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RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Higashida, Cheryl
4 Interestingly, Marpo's age is given as twenty-seven; as the setting for the story is the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, his year of birth would have been 1906-the year the first Filipinos recruited to work the sugar plantations arrived in Hawaii (Cordova 26). Another possible context for "Yoneko's Earthquake" is the Filipino boycott of Japanese stores in Stockton in the winter of 1929-30. The boycott was in response to a Japanese American man's attempt to annul the marriage between his daughter and a Pinoy (Lasker 17).
5 Many critics have observed that Yamamoto is not unsympathetic to the plight of issei men, and this is the case in "Earthquake." The narrator notes that this instance is "the first time [Mr. Hosoume] had ever laid hands on [Mrs. Hosoume]" (53), and we are led to understand that Mr. Hosoume's violence, though inexcusable, is his way of compensating for the fact that he is only nominally the household head after the earthquake: he "stay[s] at home most of the time" and occasionally has "supper on the stove when Mrs. Hosoume [comes] in from the fields" (51). Mr. Hosoume is as much trapped within the patriarchal structure of the family as he is a perpetrator of it.
6 Yoneko thinks of Marpo as a "dog-eater" after his departure because she is hurt by what she perceives to be his abrupt desertion of her. Her willingness to re-adopt the racism that she had overcome earlier speaks to its prevalence and, in particular, her internalization of her father's views (he again denigrates Filipinos when Yoneko paints her nails, saying that she "look[s] like a Filipino" [52]). The insidiousness of this racism is further shown by the fact that Yoneko in turn teaches her brother to think of Marpo as "an eater of wild dogs."
7 I would not go so far as to say, as Donald Goellnicht does, that Mrs. Hosoume and Marpo's affair is a form of interracial, cross-class solidarity (189-90), because the narrative does not provide us with either of the characters' perspectives on their relationship, let alone its political implications, nor does the narrator comment on them even indirectly.
8 As many critics have noted, America was initially received as an immigrant Horatio Alger story celebrating the virtues of American democracy. Marilyn Alquizola resolves the seemingly competing narratives of subversion and assimilation by plausibly arguing that the latter strategically masks the former; Kenneth Mostern, on the other hand, contends that America is ultimately unsubversive-an interpretation that dismisses, 1 think, the critical edge of Bulosan's Americanism. Sau-ling Wong views the narrator's political development as fundamentally at odds with the book's representations of unmappable, "necessitous motion" (136), which forecloses any ideological closure. Similarly, Lisa Lowe contests the book's classification as a Bildungsroman, arguing that "the narrative captures the complex, unsynthetic constitution of the immigrant subject between an already twice-colonized Philippine culture, on the one hand, and the pressure to conform to Anglo-American society, on the other" (45). Wong's and Lowe's deconstructive readings usefully probe the book's ideological oscillations and contradictions, but they shortshrift its representations of radical political development.
