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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
Asian men in America were not solitary figures moving in splendid isolation but were intimately connected to women in Asia .... Recentering women extends the range of Asian American history, from bachelor societies in Hawaii and the U.S. mainland to the villages and households in Asia, in an intricate and dynamic pattern of relations. (68)
Lee has reservations about this approach to overcoming the gendered boundaries of Asian American history, contending that it does not guarantee "a practice friendly, or even attentive, to women, much less a feminist critique that would interrogate gender hierarchy and gender difference" (9). Nonetheless, she succinctly formulates the merits of Okihiro's proposal:
Feminist criticism reconceived on this terrain would require more than the recovery of women's histories in Asian locations: it would entail, at the minimum, an account of the enabling or disabling economic and social effects on women circumscribed by such international trade and labor routes and by the gendered terms of kinship reformulated under transnational conditions. (9)
This is precisely why I find it necessary to examine Bulosan's portraits of Filipino women in America. And while a transnational paradigm for Asian American studies might not in and of itself lead to feminist critique, such an objection does not seem a compelling reason for ignoring its potential.13
To return to the passage in which Leon brings home his bride, we can see how their union is impacted by the displacement of small landholding farmers. Bulosan mentions that Leon's wife "came from a poor family in the north, in the province of Ilocos Sur" (6); her origins are significant here because they speak to the fact that she hails from an area of the Philippines from which men had emigrated to Hawaii in droves to work on the sugar plantations.14 According to Elizabeth Uy Eviota, the percentage of households headed by women in those regions that had lost men to the Hawaiian plantations was much larger than the national average.15 The declining number of marriageable men might account in part for this Ilocana woman's coming to wed a man from Pangasinan. Bulosan also notes that when the woman who becomes Leon's wife arrives, she "hire[s] herself to one of the farmers who had more hectares of land than the others" (6). This passage alludes to the beginning of a trend consequent upon Filipino peasant land dispossession that exacerbated the unequal division of labor between the sexes; when it came to staple crops like corn, which Allos's father grows, "considerably more women than men were labourers: men were usually the farmers, and women the farm workers" (Eviota 68). The sexual hierarchy is even more pronounced when we consider a later passage in which Allos's father tries to find work on another farmer's land after selling his own to provide one of his sons with money for school: as Allos says, "But my father was a farmer, not a hired laborer. It humiliated him to hire himself out to someone" (29). Whereas the villagers positively attribute the work of Leon's wife as a hired hand to her origins within "a thrifty and industrious people" (6), it is humiliating for a man to hold the same socioeconomic position.
