a collection of stories

FOREWORD BY JESSICA HAGEDORN

INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN ISAAC

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SCENT OF APPLES

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CLASSICS OF
ASIAN AMERICAN

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L I T E R AT U R E

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a collection of stories

FOREWORD BY JESSICA HAGEDORN

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INTRODUCTION BY ALLAN PUNZALAN ISAAC

Seattle & London

U N I V E R SI T Y of WA SH I NGT ON PR ESS

 1955, 1967 by Bienvenido N. Santos

Introduction and preface to the 1979 edition 1979 by
the University of Washington Press
Foreword to the 2015 edition 2015 by Jessica Hagedorn
Introduction to the 2015 edition 2015 by the University of Washington Press

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Printed and bound in the United States of America

1817161554321

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.

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Immigration Blues first appeared in the June 1977 issue of New Letters.
The Day the Dancers Came, The Contender, Quicker with Arrows, and
Footnote to a Laundry List first appeared in the Philippines in The Day the
Dancers Came (Bookmark Press, 1967). The remaining stories in this volume first
appeared in the Philippines in You Lovely People (Bookmark Press, 1955).

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Universit y of Washington Press

www.washington.edu/uwpress

Santos, Bienvenido N.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scent of apples : a collection of stories / Bienvenido N. Santos ; foreword by

Jessica Hagedorn ; introduction by Allan Punzalan Isaac.

1. Filipino AmericansFiction.I. Title.

823dc23

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PR9550.9.S22S32015

ISBN 978-0-295-99511-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

to

pagescm (Classics of Asian American literature)

2015018740

requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences

Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.481984.

The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum

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To my wife, Beatriz

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CONTENTS

Introduction to the 2015 Edition: FOOTNOTE TO MEMORY,

by Allan PUNZALAN Isaac xv
Introduction to the 1979 Edition,
by Leonard Casper x x x i i i

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Foreword: My Lost Country,

by Jessica Hagedorn i x

Preface to the 1979 Edition x l i

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Immigr ation Blues 3

Scent of Apples 21

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And Beyond, More Walls 30

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The Hurt Men 38

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Manila House 48

A Peculiar Rustling 58
Of Other Deaths 75

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Nightclub 68

Lonely in the Autumn Evening 82

For These Ruins 98
Letter: The Far away Summer 108
The Contender 129
Quicker with Arrows 140
Footnote to a Laundry List 168

The Day the Dancers Came 113

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The Door 86

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FOREWORD
M Y LO S T C O U N T R Y

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Jessica Hagedorn

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San Francisco, circa 1967. We are a restless, homesick pair, my mother

and I. Ensconced in a gloomy flat, we are trying desperately to
adjust to a new world and act like everythings fine. But there are
visible chinks in our armor. At least once a year and no matter
how little money we have, my mother finds a way to go back to
Manila and visit everyone and everything weve left behind. She
just cant seem to let go. I, on the other hand, stay put and find my
solace in reading books and writing sappy poetry. No way am I
going back or admitting that I miss anyone or anything. Weve
been in America for only four years, but the Philippines and my
beloved Manila are like a distant planet. Ive decided its best to
forget and deny.
During one of her trips back to Manila, my mother comes
across The Day the Dancers Came, a collection of stories by one Bienvenido N. Santos, in a local bookstore. Intrigued by the books
evocative title and bright yellow cover, she decides to buy the
book as a gift for me.
* * *
Reading those stories was an eye-opening experience. My education in the Philippines was of the convent-school variety, overwrought and colonial. We were taught the literature of Longfellow, Kipling, and their ilk, but nothing by Filipino writers. It was
as if they didnt exist. Ironically, it took emigrating to the United
States to shock me from my sleep.

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Though Bens stories are written from a male perspective (and

from the perspective of another generation, at that) they struck a
nerve. The isolation and homesick yearning felt by his characters
were easy for my teenage self to identify with. I, too, was conflicted about finding myself in America. I, too, felt lost and was
not sure where I really belonged.
Recurring characters like Ben, Teroy, Val, and Ambo in the
stories reminded me of the complicated men in my extended
familymen who were proud, wounded, fatalistic, often infuriatingly resigned. It didnt matter if these characters were impoverished farmers in rural Michigan or highly educated, dapper young men stuck in Washington, D.C., on a student visa. The
writer Bienvenido N. Santoswhoever he washad these guys
down, rendering vividly their insecurities and need to please,
their self-deprecating sense of humor, their pain and sorrow. I
was too young to fully comprehend what it meant to write with
empathy, but I knew Bienvenido N. Santos could teach me something about creating memorable Filipino characters.
Many of the stories I first encountered in The Day the Dancers
Came are reprised in Scent of Apples, whichin this timely new
editionresurrects the work of this largely forgotten master storyteller for another generation of readers. There is much pleasure
and insight to be found in this rich and satisfying collection. The
title story, Scent of Apples, is a classic, the language spare and
elegant, the observations keen. Against the backdrop of the Second World War, the narrator, an unnamed Filipino writer who
happens to be in the United States, is invited to speak to a college
crowd in Kalamazoo, Michigan. It appeared that they wanted
me to talk about my country; they wanted me to tell them things
about it because my country had become a lost country. Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked, Santos writes (22). The audience is made up primarily of women, except for one hardscrabble Filipino farmer named Celestino Fabia, who has driven thirty
arduous miles in a beat-up car to hear the narrator speak. Ive
seen no Filipino for so many years now, the humble farmer tells
our worldly narrator. So when I saw your name in the papers

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where it says you come from the Islands and that youre going to
talk, I come right away (21).
Scent of Apples breaks your heart in the quietest and subtlest of ways. But there are plenty of other Santos gems in this
collection: Immigration Blues, The Hurt Men, and the surprising, gritty Nightclub.
* * *
I met Bienvenido N. Santos when I was twenty-nine years old.
We were part of the Talk Story Writers Conference held at the
University of Hawaii in Manoa in 1978. The historic gathering
brought together younger writers like myself, Garrett Hongo,
Laureen Mar, Shawn Wong, and Oscar Pearanda with renowned
pioneers like Ben Santos, Toshio Mori, Wakako Yamauchi, and
N. V. M. Gonzalez. Talk Story was an incredible confluence and
collision of literary sensibilities, fraught with drama. Frank Chin
was invited but didnt come. Instead he sent an outraged manifesto, which someone read on his behalfmaybe Shawn Wong?
at the welcome session. Frank was on the warpath with Maxine
Hong Kingston, who was living in Hawaii at the time, had just
published The Woman Warrior to much acclaim, and was designated as the official host of our conference. I remember Maxines
unflappable demeanor while the manifesto was being read. Many
audience members began muttering, aghast at Frank Chins rude
behavior. Needless to say, it was an entertaining and culturally
significant moment, a bit of brilliant performance art, with Frank
Chin playing the role of agent provocateur. But where was Bienvenido N. Santos in all this?
I saw him in the audience, sitting next to his pal N. V. M. Gonzalez. The veteran Filipino writers watched and listened but remained above the fray. I remember going to Bens reading later
and working up the nerve to introduce myself. I probably said
something dumb like: Hi, Mr. Santos. I love your work. Im Jessica, a Filipino American writer. Meaning I lived here in the
United States, not over there. But why the hell did I need to say
that? I remember his amused smile, how he shook my hand and
said, Call me Ben.

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Youll note I keep calling him Ben, the name he preferred. In

his memoir, Memorys Fictions, Ben writes aboutamong many
thingsgrowing up in Tondo, his dream of becoming a poet, and
not being fond of his given name. Perhaps being saddled with a
name like Bienvenido Santos, which in Spanish means welcome
saints, was too ostentatious for this modest and unpretentious
man.
I feel lucky to have known him. And many years after meeting him, I was determined to include Ben Santos in Charlie Chan
Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction,
which I edited. It was a no-brainer, as far as I was concerned.
Bienvenido N. Santos was the quintessential immigration bluesman singing for all the stranded Filipino men in America: the
diligent pensionados, the melancholy exiles and expats. Men who
work hard, men who love the verbal joust, men who love to drink,
dance, gamble, and drink some more. Men who wax nostalgic
about the Philippines and the demure, purehearted women they
left behind. Lonely men who frequent seedy nightclubs where
white women agree to dance with them for a price. The dream of
a far-away Philippines and the specter of a brutal world war loom
large in their compelling, poignant stories.
* * *
The last time I saw Ben Santos in person was in New York City on
July 27, 1993. I had organized an impromptu despedida luncheon
in his honor at Woodys, a popular bistro in the West Village that
no longer exists. Ben, then an eighty-two-year-old widower and
somewhat fragile, was on his way back to the Philippineshis
other, sweeter home, as he called it. As I recall, he was traveling with one of his daughters. The luncheon was a festive,
lighthearted affair that went on for hours, with plenty of food,
wine, picture-taking, literary chismis, and laughter. Pinoy puns
and corny jokes flowed nonstop, mostly courtesy of Ben. Even in
his old age, Ben retained his playful sense of humor, especially
when there were women around. Young, old, fat, thin, smart, not
so smart, pretty, not so pretty: none of it mattered. Ben was a born
flirt and loved us all.

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A photograph exists somewhere of that memorable gathering

twenty-two years ago. I cant remember who took the picture,
but I do remember the lively group of Fil-Am writers and artists who were there: Han Ong, Ching Valdes-Aran, Luis Francia,
Noel and Angel Velasco-Shaw, Ramon Hodel, Ninotchka Rosca.
We stood on either side of Ben, smiling brightly for the camera.
Ben remained seated at the head of the table, delighted to be at the
center of all the fuss. The moment was bittersweet. There was a
sensefor me, anywaythat we would never see him again. And
in fact, Ben would die three years later, on January 7, 1996, at his
family home at the foot of the volcano Mount Mayon. His work
had always grappled in one way or another with home and loss,
with memory and acute feelings of displacement. So very Filipino. About Bens passing in the shadow of that active volcano, I
remember thinking at the time: How romantic, how perfect, how
Ben.
* * *
New York City, 2014. Books by Bienvenido N. Santos on my
shelf: You Lovely People, The Day The Dancers Came, The Man Who
(Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor, Memorys Fictions, Scent of
Apples. All the books were published in the Philippines except
for Scent of Apples, which was first published by the University of
Washington Press in 1979.
All but one of the Santos books on my shelf were gifts from Ben
himself. To give you an idea of his playful and sweet personality,
here are some of his inscriptions (reproduced exactly as he wrote
them):

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With all my love, or whats left of it ...

(New York City, July 27, 1993)

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Dear Jessica, Heres hoping youd be everything you

want to become, and in any languagePilipino or
Croatiandats a lot!
(Hawaii, June 23, 1978)

xivForeword
For a dear friend ... shortly before leaving for the
other, sweeter home ... as a token of nothing much and
everything memorable for which there are no words.
(Naga City, Philippines, September 22, 1993)

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Introduction to the 2015 Edition

FOOTNOTE TO MEMORY

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Allan Punzalan Isaac

What keeps us living on like this from day to day, from loveless kiss

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to loveless kiss, from venomed touch to venomed touch. Thrill of the

gaming table, what keeps us alive, thrill of a womans arms, sight of

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her body, sharp fleeting moments of dying.

Bienvenido N. Santos, The Door

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But the story became many stories, growing bigger and uncontrol-

lable, and many times I would sit and begin as I am beginning now.
But beginning is always.

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Bienvenido N. Santos, personal papers

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Gathered in a Spanish-themed caf in old Manila, longtime friends and I

were talking about Mang Benas his students and friends affectionately referred to him, using the Tagalog honorific. One
recalled a writing class back in the early 1990s in which Santos
was a guest speaker: I remember him saying, Dont kill your
characters. The greatest pain you can inflict on your characters is
to let them live.1 What strikes the reader in the now-canonical
short-story collection Scent of Applesthe 1979 collection that is
Santoss only book published in the United States, created from
works spanning different eras, from the 1940s to the 1970sis
the refusal of easy closure. Death and decay are all around the
charactersFilipinos from all social classes living, working, and

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dying in the Midwest and on the East Coastbut no protagonist

enjoys a proper ending, certainly not the propriety of death. By
surviving, characters must endure to mark time, make memories,
and, worse, make demands on readers.
In these quiet, laconic stories, Bienvenido Santoss characters
inhabit the dangerous kiss and touch and the erotic thrill and
sights of longing. These fleeting but sensory-filled moments of
dying have undergirded the power of Santoss writing since he
first published in the Philippines, in the 1930s, when the islands
were still U.S. territory and Filipinos were American nationals. Each of the sixteen short stories collected in Scent of Apples
grounds the reader in the American landscape during the war
years and the Cold War era. At the same time, Santos manages
to lead the reader to an equally real alternate landscape zealously kept by each character.2 He points us to the solitary pathos
defining the character, only to look away politely to let us linger
uncomfortably a bit longer.
Although he was cited as one of the first Filipino American
writers, alongside Carlos Bulosan, Santos suggested in a 1981 interview: I want to be called a Filipino writer writing in English.3
The borders between Filipino English and Filipino American literary tradition are as fraught as the borders between the Philippines and the United Statesblurred borders forged out of the
violent history of war, occupation, colonialism, forced incorporation, and a vexed friendship between the two nations. Santos was
born and educated during the years the Philippines spent under
U.S. administration (18981946), which is also the period when he
began publishing. He loved the sound of English in books filled
with beautiful sounds, he said in the same interview, recalling
the days of his youth when he would walk to the National Library in Manila. Like Bulosan, he grew up in poverty and left
for the United States as a young man. But unlike Bulosan, who
had a rural past and made a West Coast sojourn, Santos emerged
out of the inner-city slums of Manila and entered the mainland
United States as a privileged, if impecunious, student, attending
elite institutions of higher education in the Midwest and on the
East Coast.

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Bienvenido Santos was born in 1911 in Tondo, Manila, which

appears in his stories as Sulucanin Tagalog, literally his corner of the world. Mang Ben was a miracle child, born twentythree years after his older brother. Santos never stopped moving:
he lived and worked intermittently in the United States from 1941
to the 1980s, returning to the Philippines between those interludes.4 Leaving Tondo in 1931, Santos attended the University of
the Philippines, the premier state university set up by the American administration in 1908, the same decade other U.S. colonial
universities were established: the University of Puerto Rico (1903)
and University of Hawaii (1907). He and his wife, Beatriz, would
find a new home a couple of years later in the province of Albay in
the Bicol region of Luzon Island, at the foot of the perfectly coneshaped volcano Mount Mayon. This idyllic setting was to become
the backdrop for many stories, including his first two novels, The
Volcano (1965) and Villa Magdalena (1965).
He first left the tropical archipelago in 1941, as a pensionado,
a scholarship student sponsored by the Philippine Commonwealth, to specialize in the teaching of English; he did graduate
work at the University of Illinois and then at Columbia and Harvard. The outbreak of war forced him and other pensionados to
remain in the United States, unable to reunite or communicate
with their families in the Philippines, which was by then occupied by Japanese imperial forces. Many of these students, including Santos, were called to serve the Philippine government-inexile in Washington, D.C. As Americans fought alongside Filipinos in the Pacific theater, the War Department, under the auspices
of the American Association of Teachers Colleges, sent Santos on
a speaking tour across the United States. He traveled the country,
talking about the Philippines, where many husbands, sons, and
brothers of those who had never heard of the archipelago were
fighting the Japanese. Many of Santoss stories published in the
Philippines were set in Chicago, D.C., and New York as a result
of these travels.
In January 1946, Santos was able to return to the Philippines.
He did not come back to the United States until 1958, when successive grants allowed him, as a Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and

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Iowa Literary Foundation Fellow, to attend the University of Iowas Writers Workshop. Unlike his past state-sponsored travels,
these cultural grants gave him the opportunity to finish writing
his first novels. He returned to the Philippines in 1961, holding
various posts as a high-ranking administrator at the University of
Nueva Caceres in Bicol. For his writing he received the Republic
Cultural Heritage Award in Literature from the Philippine government in 1965. However, he would go back to the University of
Iowa twice more, in 1966 and in 1970.
Santos planned to stay at his forever home at the foot of
Mount Mayon, but the declaration of martial law by the U.S.backed Marcos regime in 1972 made it difficult for him to consider a return home: one of his novels, The Praying Man, had
criticized Philippine corruption. The book was refused publication by the Marcos government. (It was, however, published in
the Philippines years later, in 1982.) Scrambling for work, he and
his wife, as an academic couple already in their sixties, settled at
Wichita State University in 1973, where Santos took a post as distinguished writer in residence. Three years later he became a U.S.
citizen in anticipation of his eventual return to the Philippines.
He did return in 1982, with much fanfare, having published, in
1979, the critically acclaimed Scent of Apples, winner of the 1980
American Book Award. This Philippine homecoming was bittersweet, however, because he had come to bury his beloved wife,
Beatriz, his dearest Aquing as he addressed her in his letters.
After retirement, he became a visiting writer and artist at De La
Salle University in Manila, where a museum with his papers has
since been established and a creative writing center named in his
honor. Santos died in 1996.
Santoss peripatetic life from the 1940s to the 1980s traced the
ever-changing geographic outlines of Philippine America, and
this is reflected in the stories collected here. The stories also cover
a good portion of Santoss publishing career since the 1940s, and
so they bear signs of the evolving landscapes of, and blurred borders between, the United States and the Philippines. During this
period the term Filipino American was redefined many times, re-

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flecting the shift from an imperial to a neocolonial relationship

between the two nations. Santos was witness to the changes and
experienced the overlapping categories of Filipinos status under
various economic and political conditions: feudalism, U.S. colonialism, neocolonialism, corporate capitalism, and conjugal dictatorship. As fellow travelers, readers across generations in both
the Philippines and the United States have followed Santoss elusive character, the collective Pinoy in America, tracing his sociohistorical permutations as pensionado, student, teacher, worker,
government bureaucrat, taxi driver, porter, farmer, landed elite,
immigrant, and exile.
Scent of Apples was first published by the University of Washington Press in 1979, at the tail end of the civil rights movement
and at the advent of multiculturalism. The collection compiled,
for an American audience, stories from two previous collections
published in the PhilippinesYou Lovely People (1955) and The Day
the Dancers Came (1967)as well as two previously uncollected
stories, including the opening story, Immigration Blues (1977).
Sol Solberg of the University of Washington had introduced Santoss work to Marilyn Waesche, then an editor at the university
press. (Solberg would later write Introduction to Filipino American Literature, part of the 1983 reissue of the pioneering pan
Asian American literary anthology Aiiieeeee!, originally published
in 1974.)
In the summer of 1976, when Waesche turned her attention to
Santoss work, Americans had barely recovered from the Vietnam
War, which had ended with the fall of Saigon in 1975. The term
Asian American was not yet a decade old, having emerged from
the ethnic-studies and antiwar movements of the late 1960s. The
ethnic studies movement had been led by an interracial coalition
of college students and community activists demanding not only
increased access to higher education but also the development
of curricula that included the often overlooked cultures and social histories of Americans of color. In a letter to Santos, Waesche
commented on the importance of Santoss writing to the growing
Asian American community. Asian America had seen a dramatic

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rise in its numbers as a result of the Immigration and Nationality

Act of 1965, which banned the use of the national-origins quota
and race as a consideration for entry into the United States, a quota
that had severely limited immigration from Asia since 1924. This
restriction was replaced by a U.S. preference for immigrants with
certain occupations and by an emphasis on family reunification.
In this historical light, readers today find in Santoss works emergent cultural sensibilities and possibilitieswritten as they were
before terms such as multiculturalism and diversity had become
commonplace and depoliticized as market segments and were no
longer considered to be evolving critiques of institutions.
A few stories in the collection, including the title story, are often anthologized or used in high school and college curricula to
illustrate pre-civil-rights racism against brown foreigners who
were in fact American nationals. These very American outsiders
appeared as part of the American landscape because a new U.S.
empire had claimed seven thousand, one hundred islands for its
own (18981946) after the brief, three-month Spanish-American
War (1898) and the protracted Philippine-American War (1899
1902) that had taken the lives of a hundred thousand Filipinos,
by conservative estimates. Inhabitants of the newly colonized islands were brought to the U.S. mainland as laborers (19061934)
after other Asian groups had been barred from entering. Still
other Filipinos came as university students (pensionados) starting in 1904, funded and sent to the mainland by the colonial
government, which regarded them as future leaders and colonial
bureaucrats of a nation-state as yet unrealized. As labor substitutes or as citizens of a nation deferred, Filipinos (already Americans) were colonial subjects in the greater American scheme and
storyone not of their makingwho had already incorporated
the mainland United States and its culture into their imaginations. These contingencies of history and colonial policy brought
into existence different types of Filipinosvoluntary and forced
exilesmapped along ten thousand miles, from Manila across
the Pacific to New York, and over one hundred years of Philippine America.

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Leonard Casper observes, in the introduction to the 1979 edition, that Santos was less concerned with history perceived as
ocean current or successive waves, than with culture as an entire
archipelago of diverse islands in that stream (xv; page xxxix in
this edition). As ad hoc colonial policies created multiple Filipino
subjects across the U.S. empire, the reach of the Philippine archipelago and its inhabitants extended beyond their Southeast Asian
corner of the world to Hawaii and Alaska, and to Boston and New
York. Todays readers will recognize the scope of Filipino migration, which has widened to include virtually every corner of the
planet. Well into the twenty-first century, the reach of the archipelago continues to expand and includes labor migration to Europe,
the Middle East, the rest of Asia, and back again. Thus we might
understand Santoss collection as having begun to tell the tales of
concurrent and episodic Filipino histories and identities in the diaspora. Contemporary Filipino American writers such as Jessica
Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Eric Gamalinda, Miguel Syjuco,
Gina Apostol, and Sabina Murraymany of whom were born and
raised in the Philippines and have lived there intermittently, as
peripatetic as Santos wascontinue to explore this complex landscape of layered and disrupted histories that forge convergences
and variants of Filipino and American lives and deaths. These
works of fiction record emergent and varied Filipino cultures, as
Casper asserts, but also map out Filipino movements and transformative identities figured as as an entire archipelago of diverse
islands inhabiting a historical stream that has no clear origin
or endpoint. Political and sociohistorical conditions of migration
and return (often, failed returns) shape storytelling, turning it
into an act of memory and forgetting designed to recover, even
conjure, lives and deaths out of the imagination.
Speaking about the craft of fiction: in 1985, Santos likened creative writers to magicians, because out of our imagination we
create a world that was not there before, in the same way that a
magician would create something out of nothing.5 In the shortstory genre, Santos offers lives always already in decline. His
stories are deceptively simple. They are character driven, tracing

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changes in emotional landscapes. However, these changes do not

add up to a bildungsroman, or progressive coming-of-age narrative, that can provide closure to the characters, given the divide
between the inner and outer lives of his boys. For example, Santos describes the hurt men of his stories: Most of us boys kept
a smarting hurt beneath our brown skin, a personal tragedy of
the war zealously kept, as we walked the streets of the big cities
of America, seemingly gay, and uncaring; eager for friendship,
grateful for a kind word, the understanding look, the touch of
love (The Hurt Men, 44).
Disrupted by war, distance, or circumstances, some lives and
relationships disappear from sight and are rendered impossible;
and others, by necessity, emerge through desire for transitory
connections. Characters mourn and shed parts of themselves in
order to continue living with the loss. What Santos offers in his
stories is the obverse of the bildungsroman: a continual paring
down of character to the point of irrecoverability. However, these
physical movements and emotional displacements not only end
many stories abruptly but also challenge characters to begin others. The tentative or even transitory relationships at this point
of irrecoverable loss raise more existential questions about life
choices, intimacy, and how characters await death, players all in
a waiting game they ultimately are bound to lose.6

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* * *
The opening story, Immigration Blues, which won the New Letters Fiction Award in 1977, features two people from seemingly
different historical eras coming together in a marriage of convenience. Two sisters, Mrs. Zafra and her older sister, Monica,
visit Alipio Palma, a Pinoy old-timer recently widowed and recovering from a car accident that had happened a year before and
left him with limited control of his legs. Mrs. Zafra, a more recent migrant, is married to another old-timer, whom Alipio knew
when both were young men. Alipio extends his hospitality and
plays the gay host, but this is not simply a social visit. Monica has
overstayed her tourist visa and will be deported in a few days
unless she is quickly married to an American citizen. The sisters

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know all about Alipios recent hospital stay and the fact that his
now-deceased wife had married him for citizenship purposes. A
silent crisis between the two sisters ensues when Monica loses
her nerve, at which point Mrs. Zafra bursts out with the real reason for their visit.
On the surface, Immigration Blues relates the troubles of two
generations of Filipinos at the margins of society, the older one
needing care in his dotage and the younger one hoping to avoid
deportation. Because the delicate negotiation has to be framed as
a mutually beneficial relationship rather than simply a transaction, much of the story is about the art of polite diversion and
subterfuge, designed to avoid the unseemly discussion of crass
utilitarianism. Yet, national borders having shifted between the
two generations, such unseemliness is necessitated. The older
American national had become a permanent resident, then
a U.S. citizen after Philippine independence in 1946, and the two
sisters had arrived a generation later as foreigners. The historical
changes in the relationship between the U.S. mainland and the
Philippines had constructed these episodic identities of the older
Filipino and the sisters, the former most likely as a laborer in the
canneries and agricultural fields of California and the latter two
as tourists or new immigrants after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.
If we understand the blues in the title as being less about
the plaintive note and more about the musical form, Immigration Blues is also about improvisation in the call-and-response
between the two generations. Rather than seeing these characters as pitiable figures forced to use each other out of desperation,
Santos plays out the complexities in how manners, pragmatics,
and fantasies come together to create an alternative household
for Filipinos on the margins. The margins are not simply sites of
abject invisibility but also vibrant sites of reinvention, sociality,
and creativity for migrants.
After the revelation, Mrs. Zafra leaves Alipio and her sister
alone and goes out for groceries, returning after a long while
to speak to them in Filipino, not English, for the first time: Co-

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musta? Santos writes, The one word question seemed to mean

much more than How are you? or How has it been? (20). With
the question asked in another, shared language from home,
Mrs. Zafra thus begins a new refrain for the storys conclusion as
well as for the lives of Monica and Alipio. The intervening events
between Alipio calling Mrs. Zafra back and her loaded question
upon her return remain unnarrated. The reader can only infer
what might have transpired. Perhaps those moments gave Alipio
and Monica time to perform a semblance of courtship and to negotiate for themselves the terms of a legal, companionate relationship acceptable to each of them and, at least on the surface, to immigration officials. Alipio, in his twilight years, watches Monica
in the end to be sure she wont lose her way(20) as she carries
the groceries to the kitchen. The emotional and relational shift
is signaled only by the shift in language, mood, and the much
more that lies between the two languages. The blue note might
signify a plaintive sentiment for each party, but two sets of memories and desires have had to improvise and reshape each other to
produce an agreeable though not ideal outcome.
This story of precarious American subjects dislocated through
the shifting national borders between the United States and the
Philippines, one a potential deportee and the other an aging citizen, reveals a long and widespread history of imagining living
arrangements beyond procreation and heterosexual reproduction
of the nuclear family. Santos touches upon a challenge that many
citizens and migrants alike face today: how to transform, recognize, and create intimacies at the margins in order to survive. Both
Alipio and Monica find alternative moorings, however imperfect,
for their desires: Monica was in search of a new home, and Alipio
was in search of a home for his fading years and memories.
Many of Santoss old-timers articulate the unspoken anxieties
of the newcomers, who fear not only that they have been forgotten but also that what little hope they had left, even as fantasy,
has been destroyed or forgotten because of times passing. When
Ambo, an old-timer and recurring character in the collection, announces Nanoys death in Of Other Deaths, one of the young

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men, Teroy, exclaims in amazement: Why do I keep forgetting

that? said Teroy as though talking to himself. Yes we can also
die in America, he added as though it were a brilliant idea (80).
It had never occurred to Teroy that one could map not only Filipinos lives in America but also their deaths, and that return itself
might not be an option. In one way, exile is not so much about
where ones life belongs as about asking whom ones death belongs to in the end. Thus, Ambo laments in Lonely in the Autumn Evening not simply the loss of home but also the loss of a
resting place for his lifes memories:

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But I keep thinking of home, Ben. How would they

know out there of our passing? Would we come to them
in a dream, speak to them out of a cloud, and tell them
goodbye, we have just passed away? No? Then perhaps,
suddenly in the midst of a days work on the farm, or
silent in the old wooden house by the sea, our name
would mingle with their thoughts. Or perhaps it would
seem as though someone passed by and he looked like
us, a remembered movement of the head, a manner of
walking, or a flash of likeness in a strangers face. (83)

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Shall ones life and death be part of a greater collective story out
there even if only as a possible moment or passing memory? Or
shall it simply disappear?
In his stories, Santos captures moments and their uncomfortable duration as metonyms for displacement and solitude. He
writes in For These Ruins: And moments. Graduation time and
you, looking around for someone to shake your hand; Christmas
in far-off places; New Years eve without music and the tinkle of
ice on glass or wine drops staining white table linen (99). The
poignant details Santos leaves for the reader demand a provisional investment of meaning, but these moments and meanings
do not accrue toward neat closure. Entrusted with the image of
the characters unacknowledged pain, readers linger upon these
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as they fade into the past. Memory itself is unfaithful, as Santos

himself admits by naming his own autobiography Memorys Fictions. Memory, he says, fictionizes a lot, but the fiction makes
whole that momentary fragment.7
Scent of Apples, the title story, tells of another call-and-response between past and present, between another Filipino oldtimer and a privileged representative of the Philippine government in exile. In the story, set during World War II, the young Filipino narrator is giving a talk about the Philippines to an American college crowd, mostly women in Kalamazoo, Michigan (22).
They are concerned about their boys in the Pacific, young boys
all, hardly men, thinking of harvest moons and smell of forest
fire. Celestino Fabia, just a Filipino farmer as he called himself (21), has driven thirty miles on a cold October night just to
hear the narrator speak, because he has seen no Filipino for so
many years. Fabia stands up to ask, Are our Filipino women
the same like they were twenty years ago?(22) Literary critic Denise Cruz has astutely signaled how the repeated anxieties over
transpacific women in this and much of Santoss prose reflect
how the role and place of Filipina women have shifted alongside
the political and social reconfiguration of the emerging postcolonial nation.8 The narrator says in response to Fabias public
question that the change in the Filipinas has been on the outside
only, that inside, here, pointing to the heart, they are the same
as they were twenty years ago (23). Fabio later invites the narrator to come visit for dinner before he leaves, so that his white
American wife and mestizo son can see a first class Filipino.
At the modest shanty, the narrator smells the strong aroma of
apples ripening in storage throughout dinner. While scent permeates the story, evoking the fine line between ripening and rotting, apples are also a powerful symbol for the American colonial.
The apple is the mythical nontropical fruit by which he learned
the colonizers alphabet: A is for apple, the pedagogic refrain
goes. In lands without apple trees, the singing and the gold (21),
the narrator, like many Filipinos, encountered American English
through this nonnative fruit, the disciplinary entry to power and

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the colonial bureaucracy. Critic Victor Bascara has explored how

Santoss early stories offer a record of Philippine-U.S. relations in
transition from formal colonialism to neocolonialism. Scent of
Apples and the heart-wrenching The Day the Dancers Came,
according to Bascara, are twin stories written from the viewpoint
of visitor and host, respectively, and reveal their desire to make a
connection while also pointing to their differences at this historical juncture.9 Ruth, the white American wife, serves the apples
to the narrator, her husband, and her mestizo son. No longer an
abstraction, the apples, reduced to a meager commodity for the
farmer, are rotting and would soon be rendered worthless. For
the narrator as guest, the new American family enables him to
experience the apple as a physical sensationtaste, smell, and
touch. The Filipino old-timer has created a different trajectory,
one that sustains another dream, a challenging one to be sure but
not necessarily a substitute for a lost original or even a colonial
one.
Taking his leave of Fabia later that evening, the narrator offers
to visit the mans hometown upon his return home. Fabia refuses
the offer, saying, But, you see, nobody would remember me
now (29). Perhaps in that refusal of the sentimental gesture, Fabia signals that the evening together was enough; it has allowed
him to acknowledge a shared loss with someone who could connect past and present, the Philippines and America. Furthermore,
while Fabia might have been quite sure of his social death back
home, the evening with the narrator has guaranteed that at least
one person would remember me as he was now, in his new life.
Thus, his lifes memories are entrusted not to a faraway place already lost to him but to a living person. At issue, I suggest further,
is not just Fabias fantasy homecoming but also the narrators desire to connect with the older Filipino, given the narrators own
inability to return home because of the war. Fabias story does not
even depend on the narrators answer to the question about the
past at all. The diplomatic answer in response to the earlier question about an absent female figure was a compromise designed to
maintain what the narrator thought would be a nationalistic con-

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nection between the two generations. The Filipina woman from

twenty years before is an impossible and fantastic figure, as faded
as the picture on the mantle, of a woman that Fabia never knew
in the first place.
Unlike the confidence with which the narrator answered the
question in publicI knew what I was going to say (23)the
narrators equally extemporaneous offer in the end is filled with
doubts about his own return: One of these days, very soon, I
hope, Ill be going home (29) Three anxious qualifications stand
in the way of his return home. After all, the war was still on begins the first-person narrative and is the backdrop of the generational encounter. The narrators fear is that, as in the case of Fabia,
no one will remember him in his absence, because his loved ones
might not even be alive in the occupied and war-torn country. His
offer is less about remembering Fabia to his hometown, and more
about the narrators desire to proclaim his own wish to return
home. This would explain his abrupt and sentimental message
after the silent drive home: Tell Ruth and Roger, I said, I love
them. Most likely, like others stranded by the war, the narrator
was not afforded the opportunity to say this to his own family,
because the war cut off all communication.10 His visit with Fabias
family becomes the narrators substitute but short-lived homecoming, knowing, as he does, that the war has brought devastating changes back home.
In contrast to the previous evening, when he fulfilled his bureaucratic function on a tour as the abstract representative of an
unknown archipelago (that is, unknown to most of his American
audience) somewhere in the war-torn Pacific, the evening with
Fabias family acknowledges the narrators presence, place, and
inner life. The sense and sensations offered to the narrator at the
dinner make communality and home immediate. The newly arrived narrator needs Fabia and his very real though precarious
family life more than Fabia needs his recognition. The emotional
shift in the end, when the narrator could hardly see Fabias face
(29), begins to strip the narrator of his connection to Fabias world
and his temporary place in it. The lonely and desperate narrator

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gripped Fabias extended hand, the touch replacing sight, as if

to hold on to a memory, only to be left alone in the cold night
waving back into the darkness. But the old-timer, for whom
autumns a lovely season has learned to live with ambivalence
both vibrance and death, ripeness and decay: The trees are getting ready to die, and they show their colors, proud-like (25).
In Of Other Deaths, when entreated by his friends to write
about his tour of the United States as a representative speaker,
in order to recover old-timers lives and deaths, Ben the narrator says, I have nothing to tell, really. What I remember most
will not make a book; it will not even make a song, or a poem. It
will be all sensation, all feeling (77). Many critics have remarked
on the theme of the alienation and displacement of hurt men
in Santoss stories, men who are forgotten children of long lost
mothers and fathers, ... grown up men without childhood, bastards of an indifferent country (The Door, 96).11 Displacement
is not simply an abstraction. It is corporeal: bodily sensations of
yearning, fleeting connections, and even scents. Deferring desire
and the return home, the exiles body endures to mark time; the
exile can hope at best to make a temporary, even if inconvenient,
place for himself and his memories.
Often bodies, and memories too, cease to cooperate as stable
markers of identity in the stories. In And Beyond, More Walls,
when Ben the narrator reunites with his cousin, once a young
violinist who had come to America years before him, he sees
his handsthese had aged, unlike his face, they had died long
ago (36). Back in my own room, the narrator mourns, I felt
as if someone I knew had died, and in the darkness I was missing him. He mourns not Manuels death but his past dreams,
the time when, as Manuel said, all that mattered was I wanted
to play. In Letter: The Faraway Summer, Pablo, after a snub
by a doctor whom he had known in the United States, ponders
the idea of publishing an obituary to announce the death of the
friend he once knew who had died without memories (112).
Senses fade in The Contender, as Bernie Canlas slowly loses
his sight while waiting in his room for the next visitor and the

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next act of kindness. Fil Acayan of The Day the Dancers Came
loses even his substitute for memory, the sounds of the dancers in
his magic sound mirror. What he is left with is a fading away
into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming,
senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the
background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell (127).
Through Ambo, in The Door, Santos asks the reader to stop
to mark time with the characters: Oh, the stories I can tell you,
if you but have the time to listen, but you are going away. Everybody is going some place. They are all in a hurry, they will not
listen to me (86). These memories in search of a home are the
momentary connections between characters who inhabit different times, places, and rhythms within the larger Filipino American archipelago. Santos offers interlinked sensations that map the
time and place of deferred desires. In each story, a realization of
something lost becomes palpable, but it also becomes the point of
connection between characters, as well as between narrator and
reader. Santos conjures Ben and Ambo from different historical
moments as narrators in order to guide us to that suspended blue
note. He leaves us to linger and hear the call for our response, to
take part in an ephemeral performance. Narrator, character, and
reader all dwell in, and dwell upon, that fleeting moment of dyingreal and figurativethat also marks our ultimate disconnection from each other.

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Notes

I am grateful to Gary C. Devilles of Ateneo de Manila University for sharing this story. My gratitude to Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, Shirley O. Lua of De La Salle University, as well as Lito B. Zulueta and Ferdinand M. Lopez, both of the University of Santo Tomas, for their generosity
in sharing memories of Mang Ben and thoughts about his work. Many
thanks to Dr. Lua for the welcome to, and use of, the Bienvenido Santos
Museum and papers at De La Salle University. My gratitude to my research
assistants, Camille Ungco and Rachel Landingin.
Santos, The Hurt Men, 44.

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Santos quoted from an interview by Linda Ogawa Ramirez, Focus: Author in Love with the Sound of English, Philippine News, June 3-9, 1981.
His mother, Santos reported, prayed to the Virgin of Antipolo so that she
4
might have another child at her advanced age. Because his birth had been
dedicated to the Virgin, Santos, and sometimes one of his daughters in his
stead, made pilgrimages to the church of the Virgin in Manila throughout
his adult life. The Virgin of Antipolo is also known as Our Lady of Peace
and Good Voyage (Nuestra Seora de la paz y buen viaje). Since arriving in
the Philippines from Mexico in 1626, the figure has had an illustrious history, making several trips across the Pacific to the Americas. The Virgin of
Antipolo also served as the patron saint of the Manila galleon that served
the trade route between Acapulco and Manila for over two centuries. Filipinos traditionally make a pilgrimage up to the shrine in the mountain to
ask for her blessing for a good trip. And travel Santos did.
Leonor Aureus Briscoe, Ben on Ben: Conversations with Bienvenido Santos
5
(Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2011), 152.
Bienvenido Santos, Pilipino Old Timers: Fact and Fiction, Amerasia 9, no.
6
2 (1982): 90.
7 Briscoe, Ben on Ben, 150.
Denise Cruz, Pointing to the Heart: Transpacific Filipinas and the Ques8
tion of Cold War Philippines-U.S. Relations, American Quarterly 63, no. 1
(March 2011): 9.
Victor Bascara, Up from Benevolent Assimilation: At Home with the
9
Manongs of Bienvenido Santos, MELUS 20, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 65.
This interpretation is suggested in part by the pages of Santoss own anx10
ious, repeated, and continual letters to his wife and family at the outbreak
of the war in the Philippines, sent with little hope that the letters would
actually reach his family.
Those critics include the following: N. V. M Gonzalez and Oscar V. Cam11
pomanes (Filipino American Literature, in An Interethnic Companion to
Asian American Literature, ed. King-Kok Cheung [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997]); Maxine Hong Kingston (Precarious Lives, review of Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories, by Bienvenido N. Santos, New
York Times, May 4, 1980); and Paul B. Phelps (The Philippines: An Exiles
Dreams, Washington Post, April 20, 1980). Isagani Cruz, in his introduction to the 1991 edition of The Day the Dancers Came, challenged Philippine
readers to reconsider that volume, pointing out that, in 1967, we thought
that the book was just another book written by an exile about exile. (Bienvenido N. Santos, The Day the Dancers Came: Selected Prose Works [Manila:
Bookmark, 1991, no page number.])

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