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

I follow Rachel Lee's critical examination of fraternal communities in America, commencing with one of its opening passages-in which Allos's brother, Leon, returns to the family farm in Mangusmana after fighting in World War I. Shortly thereafter, he marries only to see his wife tied to a tree to be whipped by angry peasants according to a "cruel custom" (7) of punishing women who lose their virginity before marriage. For Lee, this moment is the first of many in which female sexuality is shown to disrupt brotherly unity, as the couple are forced to leave the village. While this reading is plausible, it does not harmonize with the narrators interpretation of the events: "But [the whipping] was a fast-dying custom, in line with other backward customs in the Philippines, yielding to the new ways of the younger generation that were shaping out sharply from the growing industrialism" (7). Ostensibly, the text exemplifies what Kenneth Mostern has argued to be Bulosan's problematic Americanism whereby the Philippines is backward and "primitive" (as the narrator often describes his homeland), hence in need of the enlightenment that only America can provide. This is not to say that female sexuality is purely incidental or that the narrator indicts the patriarchal, as opposed to atavistic, premises of the custom; as Lee observes, the woman is "repeatedly denied agency over her body" (21). At the same time, the text does not fault the sexual "impurity" of Leon's wife so much as the angry, "primitive" peasants. While the narrator reveals his own patriarchal attitude toward the woman, the form of primitivism that Bulosan chooses to criticize is one in which the traffic in women is brutally enforced.

Furthermore, it is not only Leon and Allos who are separated as a result of this punitive tradition-the subsequent chapter reveals that the family as a whole is affected. To make this distinction is not simply to split hairs but to shift from an emphasis on Filipino blood brotherhood to the family-and especially the significance of Allos's mother-as they are portrayed in the first section of the book. This is an important move for two reasons. E. San Juan, Jr., asserts that "what most readers of America have ignored, by virtue of dogmatism or inertia, is the whole of part I, in particular the resourcefulness, perseverance, and courage of the peasantry, which could not be fitted into an implicit Asian American canonical paradigm" (146). While San Juan's own work does much to remedy this problem, much remains to be said about the dialectical relationship between Allos's childhood in the Philippines and its impact on his maturing political consciousness in the context of Pinoy labor organization." second, attending to Part Ys significance to the rest of the ethnobiography, which takes place in the U.S., is crucial to a feminist reading of America given the sexual demographics of Filipino migrant labor, whereby Pinoys were heavily over-represented compared to Pinays in Hawaii and on the mainland.12 Here, I take my cue from Gary Okihiro's thoughts on re-centering women within Asian American historiography: