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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
Although Macario successfully completes his high school education, he cannot keep the family land from being expropriated by an absentee landowner, and when Allos's father is relegated to tilling inhospitable ground, he sends his son to town to live with his mother. It is in the subsequent passages depicting Meteria's trading that we come to know her best-Allos states, "It was during this period that I came to understand my mother's heart" (33)-and it is not coincidental that, of all the spheres of her life, her business is the one in which she possesses the most autonomy. As Eviota notes, "trading as productive women's work does enable [Filipino women] to engage in a variety of social exchanges which are valuable in themselves for the opportunities they provide and which do not occur in many other sectors of work available to working-class women" (131). By accompanying his mother in her travels and interactions with other peasants, Allos discovers the foundations for his subsequent labor radicalism: "I had come upon another world that was to become a foretaste of my later struggles for a place in the sun. Selling boggoong and salt with my mother gave me an opportunity to meet many people and to become a part of their lives" (36). In the course of her enterprise, Meteria counters the American individualism that Macario attempts to inculcate in Allos through the example of Robinson Crusoe: "Someday you may be left alone somewhere in the world and you will have to depend on your own ingenuity" (32). In a subsequent passage, Allos learns a different lesson from Meteria as the two foray into a village "where the poorest peasants lived on a barren land" (34). There they encounter a woman who begs for some of the boggoong that Meteria sells. "[T]hinking of the next payment on [the family] land" (35), Meteria initially hesitates to grant the woman's request to dip her hands into the salted fish but ultimately acquiesces. When Allos starts to laugh at the woman's pathetic maneuver, Meteria reprimands him angrily: "'Someday you will understand these things,' she said, looking up at the house" (35) where the woman runs to find rice to eat with the remnants of her boggoong. Phrased similarly to Macario's declaration, Meteria's injunction contrasts directly with her older son's perspective. Instead of being concerned primarily with making money for herself and her family, she tries to sustain others who are similarly or even more impoverished. Says Allos: "my mother gave even to those peasants who had nothing to barter in the hope that when we came around again they would be ready to pay. We were not always able to collect everything we had loaned, but my mother kept on giving our products to needy peasants" (33). It is not only Meteria's trade but her attitude toward it-privileging the collective well-being over competing economic motives-that shape Allos's incipient politicization.
The spirit of collectivism is furthered in a lyrical passage in which Meteria and Allos head for the village of Puzzorobio by means of a slippery highway:
