RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO

Perhaps the closest that Bulosan comes to grappling with the problems posed by the sexual exploitation of women is in a different text altogether, his short story "Homecomlng." As this work recounts the bitter return of a young Pinoy, Mariano, to his family in the Philippines, it links the trafficking of "third world" women to the international labor market. In the story, Mariano makes his way toward what he thinks of as "his father's house" (90) to find only his mother and two sisters, Francisca and Marcela, as he is unaware that his father had died a year after Mariano left for the U.S. Although excited at the prospect of being with his family, he is hobbled by inarticulacy every step of the way: "He wanted to shout to [his mother] all the sorrows of his life, but a choking lump came to his throat" (91); "he wanted to say something, but did not know where to begin" (93); he tells his mother and sisters, "I wanted to write, but there was nothing I could say" (94). Likewise, Mariano cannot bring himself to tell them that he is ill with tuberculosis and has only two years left to live. His sisters and mother, too, are resoundingly silent; when Mariano asks if they have been able to manage, Francisca begins weeping and retreats to another room. Marcela, who is "tougher," regards her sister "with hard, unsentimental eyes" (94). Mariano is "frightened, knowing what Marcela could do in a harsh world," and she confirms his fears, telling him that "Sister isn't pretty any more" (94). As he regards Marcela, he realizes that she, too, "was not pretty any more" (94), and it is then that Mariano understands the silence of his mother and sisters: "it dawned on him that [they] had suffered the same terrors of poverty, the same humiliations of defeat, that he had suffered in America.... This was the life he had found in America; it was so everywhere in the world" (95). In his despair, he realizes that "he could not do anything at all" and takes one last look at his sleeping family before departing forever.

As with Yamamoto's stories, Bulosan's "Homecoming" is replete with articulate silences, although they are conditioned by different social circumstances than those surrounding Yamamoto's issei and nisei characters.20 What initially renders Mariano unable to express himself in words is his failure to strike it big in America, thereby letting his family down: "He wanted to tell [his sister] the truth, but could not. How could he let them realize that he had come home because there was no other place for him in the world?" (93). For Francisca and Marcela, their nameless shame is the need to work as prostitutes in order to support themselves and their incapacitated mother. Unable to admit their respective histories to one another, the family cannot share the realization of what Mariano achieves on his own: that what they perceive as their individual failures are pieces of a larger picture of systemic poverty, defeat, and exploitation.