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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
"Earthquake" critiques not only racist patriarchal domination but, more fully, the shape it takes within modern capitalism. In contrast to Marpo, who is a "bad" worker because he is human(e), "good" workers for Mr. Hosoume are shown to be inhuman: "In the afternoon [Yoneko and Seigo] had perspired and followed the potato-digging machine and the Mexican workers-both hired for the day-around the field, delighting in unearthing marble-sized, smooth-skinned potatoes that both the machine and the men had missed" (55). Here, Yamamoto insinuates the men's reduction under Mr. Hosoume's employ: "both [are] hired for the day"; "both the machine and the men had missed" the potatoes that the children dig up. This subordination of man to "a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system" (Lukács 89) is what we see again in Mr. Hosoume's replacement for Marpo. The new hired hand is "an old Japanese man who wore his gray hair in a military cut and who, unlike Marpo, had no particular interests outside working, eating, sleeping, and playing an occasional game of goh with Mr. Hosoume" (54). The significance of the new hand is, naturally, that he poses no sexual threat whatsoever and is a companion for Mr. Hosoume rather than for his wife. But just as importantly for Mr. Hosoume, the old man is devoid of "the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker" that "appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions" (Lukács 89). For both these reasons, this latest worker on the Hosoume farm is truly the best hired hand.
Pace Yamamoto's denial of sending any message, this "writable" text does not engage solely or primarily in a ludic formalism, and while it invites the reader's participation in its interpretation or "writing," its open-endedness does not preclude political critique. Rather, through its double narration, "Earthquake" is carefully structured to represent the effects of racialized patriarchy on the Japanese American female subject and to convey the dehumanizing symptoms of patriarchal accumulation.7
II. RECENTERING ASIAN WOMEN
Yamamoto's male Filipino farm worker is the central subject of Bulosan's America, subtitled "A Personal History" but more accurately conceptualized as an "ethnobiography"; as E. San Juan, Jr., observes, its protagonist, Allos, is both autobiographical and representative of the more than 30,000 Filipinos living in California in the thirties (137). The majority of these Pinoys-as Filipinos in the U.S. called themselves-worked in the factories in the fields as "nomad harvesters," in the words of proletarian poet Marie De L. Welch (qtd. in McWilliams, Factories n.p.). The oxymoronic idea of "nomad harvesters," people who cannot settle on the very land that they cultivate, captures the contradictions within monopoly capitalism's penetration of California farming; the migrant fieldhands responsible for the crops' ripening are themselves doomed to rot, "homeless," according to Welch, even as they "send the harvest home" (8). Likewise, America bears witness to the wretched conditions of this work, but where Welch's poem renders its ceaselessness ("Move and pause and move on" [line 14]) and invokes an essentially passive body of laborers, Bulosan conveys the growing militancy of Pinoy workers in the thirties.
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