Penman for Monday, May 16, 2011
ON THE heels of Miguel Syjuco’s acclaimed Ilustrado comes another important breakthrough for Filipino fiction in the international market. Marivi Soliven Blanco, author of the bestselling Suddenly Stateside expat essays and the Spooky Mo horror stories and who’s now based in San Diego, California with her husband John, has sold her new novel, In the Service of Secrets, to Penguin Books. I’ve often complained about the lack of humor in our novels, despite the fact that we’re a funny people with a wicked comic nerve; well, here’s humor in spades.
When I visited with Marivi and John a couple of years ago, she was working on a novel for Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month, an annual global frenzy that’s surprisingly given birth to more than a few decent efforts), and Secrets came out of that initial push. The novel, says Marivi, involves a mail-order bride, but “begins in Manila in the 1960s and follows three generations of a family and its servants all the way through to the mid-'90s in San Francisco and Oakland. It runs along two parallel story tracks, and bounces back and forth between the Duarte-Guerrero clan and the Obejas sisters (their servants).” Pinoy readers should find many of its locales—UP, Malate, the Hotel Intercontinental, and Cubao—thoroughly if disconcertingly familiar. Here’s a brief excerpt from the book—which should come out next year—that Marivi was kind enough to allow me to share with Penman readers:
“Beverly—over here!” The Filipina Sweetheart manager waved from an armchair at the far end of the lobby. She could tell Carmelo was sizing her up as she approached, and wondered if he was ticking off the checklist he called her “pointers for self-improvement”: hair worn long and flowing; tasteful make-up; elegant jewelry; a dress, never pants, hem no longer than knee length; pedicured toenails; open sandals. That last bit had been hard to manage with the heavy downpour, but she had carried her sandals in a plastic bag and put them on in the taxi.
“Ano ba yan, may supot ka pang dala—why are you carrying that plastic bag?” Carmelo stood up, tilting his head as he looked her over. “Ah good naman, you remembered to pluck those eyebrows. Aren’t you glad I forced you to take that make-up tutorial at Shear Beauty Salon?”
“Opo Mr. Capulong,” Beverly blushed. The previous weekend Carmelo’s dear friend Esperanza Datung, the salon’s glamorous transsexual Aesthetic Directress, had used Beverly’s face as a blank palette for a dizzying array of shadows, creams, and rouges. After demonstrating how to use each cosmetic, Esperanza coaxed Beverly into buying it “for practice at home.” In two hours, Beverly spent a fourth of her month’s salary on a handful of beauty in matching pink jars. “Até Esperanza taught me everything I need to know about make-up.”
“Good, good. That’s why I insist all my girls see her before meeting the guests. Best investment you’ll ever make.” Carmelo put a finger under Beverly’s chin to lift it. “I see you’re using Esperanza’s fave lipstick: Maiden Mauve. Very nice, very nice.”
He glanced lower and frowned. “Next time wear a strapless bra with that bateau neckline, ha? Only certain women—yung mga mababa ang lipad, those low-flying doves –expose their underwear. None of my girls are like that.“ Carmelo straightened her blouse, tucking the straps underneath its rim. “Ayan!” He spread his hands like a magician presenting his latest illusion. “See how much prettier it looks when you display those lovely collarbones? Trust me, hija, I’ve been doing this forever. I know what works. Now, don’t be nervous when I introduce you to Mr. Stein. Just give him your best smile, yes? SMILE like your heart will explode through those pretty lips.”
Beverly smiled, in spite of the clammy chill numbing her bare toes, the gnawing emptiness of her belly, and the cramp between her shoulder blades that came from standing as beauty-queen-straight as Esperanza had directed. She had come this far to claim happiness, and by God she was going to smile, even if it killed her.
THE OTHER bright light in the expat literary firmament is Patria C. Rivera, or “Patty” when she was our colleague at the Economic Information Staff of the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) ages ago. Patty moved with her husband Joe and their four daughters to Canada in 1987 and have lived in Toronto since. While we knew her to be an outstanding journalist (Joe—now a retired lawyer—was also a talented playwright), no one knew, maybe not even Patty herself, that she was nursing a fine, keen poet within her, although she was already literarily inclined. She started as a junior reporter with Toronto's Catholic newspaper and rose up the ranks to become news editor. She now edits a magazine for the Canadian missions.
“One of the reasons why I wanted to come here was to follow and track Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, two of the world’s greatest story writers,” she says. “I used to read their stories from The New Yorker way back when we were still living in Quezon City. Had an inkling they were Canadian but didn’t know for sure until we arrived here. I’ve never met them in person yet but hope to someday.”
She reports that “The Toronto publishing industry is thriving, with titles appearing both in print and digitally. There is a hunger for good content, and readers are a mixed breed, because the city is very multicultural with more than 100 languages spoken, heard, and read.”
Today, Patria Rivera has two very well-received collections of poetry behind her. Her first, Puti/White, published by Frontenac House, was shortlisted for the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and was a co-winner of the 2007 Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry. She has also published The Bride Anthology, also by Frontenac House, and co-authored Weathering: An Exchange of Poems. Her poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff's Implicate me: short essays on reading contemporary poems. She has received fellowships from the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat Centre in Scotland.
Her third collection, Be, was launched last May 2 in Toronto. “It aims,” she says, “to seek out the human in an increasingly inhumane world, using micropoetic narratives to explore the insular and peculiar ways that language and emotion scour the surfaces of unknown depths. The mode could be tragic or comic, but my goal was to stretch the context of the most ordinary things into new shapes and meanings.”
Here’s a poem from Be, titled “Afterwards”:
Maybe because the mass of old trees
was not visible from the house
the only signs of life
flourished in the modest flower
of my imagination
The old house run-down and peeling
stirred uncomfortably like a restless bird
in the heat-exhausted sky
The minutes shut in their concentration
the table returning
to tree with my profuse admiration
Most of the melody would go
in the height of that stumbled-across summer
All the wrong shoes and sandals
the accepted offer of a ride
the abandoned furniture
Not even a fan or photographs
on the table to overcome my embarrassment
The hurts came
at night one after the other
not just along with the crazy mail
which did no harm
when the season changed
And we drank the evening lying
in that solitude united
by the full length of our denials
because unlike the tears
when the pilgrims reached their destination
afterwards the house opened inside
Mabuhay kayo, Marivi and Patty!