On Becoming Filipino : Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan

by Bulosan, Carlos; San Juan, Epifanio

• ISBN13: 9781566393102
• ISBN10: 1566393108
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-04-28
• Publisher: Temple Univ Pr

Summary

A companion volume to The Cry and the Dedication, this is the first extensive collection of Carlos Bulosan's short stories, essays, poetry, and correspondence. Bulosan's writings expound his mission to redefine the Filipino American experience and mark his growth as a writer. The pieces included here reveal how his sensibility, largely shaped by the political circumstances of the 1930s up to the 1950s, articulates the struggles and hopes for equality and justice for Filipinos. He projects a "new world order" liberated from materialist greed, bigoted nativism, racist oppression, and capitalist exploitation. As E. San Juan explains in his Introduction, Bulosan's writings "help us to understand the powerlessness and invisibility of being labeled a Filipino in post Cold War America." Author note: Born in 1911 in the Philippines to a peasant family, Carlos Bulosan was one of the first wave of Filipino immigrants to come to the United States in the 1930s. After several arduous years as a farmworker in California, Bulosan became involved with radical intellectuals and started editing the workers' magazine The New Tide.While hospitalized for three years for tuberculosis and kidney problems, Bulosan began writing poetry and short stories. Despite having little formal education, he saw his talent for writing as a means to give a voice to Filipino struggles, both in the Philippines and in the United States. He went on to publish three volumes of poetry, a best-selling collection of stories, The Laughter of My Father, and America Is in the Heart, the much acclaimed chronicle based on his family's battle to overcome poverty, violence, and racism in the United States. The Cry and the Dedication carries on Bulosan's passionate, satirical style. >P>E. San Juan, Jr. is Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Visiting Professor of English, Wesleyan University, and Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center. He was recently chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington University, and Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He received the 1999 Centennial Award for Literature from the Philippines Cultural Center. His most recent books are Beyond Postcolonial Theory, From Exile to Diaspora, After Postcolonialism, and Racism and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Publication History	ix
Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(46)
Stories
Passage into Life	47	(13)
The Story of a Letter	60	(6)
Be American	66	(7)
The Soldier	73	(4)
As Long as the Grass Shall Grow	77	(8)
Life and Death of a Filipino in America	85	(5)
Homecoming	90	(7)
The Thief	97	(3)
The End of the War	100	(9)
Essays
How My Stories Were Written	109	(6)
The Growth of Philippine Culture	115	(9)
My Education	124	(7)
Freedom from Want	131	(4)
Filipino Writers in a Changing World	135	(3)
I Am Not a Laughing Man	138	(5)
The Writer As Worker	143	(4)
Poems
Biography	147	(1)
Surely the Living Departed	148	(1)
The Manifesto of Human Events	149	(1)
Blood Music, 1939	150	(1)
The Shadow of a Tear	151	(1)
Death and Transfiguration	152	(1)
Waking in the 20th Century	153	(2)
Letter in Exile	155	(2)
Portrait with Cities Falling	157	(2)
For a Child Dying in a Tenement	159	(1)
The Foreigners	160	(1)
Needing No Time	161	(1)
Hymn to a Man Who Failed	162	(1)
Factory Town	163	(1)
Meeting with a Discoverer	164	(1)
Biography Between Wars	165	(1)
If You Want to Know What We Are	166	(3)
To My Countrymen	169	(4)
Correspondence
Letters (1937--55)	173	(12)
Letters to an American Woman	185	(25)
Letter to a Filipino Woman	210	(5)
Autobiographical Sketch	215	(2)
Selected Writings by and about Carlos Bulosan	217	(2)
Criticism and Commentary on Bulosan	219	(2)
About the Editor	221