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

15 "In these areas [which had sent labor abroad, such as Ilocos, or which had sent labor to other provinces], the proportion of households headed by women ranged from 13 to 19 per cent of the total. In the country as a whole about 11 per cent of households were headed by a woman. Women heads of households put in more hours of work as they bore the double burden of both household and paid work to an even greater extent" (Eviota 72).

16 See Eviota 65-70 for a discussion of the definitions of women's productive work as they appear in the U.S. censuses between 1903 and 1960.

17 For example, when Allos first meets the white prostitute Marian, he is drawn to her in part because of her rough hands, which indicate that "she had done manual work" (211); seeing that Macario's hands "were hard and calloused, like ... mother's" (241) leads to Allos's comprehension of "the meaning" of his parents' toil and sacrifices; re-encountering his brother Arnado after the latter's stint as a racketeer, Allos notices the "long scar" (295) on his "mud-caked" hand (297), which shows how he has been "roughly handled" (295).

18 Nonetheless, Bulosan later attributes Allos's "appreciation of beauty" to his experiences of snaring birds with his brother Luciano, who keeps them for their "esthetic pleasure" rather than for their usefulness (53).

19 The chapter on the Tayug revolt also documents the double burden that Allos's mother carries, engaging in wage labor and childcare simultaneously. While harvesting the rice she "stopped now and then to feed Marcela, undoing her rough cotton blouse to her waist and putting her dark, pointed nipple into the baby's hungry mouth. Then she would put her in a makeshift hammock and go back to work" (59).

20 San Juan replicates rather than explores the story's silence on prostitution in his brief reading of it, folding it into what for him is the more pressing absence: that of the father (159-60).

21 The novel that Allos describes is Clara Weatherwax's Marching! Marching! (1935), which centers around the Aberdeen, Washington, strike of lumber and shipping workers, including a Pinoy named Mario. Weatherwax's book won the 1935 New Masses prize for the best new proletarian novel.

22 My readings of the white female intellectuals in America coincide with Lina B. Diaz de Rivera's interpretation of Helen O'Reilly, the "Woman Reader/Teacher" in Bulosan's short story "As Long As the Grass Shall Grow." Diaz de Rivera argues that, despite Bulosan's initial association of Helen with the Virgin Mother/Mother Nature, she becomes the propagator rather than the object of knowledge who links "woman reading and men laboring" (14).

WORKS CITED

Alquizola, Marilyn. "Subversion or Affirmation: The Text and Subtext of America is in the Heart." Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives. Ed. Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, et al. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1991. 199-209.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1946.