Up from benevolent assimilation: at home with the Manongs of Bienvenido Santos

The visit does not quite turn out the way it seems to have been intended, that is, as a parading of Filipino excellence and American Filipino squalor. The Fabia household is disheveled from the poverty of the ongoing depression. In a telling comparison, the narrator compares it to African American sharecropper shacks he had seen: "I thought of the cottages of the poor colored folk in the South" (26). Fabia is likened to a domestic, rural, post-Reconstruction, racialized underclass, despite his being a colonized immigrant in the upper Midwest. Upon entering the house the narrator gets the whiff of apples he had only imagined at the beginning of the story. And then he is served the fruit:

   "Ah," I cried, picking out a ripe one, "I've been thinking where all
   the scent of apples came from. The room is full of it."
      "I'll show you," said Fabia.
      He showed me a back room, not very big. It was half-full of
      apples.
      "Every day," he explained, "I take some of them to town to sell
      to
   the groceries. Prices have been so low. I've been losing on the
   trips." (27)

In what amounts to a perversion of the opening image of the story, the apples are seen as a burden, something seen only as a waste of space and a source of loss rather than sustenance or even profit. Fabia's life seems every bit as pathetic as the narrator, and the narrative, would lead us to believe.

Yet, the glamour of the narrator and the meanness of Fabia are quickly inverted at the end of the story. "I saw him extend his hand. I gripped it. 'Tell Ruth [Fabia's Caucasian American wife] and Roger,' I said, 'I love them.' He dropped my hand quickly. 'They'll be waiting for me now,' he said" (29). At this point, Fabia seems to have undergone a change. He "quickly" detaches himself from the "grip" of the narrator and reattaches himself to his wife and son. He no longer seems to want to have anything to do with this representative and representer of the Philippines. The narrator also seems to sense his grasp on Fabia slipping away. At this point, the narrator turns desperately to the one possible bit of power he may have left: remembering Fabia to the Philippines that Fabia is supposed to mourn.

      "Look," I said, not knowing why I said it, "one of these days,
      very
   soon, I hope, I'll be going home. I could go to your town."
      "No," he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave,
   "Thanks a lot. But, you see, nobody would remember me now."
      Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.
      "Goodbye," I said, waving back into the darkness. (29)

Fabia literally and figuratively drops the narrator off and goes back to his life which he now seems to recognize as a life. While Fabia is still poor and isolated, he has effectively declared his independence from the authority of those like the narrator, that is, those who represent the terms of "first class" standards for which he is supposed to strive. In particular, Ruth's deep devotion to Fabia, and his gender ideals, prompted him to observe to the narrator, "Ruth's a nice girl, like our own Filipino women" (28). In the end, the narrator calls Fabia "defeated but brave," but that may be more a wishful hope of the narrator who finds that he may not be able to condescend as easily as he had. He and Fabia are both disabused of their "illusions peculiar to exile."