America is in the Heart / Carlos Bulosan / 1943
Written at breakneck speed, Bulosan narrates his life of poverty in the Philippines, his migration to the US, and his life of poverty and discrimination throughout the West. The narrator writes as if being chased in a way that reminds me Stephen Crane or Charles Dickens’ realism, except that in Bulosan this realism doesn’t feel voyeuristic. It’s actually lived and vomited from his gut. The voice reads not like a sensationalist journalist account of poverty, but of an aspiring young author who hasn’t found distance from his own pain because he never had stability to fully process. Even so, what Bulosan manages to capture with softness and tenderness is incredible. The amount of violence and cruelty intrinsic to Asian and immigrant life in this time period are crushing to read, whether Bulosan in narrating the misogynistic marital rituals of his hometown or describing racial terror he sometimes failed to flee with his comrades.
America is in the Heart also narrates one generation’s communist dreams and it was insightful to hear how consciousness grew in Bulosan and the ways it was subsequently crushed by state actors. Throughout the years, I’ve realized that so much of the canon of color’s literary tradition is left-wing in a way that isn’t talked about in academia and unknown in many radical literary spaces. I prize this communist literature, including Bulosan, as part of a tradition that has been repressed in the US, as part of a tradition that I identify with.
America is in the Heart ends with a romantic love letter to America. Bulosan, for some reason, could never abandon its promise. It read to me as Stockholm Syndrome, as a Sunken Costs fallacy, but I imagine that fans of the American Dream will find a flag to wave in its closing paragraphs. The closing paragraphs. hits the same ache as “My Man” by Billie Holiday for me. I mourn Bulosan’s tragic and stupid love for a country that will never love him back. I wish him a better dream. 4.8/5