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

America exemplifies the "readable" text: Bulosan structures his narrative to persuade his readers to strike a blow against fascism in all of its forms-from the irrigated Californian desert to the beleaguered Spanish Republic-through international labor solidarity in dialectical relation to popular nationalism.8 Thus, Bulosan purports to depict the development of a political consciousness that will lead to a truly democratic American society, one whose members will be equally represented under the law and who will share fairly in the fruits of their labor.

The subjects of Bulosan's collectives are predominantly male: (inter)national, cross-racial labor solidarity in America is cemented by homosocial bonds facilitated by first- and third-world women who often function as vessels for male-authored agendas rather than as subjects in their own right.9 Indeed, Bulosan's inability to imagine, let alone represent, women's subjectivities can be understood by examining two contradictory statements culled from letters to friends. In a 1938 letter to Ann Dionisio, Bulosan writes, "Throughout my life, from my fartherest [sic] childhood until now, I was really never close enough to a woman to know what kind of animal she is. And this is why when writing, when talking, my thoughts of women are too idealized" (Sound 5). Three years later, regarding a prostitute he had befriended, Bulosan would say, "I have some wonderful materials from her life. 1 will let you know what she is" (11). In America, knowledge of "Woman" is both disavowed and assumed, much as it is in these letters; female characters fall into a whore/virgin dichotomy, the terms of which rest along the same patriarchal spectrum and depend on each other for meaning and impact. This paradigm appears early in the book, when Bulosan contrasts his saintly mother with a girl who defiantly attempts to force Allos's brother Macario into marriage. The whore/virgin dichotomy becomes even more pronounced once Allos immigrates to the U.S. White female writers (the Odell sisters), prostitutes with the proverbial heart of gold (Marian), and drifters (like Mary, who "become[s] a symbol of goodness" [301] to Allos and the other Pinoys with whom he lives) embody the nurturing, open-armed, and warm-bosomed America that Allos seeks once he enters the brutal world of Alaskan canneries, West Coast fields, and little Manilas. Other women, however, ranging from agents provocateurs (Helen) to political opportunists (Lucia Simpson, the Communist) to unnamed prostitutes and dance hall girls, use their sexuality to take advantage of Filipino men, even endangering their lives. Yet, regardless of whether they are virgins or whores, women in Bulosan's narrative, according to Asian American literary critic Rachel Lee, "signal a lack of personal liberty" and thus "cannot participat[e] in a free community but can only act as the equivocal sign of its absence" (23).10

However, just as we need to probe the "articulate silences" on Pinoy life in "Yoneko's Earthquake," we should attend more carefully to America's double-voicing of the lives of working women in the first and third worlds. Manifestly silent on the specificities of women's oppression and liberation, America can be read against its masculinist mode of cultural production for its articulation of the ways in which U.S. imperialism, monopoly capitalism, and patriarchal modes of accumulation have conditioned the lives of Filipino peasant women and white female workers in the U.S. Unlike Yamamoto, Bulosan does not critique patriarchy but entirely subsumes sexual oppression under economic exploitation; in representing productive and reproductive forms of labor, he does not acknowledge the sexual hierarchies that structure them. Even so, overemphasis on the symbolic function of women in the book does not obscure the traces of female subjectivities that emerge despite Bulosan's male-centered and paternalistic perspective.