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WORK TITLE: America Is Not the Heart
WORK NOTES:
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NATIONALITY: American
Some sources say she lives in the San Francisco Bay area, and others say she lives in London.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, CA.
EDUCATION:University of California, Berkeley, bachelor’s degree.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation Fellow.
WRITINGS
Contributor of writings to periodicals and websites, including Freeman’s, Lit Hub, Rumpus, and Electric Literature.
SIDELIGHTS
Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area, the daughter of a Pangasinense mother and an Ilocano father. In her 2018 debut book, America Is Not the Heart, she writes about political unrest in the Philippines and families putting their lives back together. A Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation Fellow, Castillo has published writings in Freeman’s, Lit Hub, Rumpus, and Electric Literature. She has also worked on the short film, A Mukbang, commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space.
Exploring the immigrant experience in a home of three generations of Filipino Americans, America Is Not the Heart, set in 1990, follows young Hero De Vera as she escapes political upheaval in the Philippines to live with an uncle in the San Francisco Bay area. Her uncle, Pol, was a prominent orthopedic surgeon in the Philippines, but in America he finds work as a security guard. His young wife, Paz, a nurse, is the family’s bread winner. Their daughter, Roni, is the first American-born daughter in the family. While Pol refrains from asking Hero about her troubled past spending a decade with an armed resistance group that fights against the Marcos dictatorship, Paz and Roni are intrigued by her scarred hands. When Hero takes Roni to see a traditional healer for her eczema, Hero begins a relationship with the healer’s daughter, Rosalyn. “Beautifully written, emotionally complex, and deeply moving, Castillo’s novel reminds us both that stories may be all we have to save us and also that this may never be enough,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Observing Castillo’s risky use of Tagalog, Pangasinan, and Ilocano, as well as hopping around in time, a Publishers Weekly reviewer concluded: “The result is a brilliant and intensely moving immigrant tale.”
The title of the book comes from America Is in the Heart, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan. “In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever,” declared BookPage reviewer Michael Magras, who added that Castillo’s novel is a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines. In an interview with Don Jacian online at CNN Philippines, Castillo discussed the debate over being American enough or Filipino enough, saying: “Push back against that idea of unilateral national identity. … Often, first generation melancholy, ‘I don’t belong in one place …’ I don’t actually feel that. I feel like I do belong particularly, I am Filipino-American, that’s the context that I came out of and that itself is a space, a valid space.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
BookPage, April, 2018, Michael Magras, review of America Is Not the Heart, p. 20.
Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2018, review of America Is Not the Heart.
Publishers Weekly, January 1, 2018, review of America Is Not the Heart, p. 36.
ONLINE
CNN Philippines, http://cnnphilippines.com/ (May 2, 2018), Don Jacian, author interview.
A Little Bit Like Worship: An Interview with Elaine Castillo
The author of America is Not the Heart talks commemorating the mundane in fiction, writing about working class queer women, and re-claiming the Bay Area in her novel.
Photo by Amaal Said, image design by Emma Lu
By Yasmin Adele Majeed
April 25, 2018 | Elaine Castillo, interview
Media Gallery
In her debut novel America is Not the Heart, Elaine Castillo writes about a Bay Area that is rarely represented in our culture: a home of working class immigrants. It’s a Bay populated with rundown malls and Filipino restaurants that hold karaoke parties after closing time, of young second-gen immigrants who spend Saturday night playing cards in garages, and who take long drives every weekend in their hand-me-down Honda Civics to see friends spin the Pharcyde and Afrika Bambaataa records in Daly City.
The novel is as sprawling as the Bay itself, moving between Marcos-era Philippines to Milpitas in the 90s, but is centered around the story of the De Veras. There’s Pol, the former favored son of a wealthy family who sacrificed his medical career to move to California; his wife Paz, who grew up with nothing and tirelessly supports her family by working 16-hour nursing shifts at the hospital; and their charmingly truculent daughter Roni, who won’t stop getting into fights at school. But the hero is Hero: Pol’s favorite cousin who fled the Philippines after spending years in a prison camp for her stint in the New Peoples Army, the militant communist faction that combated the Marcos regime. When she draws the interest of the earnest and romantic Rosalyn, Hero gets introduced to the vibrant world of Castillo’s lovingly rendered Bay Area.
America is Not the Heart is influenced by Junot Díaz, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jessica Hagedorn, especially her novel The Gangster of Love, a book that opens with a definition of the yo-yo—the Filipino invention whose defining traits are its fluctuating movement and its built-in destiny of returning to where it came from.
Born in Milpitas, where she’s recently returned to after spending the better part of a decade abroad in the UK, Elaine spoke with me over the phone about the relationship between immigrant narratives and formal experimentation, writing about working class queer women, and commemorating the mundane in fiction.
You can see Elaine read at our space tonight at 7 pm with Joseph O. Legaspi, Luis H. Francia, and Gina Apostol.
—Yasmin Adele Majeed
I wanted to start with Carlos Bulosan and ask why you named the book America is Not the Heart, and how the book is in conversation with Bulosan’s America is in the Heart.
Not to jump into cultural stereotypes but as a Filipina, I like puns and so whenever I heard America is in the Heart I had a private joke that I would always mumble to myself: America isn’t the heart. That was actually the original title of the book. For a lot of reasons we changed it to “is not” but one of the main reasons is that my mom and my older half-brother were like, “Please don’t make it “isn’t the heart” because that doesn’t sound like good English.” It was full-on immigrant grammar shame. But the actual secret title in my head comes from that inside joke with myself.
I think any Filipino American writer who’s read Bulosan is a daughter of that book. I’m definitely a daughter of that book. Kids tussle with their forebears so there’s parts of that book that I have issues with—the representation of women for one—but it was also one of the first books that captured the rural Filipino poverty that, for example, my mom grew up in, in a way that I didn’t really see [elsewhere].
When did you first read it?
I think I was around 14. I didn’t read it in a classroom. I read it because I found it in a library, so I read it quite young.
Had you encountered other Filipino American writers before that or was it a revelatory experience?
I had. I think at that point I had read Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. But also I’d read quite a lot of books by Asian authors in translation. Growing up, I never really realized that the impulse for what I was doing was probably proto-political. I read a lot in translation because I was avoiding what we would call “mainstream” American books. But for sure I read Maxine Hong Kingston and Jessica Hagedorn when I was really young.
When I was reading America is Not the Heart I actually felt like Hero could be a Hagedorn heroine. She has that same badass and hard exterior, but this tenderness on the inside that reminded me of Rocky Rivera from The Gangster of Love.
Actually it was only when I was working on the last draft of the novel that I was like, Roni De Vera, that name sounds a lot like Rocky Rivera. I think it’s an unconscious homage to Rocky Rivera. But that’s how deep your formative influences go.
In some of your writing online there’s references to a novel called Postcard. I wanted to know what happened to that novel. Did America is Not the Heart come out of that or is it a different manuscript?
Oh, it’s a different manuscript entirely. Sometimes you have to write a book out of you so that you can actually write the book that gets published. Postcard was basically Greek myth science fiction, but it’s very incoherently also about the European migrant crisis at the time. How those two things relate only that novel would know.
The end of that novel and the beginning of [America is Not the Heart], overlap. I was at the point where I was just sort of breaking up with the idea of that novel ever becoming anything more than a file on my computer, and then in the summer of 2013 I wrote the prologue of America is Not the Heart and I knew there was something there.
Were you in London at that time?
Yeah, I was in London throughout the writing. I moved to London with my partner in 2009 and I was just super sick and was grieving. My dad had passed away about three years earlier and I wasn’t reading and I wasn’t writing. I was not in a good place and I would have done anything to get out of the Bay at that point.
Eventually, I got better and I did an MA. It was just before I started the MA actually that I started writing what became this book, although I didn’t really workshop it during the MA. I kept it to myself. This was my private project in a way. I was holding it close.
Who were the writers that influenced you the most when writing the novel?
When I was a teenager I read Junot Díaz’s Drown. Drown and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy were probably two exceptionally formative books as a kid.
At that point I had read books by Asian writers and Asian American writers and and Filipino American writers and had felt resonances with them, but you know a lot of those books were also mainly about people from Manila or people who were wealthier or people who were urban and not necessarily suburban immigrants.
I loved reading but reading was like this beautiful park that I got to visit, but it wasn’t home. I didn’t live there. But when I read Drown and when I read Lucy it was like someone telling you, No no no. You can live here. The things that you grew up on, the material, the context, the places that made you, the type of immigrant working class life, you also belong to this park.
I think the fact that neither of them were necessarily Filipino or Asian American didn’t matter, because the kind of shock of recognition that I felt with both of them was so acute.
It’s really amazing how Drown has influenced a whole generation of writers of color. I actually have a question drawn from your essay in The Rumpus from a few years ago, where you refer to an interview with Junot Díaz in which he says that when he thinks about writing he thinks about silences. And I wonder if you had silences that compelled you to write America is Not the Heart?
I don’t think there’s any writer who doesn’t, especially if you’re a diasporic writer or if you’re thinking about writing from a decolonial perspective. You’re thinking about how to challenge conventional writing advice like, “Write what you know.” We need different questions. For some much of us, “knowing” is a really fraught category.
My parents told stories about their lives, but what little they did tell was incomplete or revisionist or elaborated to the point of myth making. Trying to put pieces together, especially for decolonial writers, when you’re never really meant to put those pieces together—it’s an ongoing task.
There’s an anthropologist, Veena Das, who writes a lot about post-Partition trauma, especially around women bearing witness to trauma. She talks quite a lot about the ethics of not representing certain forms of trauma. So yes, there are silences that are in our lives. But is it possible to also produce writing writing that leaves gaps, leaves lacunae, and doesn’t try to fill those with narrative?
In that same essay you say the most realist mode for immigrants is science fiction. You described Postcard as a science fiction novel but America is Not the Heart is very much a realist novel, and I wonder why you made that move?
It’s funny because I was having a debate with someone about the avant garde and different modes of writing. We were talking about how the ways that we categorize avant garde writing means it looks a certain way and is therefore radical and progressive, while realist writing has a convention to it.
But if you’re someone who has never been valorized by the modes that we call realist writing, or if you’re someone for whom fragmentation looks like the daily life growing up in a sort of multilingual, but ultimately also traumatically multilingual family, those aren’t necessarily radical or progressive modes for you. I think the thing that I’m always interested in is, how do I make it more banal?
For example, there are things that people think are experimental in the book that I find very banal. Like the way people respond to the second person. I had no idea that the second person was this non-kosher, extra-literary mode, because that seems to be how people take it. But I was always always used to the second person as a conventional mode, typically used by writers of color like Jamaica Kincaid and Junot Díaz.
There’s this Mia Alvar story, “Esmeralda,” which is written in the second person, and she’s talked about writing it in that voice as a dare to a white man in a writing workshop who told her that she can’t write in the second person if at any point he found it to be unrelatable.
The second person is a very racialized mode and people’s responses to it are also racialized. I think it’s revealing—the discomfort that people feel around the second person. Sometimes the discomfort has to do with issues around respectability, like people who think that they’re writing respectable literary fiction [see] second person as a degraded mode. But I just never came to it as that. The fiction that was holy grail fiction for me used the second person very freely. Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is a masterpiece.
Yeah, and people talk so much about reclaiming the “I” but there’s also an importance to reclaiming the “you.” You said you wrote the prologue first. How did you come to Hero as a character?
Kicking and screaming. I wrote the prologue and from there I thought, I was going to write from either Paz’s perspective or Roni’s perspective. I spent about 200 pages writing from Roni’s perspective because autobiographically Roni and I share the most: we kind of grew up in the same town, our parents do the same things, we both had very severe eczema. But all the pages were just dead. I had no idea what she sounded like. I just couldn’t sustain that voice at all. At the time that I was writing I knew in the back of my head I wanted to write something about a New People’s Army member who was an exile.
I also knew that I wanted to write a story about two exes in the Bay, one of whom was a bi woman. It was only when I realized that the NPA member in exile is Roni’s cousin—the minute that Hero walk through the door in Milpitas—the whole world opened up.
I had huge misgivings writing from the perspective of someone who had the kind of class privilege that Hero had. It wasn’t something that I was familiar with. I didn’t like the idea of writing from the perspective of a rich kid, especially because I had read fiction by Filipino American writers that centered wealthy Manila-based families and I felt disconnected from it. The idea was massively uncomfortable, but I think it was that discomfort that gave me space to move. It gave me space to yank the rug out from her.
I always think like all of your characters will have blind spots. When you’re thinking about whose perspective to write from, for me it’s helpful [to figure out] which character has the blind spot that’s going to be productive for your novel.
What drew you to writing about the New People’s Army and writing about the Marcos era from the lens of this communist militant wing?
I didn’t want to write about the New People’s Army ever. There was a member of the NPA in my family. I had heard stories from my dad or half brothers, but I had never met her. Her life is very different from Hero’s. I think she actually is a much more important member of the NPA, whereas I really wanted to write about someone who’s kind of a loser.
I always think of this book as fan fiction of a much more conventional thriller. So the actual thriller would be about the NPA, Teresa would be the main character, it’s all action and history and compelling set pieces. While Hero’s just this grim doctor on the side that you don’t really take a second look at.
But for me, I’m interested in what happens after what we would call the “legibly political event.” I think there’s there’s an easy recourse to think that the political parts of the book are the NPA or the Marcos stuff, but I’m interested in asking, for example, how is Hero’s reaction to romance manga embedded with what we might call political significance? If you’re writing about people, then you’re writing about them at that vector of being emotional and political and animal and historical. It was important for me that if I was writing about the Marcos dictatorship or the NPA, that I write about it from the sidelines.
I did want to ask about romance. In a lot of queer literature queerness is often posed as a problem to be solved, and people of color and immigrants are placed in this position where they have to go outside of their community to solve that problem and come into their identity as a queer person. But I felt like that wasn’t the case in this novel and I wanted to know if that was intentional.
I’m really glad that you said that and that resonated for you. For me it was very important to write about queer women, bi women in particular, because I’m also bi and I don’t see any representations of bi women anywhere, especially not bi Filipina or Asian Americans.
It was also really important to write about queer suburban women, because it’s exactly as you said. I read a lot of really formative, beautiful queer literature growing up, but a lot of it was urban, a lot of it took place in either San Francisco or New York. The suburban or the rural or the country—that’s always the kind of backwards place that you have to leave behind in order to come into your queerness. And I just don’t think that’s everybody’s story. I don’t think that is the trajectory that every queer person takes.
I’m writing about queer women who are also immigrants, who are also at the crux of their community, who are also working class women, who are a part of families. How do you write about women who are beholden to all of those parts of themselves? Those are the queer lives that I’m interested in showing and exploring. Those are the queer lives that I knew growing up.
This all goes back to “Make it more banal, make it more boring, more ordinary.” I don’t want to shy away from the very real homophobia or structural discrimination that both Hero and Rosalyn would experience. I’m not trying to create this world in which there’s no discrimination. But I think the fact that queer people are read within a heteronormative lens, and always have to position their queerness as something to be deciphered, and to be parsed through, doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s how they have to be portrayed.
I feel like so much of Hero’s initial life in America is dictated by all this shame she’s carried—her family’s abandonment of her, her broken thumbs—and I was curious about your thoughts on shame and its relation to particular immigrant narratives.
I think the way shame functions in the book really varies across the different characters. All the characters, particularly all the immigrants in the book, carry within them a particular shame. For example Paz’s shame around her rural poverty, of being treated like dirt all her life, informs her relationship with her husband, with money, with her own body, with her daughter, with her life. I think that shame is a huge driving force in her life.
You could call Hero’s shame survivor’s guilt. What Hero carries is her acute awareness that her treatment in the prison camp, and the kinds of torture that she did not experience, is entirely dependent upon the fact that her captors had a sense that she might be related to Marcos. It was important for me point out that greater shame that Hero carries with her: an awareness to how class writes itself on different bodies and the kinds of outcomes that are produced from that.
This book is kind of a classic Asian American novel in that it’s filled with a lot of delicious food. I wanted to ask about the way food operates in the novel, and specifically, there’s all these really pivotal scenes involving pancit.
I had no idea that I had written about food so much until people started telling me I did. My sense is that I hadn’t written enough and that there was a bunch of shit I had left out. I think it’s weird when I read books and like nobody talks about food—I’m like when do these people eat?
Pancit is a party food, it’s a daily food, but it’s also often a food that you eat on your birthday for long life. What does it mean to choose a life? To eat food that says, Yes, I choose to be here. Between survival and not survival, I’m choosing pancit. I think that those are the kinds of questions that the scenes of pancit bring up for me.
I wanted to talk about the really rich depiction in the novel of the Bay Area at that time. I also grew up in the Bay and I’m also Filipino and so much of the book was really familiar to me. It’s a Bay Area that I haven’t really seen in literature—
Oh my god! You’re like the most important reader.
I was really thrilled to see Vallco mentioned and—
Oh my god, Vallco.
Which is now a dead mall, sadly! And then at the end there’s a scene where Roni is working on a mission project…
Did you have to do a mission project?
I did have to do a mission project and I didn’t even realize until I was an adult just how… fucked up it is to have children make a little miniature of colonial structures.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. “This is where we tortured the Native Americans…”
But I felt like the book really commemorates a Bay Area that doesn’t exist anymore. I haven’t been back to the Bay in a long time but I imagine it has changed a lot in recent years, and I wanted to know your thoughts on writing about the Bay and the Filipino immigrant community there.
Thank you. It’s kind of you to say that it does commemorate it. I hope it does. I grew up in the Bay and I deeply love it. I also have problems with it because that is what it is to deeply love something.
A lot of our depictions of the Bay Area are really depictions of Silicon Valley, or San Francisco—wealthier urban centers, people who went to Stanford. I don’t know anybody in my life who went Stanford. It’s a different Bay Area.
Like lots of people in the Bay Area, I grew up in a majority minority town. In Milpitas in a classroom there was one white kid. That was Milpitas. That was the Bay Area. And so, when I would see depictions of California that didn’t look like us, it was like watching a transmission from Mars. It still all goes back to “make it more banal.” Claiming the cities I grew up in are not only the Bay Area, but are America, is the kind of mundane work that I wanted to commit to in my writing.
Writing about the Bay and writing about the granular detail of the things that make up the lives that I grew out of, of the cities that made me—for me, that was a little bit like worship.
laine Castillo was born, raised and lives in the Bay Area. Her debut novel, America Is Not The Heart, is published by Viking (US/Canada) and Atlantic (UK), with editions from Foksal (Poland), Delcourt (France), Gyldendal (Denmark), Black Button Books (Romania), Solferino (Italy), and Sendik Books (Israel).
Agent Name: Emma Paterson
Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel.
Sailor Moon, strip mall-BBQs, and the diaspora: Fil-Am Elaine Castillo on her debut novel
By Don Jaucian
Updated 17:49 PM PHT Wed, May 2, 2018
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In Elaine Castillo’s debut novel “America Is Not the Heart,” generations of Filipino women grapple with the ravages of the diaspora and struggle to find themselves in an unfamiliar world. Pictured is the U.K. edition of the novel. Book cover from ATLANTIC BOOKS
Manila (CNN Philippines Life) — How many lives can one live? For Hero, short for Geronima, the central character of Elaine Castillo’s debut novel, “America Is Not the Heart,” three decades might mean three vastly different specificities: a señorita at the heart of Marcos country, a doctor who turns her back on her elite upbringing to be an NPA doctor, and now, an immigrant in Milpitas, California, babysitting her uncle’s daughter, trying her best to belong or simply remain invisible in a world so familiar yet so foreign.
Hero’s Milpitas is as much Castillo’s. The author grew up in the Bay Area during the early ‘90s, where Asian, American, and Latino cultures interweave. There’s a Taiwanese store where they buy manga, a Filipino BBQ joint in a strip mall, a Vietnamese beauty salon, and a Mexican restaurant and bakery, among many others. The ‘90s was the time of T.V. shows like “Baywatch,” depicting California in all of its tanned, muscular glory, red swimsuits and all. But for someone who grew up in a place like Milpitas, this was an image far off and, perhaps, even illusory.
“I don’t know who any of those people are,” says Castillo. “I didn’t grow up around that many white people ever. But then you would watch something like ‘Sailor Moon,’ and feel like ‘Ah I get that.’ You had that kind of unconscious sense that this is made maybe by people like us.”
The influence of anime is recognizable in “America Is Not the Heart.” Strewn in chapters are “Lupin the Third” movies, references to the capacity of Ghibli movies to break hearts (including a little spoiler for “Grave of the Fireflies”). VHS tapes are exchanged as stand-ins for proto-intimacy. The comfort of having recognizable pop culture artifacts in an alienating world is something that the characters of the novel hold on to, companions for when your parents are working three jobs, while the friendly neighborhood lola keeps watch.
Elaine Castillo was born in the San Francisco Bay Area to a Pangasinense mother and an Ilocano father, much like one of the characters from her debut novel "America Is Not the Heart." Photo from VIKING/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
But intra-Asian dynamics also play a part in Castillo’s consumption of pop culture. Castillo was told that anything Japanese wasn’t welcome around the house, having relatives who fought against the Japanese in World War II.
“My grandpa was actually like, ‘You’re not allowed to watch any of this Japanese stuff’,” says Castillo. “They had experienced trauma in World War II. It wasn’t a wholly kind of innocent transaction but for us, we were young, we didn’t care, I love ‘Sailor Moon.’”
The anime show was influential for Castillo, who first saw an on-screen depiction of a queer couple in Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune. Wong Kar Wai’s “Happy Together” is also a crucial milestone for an Asian visual of queerness, and Castillo admits that these images were unconsciously collected and then transcribed into her novel, whose lead character Hero is “unapologetically” bisexual.
Castillo is thrilled that her novel — populated with realities familiar to immigrant families and existing outside the White California peddled by hugely popular landmarks such as “Beverly Hills 90210” — allows people of color to recognize themselves, especially in a cultural space where Asian-made works were only granular, yet reassuring, points of reference to recognize and build yourself up on.
The novel comes at a time when depictions of Filipino-Americans are getting mainstream clout. There’s the very Filipino thanksgiving in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” complete with dinuguan, anchored on the character of Hot Asian Bro Josh Chan, played by Vincent Rodriguez III; Nico Santos’ Mateo in “Superstore,” who is probably the first character to speak fluent Filipino in an American network sitcom; and Asian Bro/doofus Jason Mendoza in NBC’s “The Good Place.”
“I would love to be part of anything that increases the visibility of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans in popular culture,” says Castillo, upon the suggestion that her novel is now part of this Fil-Ams in the big leagues thread. But she is quick to point out that she doesn’t want to be the representative, which always presents a burden.
“You kind of feel like, well I have to be on my best behavior because ‘I’m carrying the weight of an entire people behind me.’,” says Castillo. “That’s obviously toxic, you can’t do that. No one really wants to be ‘represented’ … But when we see ourselves in television, when we see ourselves in fiction, I think the real power of that, the joy of that is you see someone telling you you’re real, what you live is real, what you experience is real, what you eat is real, you are part of the real.”
The novel is achingly luminous, written in a ferocious prose that reflects the intersecting cultures of the Bay Area. It is a hardlined look at the lives of Filipinos who are not really Pinoy and not exactly American, grappling with this sense of non-identity, though mostly thanks to society’s prescribed definitions of what makes someone American or Filipino.
Since its release in April, “America Is Not the Heart” has been getting exuberant reviews and coverage, from publications such as Vogue, New York Magazine's Vulture, The Paris Review, and the Chicago Tribune.
CNN Philippines Life recently sat down with Castillo during her brief Manila visit to talk about the parallels between her life and those of her characters, the importance of writing from a queer standpoint, and being a descendant of all the books you’ve read all your life. Below are edited excerpts from the interview.
I’d have to say it was surreal reading your book. I was in my hometown at that time, and drawing parallels of Hero’s recollection of her growing up in Ilocos Sur, it was conjuring my own memories, too, growing up. How is the Bay Area of the book close to the one that you actually grew up in?
Yeah, I grew up in Milpitas where the story takes place, the kind of ‘80s and ‘90s of the Bay Area. I just moved back there now, I’ve been living in London for around eight and a half years. I wrote all of the novel when I was living outside of [the Bay Area]. So going back there now, it’s just really surreal, exactly like you, going in places where [I’d say] “I threw up there when I was a kid!” These kinds of things are completely surreal but also really exciting and to see all of the places that I wrote about in the book and then to [see] they’re still here. Milpitas still smells like shit. [Laughs]. That is a fact. It gives me a lot of joy.
I’m really happy to write about Milpitas especially because towns like Milpitas, it was a majority-minority town for as long as I remember. Since the ‘90s all of our mayors are either Filipino or Vietnamese, which was reflective of the population, and for me that is a very American town. Towns like that are not often depicted in literature as American towns … as American heartland, and why not? Why can’t they be conferred the identity of “This is America,” “This is an American town?” So I think that’s probably, if I have to think of a political or ethical dimension of why I write from there. And also just ‘cause I love it.
“For me it was always a no-brainer to make the language of the book reflect the realities of a community like that and the idea of italicizing or drawing attention to the otherness of those words ultimately assumes the primacy of a reader who is white.”
How did writing in London help you write the novel? How did that distance kind of shape the way you view Milpitas and the way you want it to appear in the novel?
I think I’m just living the cliché that most writers live. [Laughs]. You leave a place and then suddenly you’re writing about it. Suddenly, you have the space and the distance to reflect and be objective. That’s what everybody says. I hate fulfilling a cliché but … I think it it must be true. But I think I was also, at the same time, I was also very, very weary and afraid that that distance was making me romanticize [the place]. I’m not that sentimental, so I think I did work hard … I don’t want to write a fetishistic book about the ‘90s Bay Area, so the distance for sure helped. But then I did have to sort of stay vigilant in a way to not allow that distance to cover everything in rose petals.
A friend who was reading the novel asked, “Is this the ‘100 Years of Solitude’ of the Bay Area?” …
Oh no .. Oh my god. [Laughs].
I remembered it but because of Miguel Syjuco’s “Ilustrado,” which is also about the Filipino diaspora. Both your novels have a lot of shared similarities with Latin American literature, particularly the way diaspora has been depicted. Was that something you were conscious of while working on the book?
No, I don’t think I tried to veer away from it. I think it is true that the particular history of the Philippines and the Filipino American diaspora is very, very close to the history of Latin America and Latin American diaspora. I had a friend who said “The Philippines is another Latin American country,” which is contentious because Filipinos are treated as if they’re not part of Asia. I grew up reading a lot of Latin American writers. I grew up reading a lot of writers in translation, unconsciously I don’t think I was politicizing it at that time, but now that I look back, I think it was proto-political that I was really avoiding white American readers or the classics of white American fiction …
Old white guy literature…
Exactly. Or even English literature. That’s why there are huge pockets of canon that I’ve never read, which I’ve actually started recently and they’re okay. [Laughs]. It turns out George Eliot is kind of pretty good.
I read a lot of Latin American literature, like Manuel Puig, a kind of clear Argentinian writer who wrote really formally and experimentally, who wrote about politics and about queerness, and also about class in a way that really resonated for me; Junot Díaz, I think there’s a whole generation of writers like me who are basically the children of “Drown,” of a book like that.
For me, I never really shy away from comparisons because I am ultimately a reader first and foremost, so the idea that your book is part, in a way, of a family of books, that to me is positive. If you’re a reader, you consider yourself, in a way, a daughter of all of those books.
A striking characteristic of the book is that the Filipino phrases and terms are not italicized, which is contrary to the general practice in publishing and writing, the othering of the non-English language. This is becoming a practice to several writers of color, such as Junot Diaz. How did you go about this decision?
It was absolutely deliberate. Growing up, my father was from Ilocos Sur, my mother’s from Pangasinan, they had those languages between them and they spoke Tagalog to each other and of course English. So I grew up with a mixture of those languages floating around in my house [and] without much border between one of the other. When I was a kid I would speak what I thought was Tagalog [and someone would tell me] “That’s not a Tagalog word.” That was just my reality. It’s an American reality. It’s a reality for a lot of kids like me.
In Milpitas, 60 percent of the population speak a language other than English. So for me it was always a no-brainer to make the language of the book reflect the realities of a community like that and the idea of italicizing or drawing attention to the otherness of those words ultimately assumes the primacy of a reader who is white, English speaking or not a Filipino and I’m not interested in making my word palatable in that way. Ultimately you wanna write in a way that’s palatable to the material, the realities of the particular world that you’re writing about and that includes taking a stand on the kinds of linguistic choices that are also, ultimately, ethical choices because they’re saying “No, this is how you have to come to understand this world.” Concessions are not gonna be made just because you’re English-speaking or white or whatever.
“The way to make incursions in what we would call representation is also to put your faith in people, to commit to be and attentive to writing the kind of granular, intimate material very banal, very mundane, details what it’s like to be a person.”
I also read that you started as a writer with “X-Men” fanfiction, and that comic book mainly deals with mutants as “the other,” and uses mutation as a way to deal with societal alienation and looking for a sense of belonging — as in the manga and anime mentioned in the novel, and this is what Hero was going through.
That type of analysis [about anime and X-Men] has been going around more. Science fiction very much metaphorizes marginalized people or people like immigrants or in my context, people of color, queer people. I don’t know if I necessarily knew that consciously when I was a kid loving “X-Men” or “Sailor Moon” or “Star Trek.” But now when I look back, when I watch those shows again, [they’re] just deeply and politically radical and had so much content in them that obviously would have spoke to someone who felt in a way marginalized in a larger culture.
It’s great that your main character is bi and when you look for relatable representations of queer and Asian — or particularly Filipino — characters in literature, there’s isn’t much. So you have a burden of having one of the few queer Filipino characters in literature — who doesn’t die at the end.
Personally I am bi, so it’s important for me to write bi characters, [and] not just in my writing but in my life. Bi visibility is important for me, and bi erasure is important to me, it’s important that those women will be understood as bi women.
Someone was asking me about these characters [who] are unapologetically queer, [and] they never have that cliché scene where they’re wrestling with their sexuality. No, the thing — not just for LGBT issues but for everything — I am interested in the banal, make it more banal. So for me, even if I have queer characters in the book … just because heteropatriarchy is very real, I don’t want to shy away from the very real homophobia that characters like them would experience, but I also don’t want to make those conflicts then the center of how you depict it. A queer woman who’s also worried about being maybe deported, it’s a queer woman who’s also having to learn to be there for a cousin, it’s a queer woman who has to be there for a new girlfriend who’s going through some shit.
The way to make incursions in what we would call representation is also to put your faith in people, to commit to be and attentive to writing the kind of granular, intimate material very banal, very mundane, details what it’s like to be a person. You know when you watch the movie and you’re like “Oh there’s the queer character, they’re just there in order to, in a way to perform their queerness” I don’t respond to that type of depiction, what I respond to is lives.
Since its release this April, “America Is Not the Heart” has been getting exuberant reviews and coverage, from publications such as Vogue, New York Magazine, The Paris Review, and the Chicago Tribune. The cover of the novel is illustrated by another Filipino American, Matt Vee from Penguin Random House. Photo from VIKING/PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
In one review of “America Is Not the Heart,” there’s a line that goes “If America is not the heart, neither is the Philippines.” It’s interesting how it addresses the imbalance that one is not American or Filipino enough, or possessing character traits that make you American enough or Filipino enough. How do you tackle such an issue?
Pushback against it. Pushback against that idea of unilateral national identity. That idea that you’re either Filipino or American or even the idea that there has to be in anyway a kind of conflict. I’m of the generation but I don’t think I really subscribe to that. Often, first generation melancholy, “I don’t belong in one place …” I don’t actually feel that. I feel like I do belong particularly, I am Filipino-American, that’s the context that I came out of and that itself is a space, a valid space. It doesn’t mean that I wholly belong to one of the other. Why are certain images only allowed to be the markers for national identity?
In one of Hero’s past lives, she is a doctor for the National People’s Army. What kind of research did you do to make sure that this is grounded on something realistic?
Lots of doing my homework, and reading and reading. Luckily I’m a reader, I enjoy reading. There’s tiny bits that are drawn from family lore. There was a cousin that I’ve never met who was in the NPA and lived in exile. But I think she was much of a higher up, or an important person and I knew I did not wanna write about someone who was like an important person, I wanted to write about a loser, this kind of side character. But then also understanding that research is going to protect you, it’s not gonna make the book impenetrable, you will get things wrong, that’s okay. Or ultimately you’re writing fiction, and you’re also writing people. So I think bombarding the reader with historical fact to say “I’m proving all the research I had! I did all my homework!” I think that’s not what produces a book. People won’t really engage with people, they’re just reading your homework.
I asked that because I want to know how you feel about people who will read it and who have actually lived these experiences.
Profund terror! To be completely honest. [Laughs]. I was fully prepared to come to the Philippines this time and just be confronted by hordes of people saying “You got everything wrong! We’re throwing you out of the country! You’re a disgrace to yourself and to your parents!” So far that hasn’t happened yet, thank God.
I think no writer would say that they’re permanently calm about that, that would be a lie. As a writer, you put your faith in that you wanted to write true, human, fully fleshed out and lived characters and hopefully that’s what people respond to. And that people pick up on that and sense your commitment to writing deeply human characters and ultimately, that’s what you can put your faith in, and you just hide! [Laughs]. And you don’t talk to anybody.
***
“America Is Not the Heart” is available at National Book Store.
Elaine Castillo was born and raised in the Bay Area. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in comparative literature. She is a Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation Fellow, and her writing can be found or is forthcoming from Freeman’s, Lit Hub, The Rumpus, and Electric Literature. Her most recent short film, A MUKBANG, was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. “America Is Not the Heart,” published here and in five other countries, is her debut novel.
AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
Michael Magras
BookPage. (Apr. 2018): p20.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 BookPage
http://bookpage.com/
Full Text:
AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
By Elaine Castillo
Viking $27, 416 pages ISBN 9780735222410 Audio, eBook available
DEBUT FICTION
In the current political climate, the need for novels that cast light on the immigrant experience is greater than ever. American literature has had its share of such works in recent years, from Imbolo Mbue's Behold the Dreamers to Lesley Nneka Arimah's magnificent story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky. The latest is Elaine Castillo's debut novel, America Is Not the Heart, a timely book about a prominent family from the Philippines and the circumstances that lead them to America.
The novel--its title a play on America Is in the Heart, a 1946 semi-autobiographical novel by Filipino-American author Carlos Bulosan--begins with Paz, who is studying to become a nurse. While still in the Philippines, she meets her future husband, Pol De Vera, a talented orthopedic surgeon and "the Don Juan of the hospital." Once they move to California, their roles reverse: Paz becomes the family breadwinner, while Pol works as a security guard. Their lives change further when, in 1990, they invite Hero, their niece thought to have died years earlier, to stay with them on a tourist visa.
Hero's story is the focus of the novel, as she develops a close friendship with Roni, the couple's 7-year-old daughter, and accompanies Roni on visits to faith healers who seek to cure the child's eczema. Hero begins a relationship with Rosalyn, the daughter of one of the healers.
Castillo incorporates snippets of the Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan languages throughout her tale, and some of the novel's most memorable scenes depict the decade Hero spends with an armed resistance group that fights against dictator Ferdinand Marcos' government. If Castillo overdoes some details--she references food too often--America Is Not the Heart is still an earnest contribution to the ongoing discussion of immigrant life in America.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Magras, Michael. "AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART." BookPage, Apr. 2018, p. 20. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532528580/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=60bb7ce3. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532528580
Castillo, Elaine: AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 15, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Castillo, Elaine AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART Viking (Adult Fiction) $27.00 4, 3 ISBN: 978-0-7352-2241-0
Castillo's debut novel presents a portrait of the Filipino diaspora, told through the lens of a single family.
Revolving around Hero de Vera--a former rebel (with the scars to prove it) turned au pair of sorts in Milpitas, California--this is a book about identity but even more about standing up for something larger than oneself. The idea is implicit in that name, Hero, though Castillo pushes against our expectations by bestowing it upon a woman fighting patriarchy. Her employer, after all--her sponsor, really--is her uncle Pol, scion of an influential family. For the most part, Castillo tracks Hero's experiences in the San Francisco Bay Area, highlighting two sustaining relationships: the first with Roni, her uncle's school-age daughter, and the second with Rosalyn, with whom she falls in love. The most important relationship in the book, however, is the one she develops with herself. It's not that Castillo is out to write a novel of transformation; Hero is on a journey, certainly, but it's hard to say, exactly, that the circumstances of her existence change. And yet, this is the point, or one of them, that this sharply rendered work of fiction seeks to address. "She wasn't killed...or didn't kill herself," the character reflects. "Tragedy could be unsensational." Unsensational, yes--much like daily life. Castillo is a vivid writer, and she has a real voice: vernacular and fluid, with a take-no-prisoners edge. At the same time, she complicates her narrative by breaking out of it in a variety of places--both by deftly incorporating languages such as Tagalog and Ilocano and through the use of flashback or backstory, in which we learn what happened to Hero before she left the Philippines. There are also two second-person chapters (the rest is told in third-person) that further complicate the point of view. Here, we encounter Pol's wife, Paz, who untangles the intricate ties of family, and Rosalyn, who explains the vagaries of love. Through it all, we have a sense that what we are reading is part of a larger story that stretches beyond the borders of the book. "As usual," Castillo writes, "you're getting ahead of yourself, but there isn't enough road in the world for how ahead of yourself you need to get."
Beautifully written, emotionally complex, and deeply moving, Castillo's novel reminds us both that stories may be all we have to save us and also that this may never be enough.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Castillo, Elaine: AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530650635/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=30895579. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530650635
America Is Not the Heart
Courtney Eathorne
Booklist. 114.11 (Feb. 1, 2018): p22.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
America Is Not the Heart. By Elaine Castillo. Apr. 2018. 480p. Viking, $27 (9780735222410).
This raw and lyrical debut novel tells the story of Geronima "Hero" de Vera, a young Filipino woman who in her three short decades has seen more than her fair share of strife. After living through the political upheaval of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s, Hero is taken in by her uncle, Pol, and his wife, Paz, in the San Francisco suburbs. She is put in charge of caring for her seven-year-old cousin, Roni, and finds Roni's unconditional, if brash, affection to be the healing power that she needs. Throughout the story, much is learned about Hero's past: her parents' disowning of her, her captivity in a prison camp where she was tortured with cigarette burns and the breaking of her thumbs. Though Hero's new life as an immigrant adjusting to America is complicated, the mundane routines and soulful cast of characters she encounters allow her many-times-broken heart to expand and eventually love. Castillo's direct and urgent voice propels the sprawling epic with impressive skill. This unforgettable family saga is not to be missed.--Courtney Eathorne
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "America Is Not the Heart." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2018, p. 22. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527771784/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0a404ce3. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A527771784
America Is Not the Heart
Publishers Weekly. 265.1 (Jan. 1, 2018): p36.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* America Is Not the Heart
Elaine Castillo. Viking, $27 (480p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2241-0
Castillo's debut, a contemporary saga of an extended Filipino family, is a wonderful, nonpareil novel. It opens with Paz, a long-suffering nurse from Vigan who, having immigrated to Milpitas, Calif., shoulders much of the responsibility for her entire family. Her husband, Pol, a member of the De Vera family in the Philippines and once a successful surgeon, had to flee due to political turmoil and take a job as a security guard in the U.S. When their niece Hero arrives, they take her in, and she leads the rest of the story. Hero is burdened with a disturbing political past that she < silently carries with her as she spends her days driving Paz and Pol's daughter, Roni, to school and to the faith healers that Paz finds to treat Roni's eczema. Both Hero and Pol struggle to define themselves. While Hero cautiously tries out new friends and lovers of all ilks--most notably a makeup artist named Rosalyn--Pol's crisis of identity will send him on a journey with Roni that threatens the tenuous American roots Paz has worked so hard to put down for the family. Castillo uses multiple languages--Tagalog, Pangasinan, Ilocano--and the strangest of tenses, hopping around in time and among her characters' heads; that taking all of these risks pays off is a remarkable feat. The result is a brilliant and intensely moving immigrant tale. Agent: Emma Paterson, Rogers, Coleridge & White. (Apr.) Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "America Is Not the Heart." Publishers Weekly, 1 Jan. 2018, p. 36. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A522124959/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=31ab51d4. Accessed 27 May 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A522124959
‘America is Not the Heart’: Poignant tale of a Filipina immigrant’s journey
Originally published May 6, 2018 at 6:00 am Updated May 1, 2018 at 1:18 pm
Elaine Castillo's debut novel shows a mastery of language and style, transporting the reader deep into the traditional culture of the Philippines as well as the immigrant experience in America.
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By Bharti Kirchner
Special to The Seattle Times
Book review
“America is Not the Heart,” a debut novel by Elaine Castillo, can literally be called Hero’s Journey. The “hero,” in this case, is Hero De Vera, a young rebellious Filipina who arrives at her uncle’s home in Milpitas, California, in the 1990s, ostensibly to serve as an au pair. In reality, she’s trying to escape a harrowing situation in the Philippines, where her previous life as a Communist insurgent has left her physically and emotionally scarred. Her new family consists of Pol, a former surgeon; his much younger wife, Paz, a nurse; and their eczema-ridden young daughter Roni.
Although Hero will soon take the center stage, this multigenerational tale, dominated by women characters, opens with Paz. Born into a poor family in the Philippines, Paz grows up in the shadow of a prettier and more popular older sister. While studying to be a nurse, she catches the attention of a wealthy Don Juan of a surgeon named Pol. Eventually, they get married and immigrate to America. Paz, forever self-sacrificing, works several jobs to help her loved ones, never expecting much in return.
Meanwhile, Hero has her hands full with Roni, who turns out to be a problem child in school. No wonder Hero lacks social contacts. But when she meets Rosalyn, a vibrant hairdresser and makeup artist, a shift occurs within her.
The issue of belonging, common to our times, is one of the preoccupations of Castillo’s poignant and emotionally complex novel. “(Y)ou’re starting to understand what it means to have baggage,” so muses a character. “Baggage means no matter how far you go, no matter how many times you immigrate, there are countries in you you’ll never leave.”
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Castillo has an assured voice, which is evident in the novel’s leisurely pacing. Her prose style is uniquely her own, given to sentences that are economical, yet vividly descriptive, albeit occasionally choppy. This mastery of language and style transport the reader deep into the traditional culture of the Philippines as well as the immigrant experience in America. At times her writing can have a jarring and unsettling effect, such as when describing an unsatisfying encounter or an explicit sex scene, but that does not detract from the narrative flow.
Even as a first-time novelist, Castillo is not afraid to experiment with techniques, such as using multiple narrators and making liberal use of foreign languages, such as Tagalog and Ilocano. Effortlessly, she switches between second- and third-person points of view. The prologue, written in second person and set in the Philippines, beautifully exposes Paz’s vulnerabilities. “You already know that the first thing that makes you foreign to a place is to be born poor in it,” she says to herself. “Your word for love is survival. Everything else is a story that isn’t about you.”
In general, the sections and back stories dealing with the Philippines come alive. The characters seem to be more in touch with their environment. On the other hand, the sections set in various parts of Milpitas — strip malls, bars, restaurants and beauty salons — have a sterile, detached quality, a sameness that perhaps reflects the characters’ mundane existence.
Some readers may find the unusually large cast of players, an overabundance of untranslated words and phrases, and a lack of chronology problematic. And there are sections that could have been condensed. Still, this reader felt a deep sense of admiration for this portrayal of the conflicts inherent in the immigrant experience; no small feat for a debut novel.
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“America is Not the Heart” by Elaine Castillo; Viking; 408 pp., $27
Bharti Kirchner