt before, not like a chair leg glancing your temple, not like the non-look of someone staying in the backseat of a cool car while their driver is sent out to buy chico from your stand. Your mother isn’t even angry that you used the money for the procedure; there’s something bordering on pride in the look on her face when she sees you and Atse Carmen; smiling, glinting. So now you know what triumph feels like; the feeling lasts for a while. Lasts until all of your teeth, with the exception of your ungilded back molars, rot and fall out as a result of what turns out to be a poorly and cheaply executed fitting. By the time you’re fourteen, you wear dentures. You’ll wear dentures for the rest of your life. These early ones, which your father’s American salary pays for, give you blinding headaches. You hate having to brush your teeth in your hand every night; you avoid looking at yourself in the mirror in those moments, but sometimes you slip up and catch sight of your mouth, wound-pink and hollow, a grandmother’s maw in your child’s face. Atse Carmen’s gold tooth never falls out.

  When you’re sixteen, you get into Saint Louis University, a Catholic college nestled five thousand feet high in the mountainous forests of Baguio City. You’d wanted to take your aching gums to Manila, but your mother absolutely forbade it; the
cost, the distance, the demonstrations. You’re the second and last girl in the family to go to college. At the time your father’s still in Guam; he hasn’t become an American citizen yet, but it’s in the process. When his citizenship comes through, your younger siblings will be able to come to America as green card holders, but you’ll be over twenty-one by the time you finish nursing school, too old to be petitioned. You’re going to have to become an American by yourself.

  In Baguio, you brave the treacherous drive up Kennon Road, the winding road known for its landslides during the rainy season and its speeding accidents year-round. It’s the only road that can take you all the way up to the city, the scent of pine trees growing stronger the higher up you get, passing the abandoned mining towns and the Ifugao souvenir huts by the side of the road selling wood carvings, like the little one of a naked man wearing only a barrel, whose titi pops out when you lower the barrel. You’ve seen that figurine even back home; it’s a common enough little comic trinket found in any household. It’s only in Baguio that you hear that the figure appeared after the Americans had built their military settlement in Baguio, the only American hill station in Asia, displacing the Ibaloi living there. You never look at that little wooden titi the same way again.

  But you also don’t turn your dormmates down when they all want to go to the restaurants at Camp John Hay, formerly John Hay Air Base, perched there at the topmost part of a hill in the Cordilleras, overlooking all of Baguio. You can only enter the recreation camp if you’re a guest of a U.S. citizen, but one of your new girlfriends happens to be dating an American soldier and she’s generous enough to invite all of you to the camp, so in the end it’s like you’re all dating the soldier: you get to see the golf courses, the country clubs, the rich Filipinos getting married, plucking pine needles out of taffeta. At Camp John Hay, the cost of everything is listed in dollars, not pesos—when you get back to your dorm room and start to calculate the price of a hot dog, you throw the paper away before you’ve even finished the math.

  At SLU, most of the girls in your dorm speak Tagalog, Ilocano, or Kapampangan. One day one of the girls, Fely, says to the group: You know how they say rich people have red heels?

  You have, in fact, always heard this growing up: that poor people have dusty, gray heels, and rich people have smooth, moisturized heels, red with health. You have a tendency to hide your feet, even though you’ve always rubbed cream into them religiously so they won’t look like your mother’s heels, desert-cracked. Well, I have a trick, Fely says, showing all of you her smooth, impossibly red heels. You just put merthiolate on it! Not iodine, that makes it orange. Merthiolate is the secret! After that, all of you take to staining your heels with the liquid antiseptic. From then on, you love wearing slingbacks, mules, cropped trousers. Years later, even as an adult nurse in California, sometimes you’ll still put merthiolate on your heels.

  There are nine of you in total, and all of you are the first inhabitants of that newly built dorm, Cardinal Cardijn Hall. You’ll never really know who Cardinal Cardijn is; those are just words to you. Another new building on campus that year is the Diego Silang building, named after Diego Silang y Andaya. Now his story, you know a bit better; you remember the school lessons, punctuated with blows across the knuckles to help the kids remember. Diego Silang, the eighteenth-century revolutionary who, with the help of British forces who wanted their own piece of the Philippines, staged a revolt against Spanish colonial rule. Everyone says Diego Silang’s an Ilocano, that as a revolutionary he wanted to form an Ilocano nation. Even your future Ilocano husband will remember Diego Silang as an Ilocano, will remember that the revolutionary as a young boy lived and worked in Vigan, his own hometown. But you know a different story: you know that Diego Silang was born in Pangasinan, just like you. His mother was Ilocana, but his father was Pangasinense. You feel somewhat petty for thinking that it matters, but—it matters. It matters to you.

  Diego gets betrayed, of course; by the British powers that promised reinforcement, and then by a friend of his, paid by the church to kill him. Leadership of the revolt falls to Diego’s wife and fellow insurgent, María Josefa Gabriela, an Ilocana with a Spanish dad and uncertain maternage—a native maid in a colonial household, maybe Igorota or Tinguian. Either way, your lessons told you that Gabriela was a beautiful bolo-wielding mestiza. The mestiza part means they’ll definitely make a movie out of her life one day: people remember the mestizas. That you’re light-skinned enough to pass for mestiza doesn’t slip your mind; frankly, you’re hanging on to it as a crucial talisman for your survival. You want to be remembered, too. Like a blow across the knuckles.

  Gabriela’s siege doesn’t work out; Spanish forces overpower her troops, and they retreat into hiding. Eventually, the Spanish capture them and hang them all in the Plaza Salcedo, not far from the home where your future husband’s family will have lived for hundreds of years before the word Filipino ever even existed. Abangan ang susunod na kabanata.

  * * *

  In Baguio, you learn how to lie to your mother. Every year when it comes to reporting your textbook expenses, you subtly up the price so that you can skim off the extra, add that to the money you save by choosing to walk instead of using the jeepneys, and use the money to go with your new girlfriends to the PX stores, buy up all the American peanuts that taste different from the fresh mani you’re used to eating, worse, addictive, and check out all the exotic beauty products they have in store: soaps, powders, pomades. Most of the other girls are happy with Avon perfumes and everyone you know smells of Charisma, Elusive, Occur, or Moonwind. You, on the other hand, save up money to buy Madame Rochas, the most expensive perfume in the shop, which you’ve never even smelled—the lady behind the counter at the PX shop only displays the bottles behind a huge mirrored glass case, doesn’t let anyone try anything on until they hand over the cash.

  Occasionally, a moment of guilt interrupts your bliss; you know how stretched money is back home, and you have younger siblings who’ll have to go to school eventually, too. But all the girls do it, you tell yourself, a little kupit here and there when you’re living away from home, it’s nothing, you could stop if you wanted to, and it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

  You were hoping to stay in Baguio, up there in the cool green hills, safe and perfumed, away from Pangasinan and everyone who knew you. But something goes wrong; it turns out that Atse Carmen has applied to do her nursing internship at Baguio General Hospital, too. The only thing is, because it’s a government hospital, only one member of a family household at a time is allowed to apply for an internship. Everyone expected her to apply in Dagupan, closer to where she’s attending nursing school; you’re not quite sure why she chooses Baguio. Some part of you thinks, with a rage bordering on glee, that it’s because she’s somehow found a way to be jealous of you, listening to every person back home talk about what a nice city Baguio is, and how lucky little Pacita is to be going to university there, and maybe she’ll get married and settle up there and the family will be able to go visit her for summer vacations.

  When during one of your monthly calls back home, Atse Carmen answers the phone and preens over her acceptance, you know what it means. You’re either going to have to wait a year and work somewhere else until you can apply when Atse Carmen’s internship is over—or you’re going to have to leave Baguio. You’re starting to learn that the things you get, you don’t get to keep.

  Your mother at least has the sensitivity to realize that your sister’s acceptance into Baguio General is pushing you out of a city you’ve made your own. She asks you if you want to come back to Pangasinan. She says that she knows somebody who knows somebody at the College of Nursing at the University of Pangasinan, right in Dagupan City. And maybe things will be less expensive in Dagupan than they seem to be in Baguio, she says. A stone between your ribs, you say yes. You’ll come back.

  When you come home, you find out the reason Carmen went to Baguio General Hospital
and took your place: she went to Baguio pregnant, leaving another infant with your mother, born while you were away. You hadn’t even known about the first one; no one told you she’d had a kid, and no one tells you anything about the father, or fathers. You meet the baby on your first visit back to Mangaldan since leaving Baguio, a little baby boy with his black hair in a topknot, left long in the traditional custom of not cutting a child’s hair until the first birthday.

  You only meet the two boys again when they’re young men, after Carmen comes to live with you in California, her tourist visa having expired. Her two sons, Jejomar and Freddie, have American citizenship—they’ve been registered not as Carmen’s children, but your mother and father’s. Legally, they’re your brothers. They call you Atse Paz, and not Auntie.

  It’ll be easy enough for Carmen to get a nursing job in California; the shortage of nurses in the state is so severe that many hospitals don’t check for papers. But neither of her sons even have high school degrees, so you try to get them jobs here or there, some janitor work at one of the hospitals you work at, or sometimes you pay them to clean your house, or babysit your future daughter. You’ll wonder if they themselves even know that Carmen is their mother. They look so much like her it makes your molars ache.

  * * *

  Once you’re in Dagupan, you don’t study as hard or push yourself as much as you did in Baguio. You still want to leave the country, but you’re getting tired of holding up the weight of your own desires. You just want to get through the year. You get straight Cs in most everything from Anatomy and Physiology to English Speech Improvement. Your highest grade is a B, in Physical Education. Your second highest grade is a B minus, in Land Reform and Taxation.

  The only person you know at the University of Pangasinan is your cousin Tato. He’s two years older than you and studying either politics or law, you’re not sure. He’s not as light-skinned as you, but you share the inchik eyes, which is what you think about when your father comes home from Guam, gets drunk, and says, That’s not my blood, pointing vaguely in your direction. You had a crush on Tato when you were kids; you used to visit their family house in the town center sometimes on your way back home from selling food or cookware with your mother at the Mangaldan Public Market. You haven’t seen him since before you left for Baguio, though, so when you meet him for the first time on campus, you’re surprised by how mature he looks, a man with tough meat on his bones. You know distantly about what happened at Malacañang Palace last year, the student rally, the riots, but you never talk about it with any of your friends. Once you meet Tato, you know he’s involved.