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'The Laughter of my Father': a survival kit

MELUS, Summer, 1995 by L.M. Grow

I was a month old when the first World War was declared, but the sound of distant guns shook my childhood. I grew up quickly and found that my brother Polon was one of the 25,000 volunteers in the Philippine National Guard that fought in Europe. Suddenly the war came and suddenly it ended. Then my childhood was gone forever.

The soldiers were demobilized. Out of the eleven young men that volunteered in our town only three came back to live among us. One was dead in battle; two died of serious infection on the boat; three were injured and stayed in the city. The three who came back were always sitting on the lawn in front of the presidencia. They sat all day and part of the night without talking to anybody. (11)

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This is certainly not humorous, and the story sustains a tone that is anything but comic: "They fought among themselves, cutting their faces and breaking their noses" (15), and "Don Rico became insane and hanged himself with a rope" (18). Perhaps we might think that Bulosan's humor is dark rather than hilarious. As E. Aguilar Cruz has put it, "Humorous stories about plausible people and situations, as far removed from O'Henry and Octavus Roy Cohen as the real laughter of our fathers is from Carlos Bulosan, are still being written by such before-the-war fictionists as Consorcio Borje, D. Paulo Dizon and C.V. Pedroche" (12). Similarly, Avelina Gil concludes, "Intended to be serious protest against the economic system of his time, The Laughter of My Father by Carlos Bulosan reveals a wry humor that verges on bitterness. But the hilarious, even grotesque, situations which Bulosan treats almost like vignettes mask the satire on Filipino poverty and ignorance" (61).

"Wry" does describe the sort of antics we get in "My Mother's Boarders": "I just sat in front row watching the bare legs of my teacher. When she saw me she raised her skirt a little higher. I threw my pencil under her table, but when I crept on the floor to reach for it, she got up suddenly and started writing on the blackboard" (LF 22). However, incidents like this are not mere horseplay. The story establishes, through context, the phallic symbolism of the pencil: "When I was five the town council decided to enlarge our school because the soldiers that came home from the war produced children left and right. We used to wonder how they performed the splendid job" (19). He will soon enough find out, since his education has already begun. One of the teachers "grabbed me and started swinging me around in her arms. My feet were several feet off the floor. I put my legs around her waist the way I put them around our carabao. It was not dancing, but I felt good" (23). The sexual implications here serve a serious purpose, as we will see shortly.

It is unsurprising that the stories are serious, even bitter, since Bulosan intended them to be both, as he made clear in his outraged response to critics who construed him as a humorist:

I am mad because when my book "The Laughter of my Father" was published by Harcourt, Brace & Company, the critics called me "the manifestation of the pure Comic Spirit."

I am not a laughing man. I am an angry man. ("I am Not a Laughing Man" 143)

No precise source of the anger is specified; after indicating that "it [LF] started with the war" (143), Bulosan spends the rest of the article recounting his restless drifting from job to job. No doubt this vagueness is attributable to Bulosan's outrage over conditions of life in America in general - outrage which he expressed in print in a biographical piece in 1936: "'The McDuffie-Tydings law has affected us so much. It has thrown us into dungeons; it violated our rights and civil liberties. It is savager than the Platt Amendment of Cuba. Life for us here in California is very hard...'" (293).

This constitutes strong support for the likelihood that the LF stories have a double frame of reference: while they are set in the Philippines, they equally apply to oppressed and harassed Filipinos, like Bulosan, in America. Certainly, it is easier to account for the vehemence of Bulosan's reaction to being consigned to the "humorist" category on this assumption.

The seriousness in the LF stories, however, it is not entirely, as Gil would have it, "a serious protest against the economic system of his time," although, as Leonard Casper observes, "One sometimes senses a subtle complaint against the near-penal conditions of the economic structure" (68-69). The first LF story is a case in point of the collection's overall non-functionality as protest literature. In "My Father Goes to Court," a rich man brings a legal action against the narrator's family, on the grounds that the family has stolen the spirit of the rich man's wealth by smelling the man's food while it was being cooked. But the narrator's father fools the rich man by jingling some coins in his pocket and then claiming that the "spirit" of the money has compensated the rich man. The case is dismissed and the story ends with: "the laughter of the judge was the loudest of all" (10). The outcome here suggests that the system works; the rich aren't holding all the cards. The shrewd underdog can make the smart money hit the canvas, as Ralph Ellison would have put it.

'The Laughter of my Father': a survival kit

MELUS, Summer, 1995 by L.M. Grow

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