Diego Javier Luis hardly bothers explaining to his readers that of course there were Asians in the Americas centuries before the California Gold Rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. But given the common and almost automatic conflation of the United States with “America”, it can nevertheless come as a surprise that Mexico had entire Asian communities before the Pilgrims even set foot on Plymouth Rock.
Philippines
T his time last year, Penguin Southeast Asia released Amado V Hernandez’s first novel The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit), a classic of modern Filipino literature that had somehow more or less missed the attention of international publishers up to that point. This has been followed, in just the space of just twelve months, with Hernandez’s second and last novel Crocodile Tears—or Luha ng Buwaya, first published in 1962.
“Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed— / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives’ need,” starts Rudyard Kipling’s notorious poem of American expansionism in the Philippines, “The White Man’s Burden”. Those lines will ring familiar to many, particularly those who have received an education in the United States—so widely has the poem become emblematic of American imperialism and the “civilizing mission” during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Despite a slow drip of new writers, Filipino fiction remains relatively thin on the ground, at least from publishers with wide distribution, and at least when compared to writers from such other countries in the region as Japan and Korea. With his debut novel Forgiving Imelda Marcos, Nathan Go joins a club which, while small, contains some illustrious members.
When girls in the Philippines turn eighteen, it’s customary to have a debut, or coming out party at which eighteen male friends or family serve as “roses” and eighteen females as “candles”, thereby making up the debut’s entourage. Mae Coyiuto’s own debut—of a literary variety—is centered around the coming of age party of a Chinese Filipina named Chloe Liang. Chloe and the Kaishao Boys is more layered than the typical, often formulaic young adult novel and combines Chloe’s Chinese Filipino culture with more universal teen issues like pleasing parents and finding independence.
Amado V Hernandez’s The Preying Birds (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, first published in 1969) is a classic of modern Filipino literature and, according to translator Danton Remoto, a required text in Filipino schools. That it is only just now appearing in an international English-language edition is something of a surprise.
Since the English edition of this book first came into my possession, it seemed obvious to me that it should be published in Spanish. Fortunately, after some frustrated attempts, the ever-ready publisher Siruela saw fit to take it on. It is a small book and, therefore, doubly interesting, and not only because of what Baltasar Gracián summed up with the sparkling phrase: “Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno” (“what is good, if brief, is good twice over”). There is another factor, or perhaps two, to take into account. The first is that La Plata y el Pacífico illuminates an essential chapter of universal history, that is, the first stage of economic globalization along the axis of the Pacific via the Manila Galleon or Nao de China, an episode largely unknown to the wider public, whether of English-, Spanish- or Chinese-speaking backgrounds.