America Is in the Heart

by Carlos Bulosan

  The meeting was successful; a resolution was sent to Washington asking for the inclusion of Filipinos in the armed forces of the United States. Copies of the resolutions were sent to all Filipino organizations for endorsement; members of the delegation returned to their communities and campaigned. For once we were all working together; even those who had opposed our fight for citizenship were now wholeheartedly co-operating.

  I was waiting for this very moment; it was a signal of triumph. But it took a war and a great calamity in our country to bring us together. President Roosevelt signed a special proclamation giving Filipinos the right to join the armed forces of the United States. Filipino regiments were formed in the United States; similar units were also formed in Hawaii.

  CHAPTER XLVIII

  A week after the fall of Bataan a letter came from a small publisher. He wanted to publish an edition of my poems. Was it possible that I would have a book at last? Not quite sure if it was time for me to assemble my poems, I arranged and revised them in restaurants at night. I had stopped working because my right hand, the one smashed by the police patrol in Klamath Falls, was rapidly becoming paralyzed. I wrapped my hand tightly with a towel and wrote slowly, painfully, until the cold outside air came into the restaurant and stopped me.

  When the manuscript was finished, I sent it to the publisher. I began another assignment, a small anthology of contemporary Philippine poetry. My anxiety about my relatives in the Philippines dampened the excitement I would have felt at this notice of my literary work. Here was something I had been working for with great sacrifice, but the war had come to frustrate all feelings of fulfillment.

  When the bound copies of my first book of poems, Letter from America, arrived, I felt like shouting to the world. How long ago had it been that I had drunk a bottle of wine because I had discovered that I could write English?

  The book was a rush job and the binding was simple, but it was something that had grown out of my heart. I knew that I would not write the same way again. I had put certain things of myself in it: the days of pain and anguish, of starvation and fear; my hopes, desires, aspirations. All of myself in this little volume of poems—and I would never be like that self again.

  I put a copy of the book under my coat to keep it from the rain that had begun to fall, and went to Amado’s hotel. I hoped I would be able to thaw his anger, for ever since I had struck his face, I had been feeling a deep emptiness. But Amado was not in. I went to several places. I could not find him. I walked silently in the rain.

  I had written a book, but I had no one to share my happiness. The aching emptiness of our life in America came to me, and I was angry and sad and tragic. I was deep in memories. I could not feel the heavy rain any more. I walked to Temple Street slowly, scarcely knowing that my steps were moving in that direction. There I had always found companions. There on that narrowing island of despair was a ready crowd that I could reject or accept.

  My brother Amado was drinking beer with two girls. I went up to him, touched his hand and opened my mouth to speak, but I could say nothing. The girls looked up and offered me a glass. I sat with them, feeling the sharp corner of my book rubbing against my chest. I wanted to show it to my brother, but his silence came between us. Then one of the girls, thinking perhaps that I had a bottle of whisky under my coat, pulled at my arm. When she saw that it was only a book, her joyous anticipation vanished.

  “It’s a damned book,” she said.

  “Yes, it’s my book,” I said.

  “Ha-ha!” she laughed. “Poetry!” She began tearing out the pages and throwing them at my face.

  “Don’t do that, please!” I said, rising to take the book away from her.

  It was like tearing my heart apart. Amado suddenly grabbed the book from her and gave it to me. Then he got up and started beating her with his fists, cursing her.

  “Let my brother alone!” He struck her again. “Let him keep his poetry, you goddamned whore!”

  The girl fell on the floor. The other girl looked dully at her. I picked her up and gave her a glass of beer. She looked at me and began crying brokenly.

  “I just felt bad, that’s all,” she said. “I just felt bad. If you stay on in this lousy street you’ll be ruined. See what happened to me? I wanted to be an actress. I came from a nice family, a nice family in Baltimore. . . .”

  I put the remnants of the book under my coat and walked to the door. Amado got up to say something, but stopped and looked down in defeat. I thought his unforgettable left hand would be raised as in other times, in Mangusmana, Lompoc, and Bakersfield—but he filled a glass and gulped down the beer, closing his eyes. I saw only the long scar that wound to his wrist.

  * * *

  —

  A few days later, Amado came to my room with all his belongings.

  “I’m joining the navy, Carlos,” he said.

  “You are too sick to go,” I protested.

  “There is always the transport service,” he said.

  I took him to breakfast. Then we went to the station and waited for his train. I kept remembering when he had run away from our village. I kept remembering his last words. Now this was another parting, and perhaps there would be no return. He kept twirling his large thumbs. I looked at his thumbs again: flat on the top like a spatula, hard and cracked with toil. I doubled my fists inside my pocket.

  “I’m sorry that I was not able to help you,” I whispered to myself.

  “Did you say something, Carlos?” he said suddenly.

  “I think your train is ready,” I said.

  He got up and took my hand. He put something in it and ran to his bus. It was a little envelope that contained twenty-five dollars and a note. He had written:

  “I’m not as well-read as you are, but I know that a little volume of poetry can give something to the world. I could have striven to raise myself as you have done, but I came upon a crowd of men that destroyed all those possibilities. However, I’m glad that I remained what I am, because it will give you the chance to see your own brother in darkness; in fact, it will give you another chance to look at yourself when you were like me. My lostness in America will give you a reason to work harder for your ideals, because they are my ideals too.

  “I did not have a rich and easy life, but it was my own. I would like to live it over again. I’m sorry that there are people who hate and destroy in our time. I’m sorry that they kill. There is so much to do—if not for each other, for the world. I know this is not the last good-bye. But if I’ll not come back, I know that you will make me live again in your words.

  “I’m sorry that I can’t understand all that you are doing in America. But I’m sure that it’s for the good of us all. You are my brother, and that is why I know. Good-bye till we meet again, Carlos. . . .”

  At last in this war that had come upon us, we had found a release for our desires. One by one my friends left for the armed forces. When Amado had gone, Macario stopped working and walked the streets aimlessly for weeks, then joined the army the day Corregidor fell to the Japanese. We sat in his room the day he enlisted, remembering the Philippines. I reminded him of the time when he had read primers at the side of my sickbed, and he laughed when he recalled the story of Robinson Crusoe.

  “The world is an island,” he said again, remembering. “We are cast upon the sea of life hoping to land somewhere in the world. But there is only one island, and it is in the heart.”

  I felt again the same seriousness that I had seen in him years ago, when he and Felix and Nick had been trying to revive the publication of a little magazine. I was shy; even now that I had amassed a fair English vocabulary, I was still held down by the old awe and respect for my brother.

  I reminded him of the time when he was still a student in Lingayen and had come home for a visit. There was nothing to eat, so in the darkness of night we had gathered snails in the mud under the house.


  “We were poor,” he said.

  We walked to the station and waited for his bus.

  “Keep all my books intact because I’d like to come back,” he said. “I’m not going on a worldwide crusade to save democracy. I don’t want to talk about going away. I’m just doing my job, but however small it is, I’ll try to do my best. I think this is really the meaning of life: the extension of little things into the future so that they might be useful to other people.”

  I kept remembering the past. He was the last to go away from me, while I was the last to go away from our family.

  “Don’t fail to tell Nick to follow me soon,” he continued. “And say good-bye for me.” He got up suddenly and took my hand, pressing it affectionately. I could feel the roughness of his toil-worn hand; the toughness of his palm revealed more of himself than his words. I was ashamed of my little soft hand in his. Then, as though he remembered something of great importance, he gave me ten cents. “Don’t forget to give this to the Negro bootblack across from my hotel,” he said. “I forgot to pay him today.”

  He ran to the bus and climbed in quickly. I saw his face smiling in the window, before the bus drove away.

  I knew it was the end of our lives in America. I knew it was the end of our family. If I met him again, I would not be the same. He would not be the same, either. Our world was this one, but a new one was being born. We belonged to the old world of confusion; but in this other world—new, bright, promising—we would be unable to meet its demands.

  I walked toward my hotel. In my room, standing against the mirror, Macario had left a large envelope. I found two hundred dollars in it, a Social Security card, and a photograph of himself. I hurried to his hotel and packed his books. Then I went to the Negro bootblack across the street.

  “Is your name Larkin?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s my name,” he said.

  “My brother owes you ten cents for a shoeshine,” I explained. “He asked me to give it to you. He went to the army this morning.”

  He took the ten cents and looked at me.

  “Would you like to have a glass of beer with me?” he said.

  “All right.” I had felt a ring of sincerity in his voice. “There is a small place down the block.”

  He bought a glass of draught beer with the ten cents. He offered it to me when he had drunk half of it. I took the glass and drank the rest of the beer.

  “Well, I think I’m going now,” he said, giving me his hand. His hand, too, was like my brother’s—tough, large, toil-scarred. “I’m joining the navy tomorrow, so I guess this is good-bye. I know I’ll meet your brother again somewhere, because I got my dime without asking him. But if I don’t see him again, I’ll remember him every time I see the face of an American dime. Good-bye, friend!”

  I watched him go down the block. He stopped in a corner and looked around slowly and then skyward, as though he were committing it all to memory. He raised his hand and disappeared. I walked to my hotel filled with great loneliness.

  CHAPTER XLIX

  The next morning I put my brother Macario’s money in the bank, in his name, and went to the bus station. I wanted to catch the last crew of cannery workers in Portland.

  I looked out of the bus window. I wanted to shout good-bye to the Filipino pea pickers in the fields who stopped working when the bus came into view. How many times in the past had I done just that? They looked toward the highway and raised their hands. One of them, who looked like my brother Amado, took off his hat. The wind played in his hair. There was a sweet fragrance in the air.

  Then I heard bells ringing from the hills—like the bells that had tolled in the church tower when I had left Binalonan. I glanced out of the window again to look at the broad land I had dreamed so much about, only to discover with astonishment that the American earth was like a huge heart unfolding warmly to receive me. I felt it spreading through my being, warming me with its glowing reality. It came to me that no man—no one at all—could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land, digging my hands into the rich soil here and there, catching a freight to the north and to the south, seeking free meals in dingy gambling houses, reading a book that opened up worlds of heroic thoughts. It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines—something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become a part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment. I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever.

  Appendix: Selected Letters of Carlos Bulosan

  In his essay “Carlos Bulosan: Critique and Revolution,” internationally renowned Bulosan scholar E. San Juan, Jr., cites Dolores Feria as inaugurating a critical assessment of Carlos Bulosan’s writings during the 1950s and 1960s in the Philippines:

  [T]he real “angel” of Bulosan’s works is the late Dolores Feria, a lifelong friend of Bulosan, to whom all of us owe a great debt. Aside from several insightful commentaries on Bulosan, Feria edited the indispensable selection of Bulosan’s letters, Sound of Falling Light (1960); her effort to publicize his works and call attention to the plight of Bulosan’s compatriots remains unacknowledged and in fact unconscionably forgotten (285).

  Feria’s pioneering contributions to scholarship on Carlos Bulosan are documented in the 2016 anthology Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt: Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan. She paved the way for Bulosan’s retrieval by the Asian American movement and the Philippine national sovereignty movement—both of which led to the 1973 reprinting of America Is in the Heart by the University of Washington Press and the 1978 publication of a collection of short stories, The Philippines Is in the Heart, by New Day Publishers in Quezon City edited by E. San Juan, Jr.

  Sound of Falling Light is a collection of Bulosan’s private letters to his many associates including Dolores Feria. A large collection of uninventoried materials (letters, essays, and other writings) remained after Bulosan’s death in 1956. Sound of Falling Light reproduces a select portion of Bulosan’s correspondence to provide insight into “the collective experience of the Filipino intellectual in America and the interior history of a creative temperament, its unfoldment and death” (189). The collection of letters, divided into four sections, spans a period between 1937 and 1955—between the “period after Harriet Monroe’s . . . introduc[tion of] Bulosan’s first poems in Poetry Magazine” and the years prior to his untimely death.

  Bulosan’s letters are significant because they trace his development as a writer-activist. It was not unusual for Bulosan to use correspondence as an opportunity to outline and draft ideas for various writing projects (novels, short stories, poetry, drama, anthologies) or to theorize the role of the Filipino writer in movements for social transformation within the United States and the Philippines. Literary scholars Oscar Campomanes and Todd Gernes argue that Bulosan’s letter writing informs his approach to imaginative literature—to his generating an epistolary aesthetic with America Is in the Heart and other works. Asian American studies scholars Marilyn Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi have turned to Bulosan’s letters to contextualize their groundbreaking examination of FBI surveillance of Carlos Bulosan during the Cold War period. They observe how Bulosan sustained his passion for writing and his desire for social justice in spite of political repression. To be sure, the letters collected by Dolores Feria bear witness to the ways in which Bulosan occupied the intersection of literature and politics throughout his life as a Filipino writer in exile and revolt in the United States. His unwavering commitment to Filipino self-determination informed his art as well as his letters collected in Sound of Falling Light.

  * * *

  —

  These letters (written in Los Angeles,
New York, and Seattle) shed light on Bulosan’s process of writing America Is in the Heart and his literary communities within the United States and the Philippines. They encourage readers to understand America Is in the Heart in relation to Bulosan’s lifelong commitment to developing Philippine literature within the diaspora. The first two letters, written in Los Angeles in 1942, are addressed to Bulosan’s close friends—Dolores Feria (a white American) and her husband, Rodrigo Feria (a Filipino migrant who arrived on the West Coast in 1929). Bulosan mentions his drafting America Is in the Heart, his anticipation of a contract from Harcourt, Brace, and his enthusiasm for receiving support from literary agent Maxim Lieber. These two letters also touch on the challenge of finding love in the face of systemic racism. In “Writers and Exile: Carlos Bulosan and Dolores Stephens Feria” (a tribute to her parents and Bulosan), Monica Feria recalls how Bulosan thoughtfully made arrangements for Dolores and Rodrigo’s marriage in New Mexico in 1941 because of California’s antimiscegenation laws.

  SOUND OF FALLING LIGHT, PAGE 203

  CB TO DOLORES S. FERIA

  May (?) 1942

  Los Angeles, California

  Dear Dee:

  I have been thinking about your suggestion that I should look for a Pinoy for your friend, and I have come to the conclusion that I would like to meet her myself. I can say that she will not regret knowing me, because from me she will learn a thing or two about literature and the world, and she can meet people of her intellectual type through me. Now I am working on a manuscript which will be 600 pages long (America Is in the Heart) and my deadline for it is June 1st; but I get restless and lonely after a day’s work. I would like someone to call me once in a while, after a strenuous day’s work, or who could come talk to me when I get lonely. The life of a literary person is awfully lonely . . .