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

Yamamoto has primarily been studied under the rubrics of Asian American literature and feminism. Critics have identified intergenerational conflict, especially between issei mothers (first-generation Japanese American) and nisei daughters (second-generation Japanese American), the subordination of Japanese American women within patriarchal structures, and the impact of racism-in its institutionalized and informal manifestations-as the major themes in her work.2 Scholarship has not often treated Yamamoto's "awareness of classism," as King-Kok Cheung puts it ("Seventeen Syllables" 13).3 But in many of Yamamoto's short stories, especially "Earthquake," it is not just class prejudice but the historical conditions of production that are integral to the "buried plot" (Yogi 144-45) of the text's subtle protest against racialized patriarchy and its sympathetic portrait of a rural issei woman's struggles as a mother, wife, and fieldworker. The "articulate silences" voiced by "Earthquake" are certainly those of the narrator's mother, but they are also those of Marpo, the Filipino farmhand with whom the mother has a tragic affair; furthermore, their destinies are intimately linked by their relationships to the issei patriarch/employer.

As Cheung observes, Yamamoto often engages in "double-telling," or "conveying two tales in the guise of one" (Articulate Silences 29) through the use of an unreliable narrator, in this case a young girl, Yoneko Hosoume. When her father hires Marpo, Yoneko is immediately taken with this multitalented newcomer with the mysterious but "lovely" last name that sounds "something like Humming Wing" ("Earthquake" 47). Yoneko's misrecognition of Marpo's surname exemplifies the way that the text, at its surface level, does not fully comprehend Marpo's significance to the Hosoume household or the reasons for Marpo's presence in their lives. Yet, just as the text latently bespeaks the psychosexual dynamics among Mrs. Hosoume, Mr. Hosoume, and Marpo, it renders traces of the historical forces of twentieth-century modernity that give rise to their love triangle.

The first "irrefutable fact" that Mr. Hosoume embeds in Yoneko's mind regarding Marpo is that "Filipinos in general [are] an indolent lot. Mr. Hosoume ascribed Marpo's industry to his having grown up in Hawaii, where there is known to be considerable Japanese influence" (48). Marpo is thus shown to be a product of early Filipino labor migration from one American possession to another, a phenomenon engendered by the displacement of peasant farmers in the Philippines and the crushing of its native industry under U.S. imperialism.4 Mr. Hosoume's mention of "Japanese influence" alludes to Hawaii's multinational labor force even as he elides its racially segregated structure, wherein Sakadas-Filipino indentured laborers in Hawaii-were at the bottom of the pecking order (Takaki 155-57). "Earthquake" articulates the permutations of this racial hierarchy of agricultural labor within a mainland context. Mr. Hosoume belongs to the strata of issei who, by dint of industry and kinship ties, moved from farm worker to farm owner, thereby incurring the wrath of agribusiness, which campaigned for the Alien Land Acts (1913, 1919) and the anti-Japanese Immigration Act of 1924. As a result of Japanese exclusion, farming industries began recruiting Mexicans and Filipinos (McWilliams, Factories 110-16). While for the most part Japanese farmers initially hired other Japanese, they eventually took advantage of the newer pools of cheap labor comprising these other ethnic groups; this is why Mr. Hosoume hires Marpo as well as the Mexicans who assist in the fieldwork "on certain overwhelming days" (51). According to Ronald Takaki, many Japanese growers chose to hire Filipinos "because they were single men and could be housed inexpensively" (321), a fact that Yamamoto conveys: "[Marpo] never sat down to the Hosoume table, because he lived in the bunkhouse out by the barn and cooked on his own kerosene stove" ("Earthquake" 47). Ironically, it is precisely Marpo's bachelorhood that threatens Mr. Hosoume's household dominance.