Carlos Bulosan and the Struggle for Asian American Freedom: Part II
As I described in the first part of this essay, Carlos Bulosan’s humanist vision of freedom was articulated through his deep attention to the material conditions of Filipino life—life characterized by social marginalization, colonial servitude, and racial prejudice. It is this context that ties Bulosan to a tradition of critical modern American intellectuals and, I believe, continues to endow his writing with contemporary significance.
Bulosan, 1951. University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, POR1438. Used with permission.
As a modern, Bulosan pays great attention to the interiority of the self and its relationship to material conditions. The modern, colonial, Filipino self is enclosed by despair, which for Bulosan is not too different from Søren Kierkegaard, who insists that despair is a state in which a self does not recognize its freedom. One crucial difference is that for Bulosan, despair is as much a matter of external circumstances as it is an internal state. Freedom is limited precisely because social conditions place genuine limits on Filipinos/as: in the threat of being lynched, of having to travel miles on end as cheap labor, of living in tenantry conditions with no promise of a better life. The message of these conditions says that Filipino bodies are cheap, expendable, unworthy, and ultimately, nothing. And the despair arrives precisely in succumbing to the belief that there is absolutely no point in struggling against these conditions. “I almost died within myself,” Bulosan’s protagonist of America is in the Heart says to himself. “The days of hunger and loneliness came. Aching hunger and stifling loneliness.” With clear eyes and desperation, the narrator confesses he has come “face to face with brutality.” The narrator goes on, “I was terribly afraid of myself, for it is the beast, the monster, the murder of love and kindness that would raise its dark head to defy all that was good and beautiful in life.”
Bulosan blames modern despair in the United States at least partly on the culture of fundamentalism present at the time of his writing. “You know yourself that the ordinary American is often suspicious of the man of learning and the artist,” he writes. And his critique is even directed toward Filipino/as. “Most of the Filipinos I know have no intellectual growth and are without social understanding,” he confesses. “In fairness, I suppose this is true of all peoples. They do not read, not that they cannot read, but they do not care for good books. Without reading, and with only hard work and good times and their abnormal social life here, many are dead inside.”
One can feel Bulosan’s modern conviction that education is essential to democracy and freedom. He is, in this regard, united to authors like Frederick Douglass and, more recently, Min Jin Lee, Cornel West, and Elaine Castillo, notable intellectuals who talk explicitly on the political significance of the act of reading. Douglass, in particular, tells us that reading intensified his desire for freedom. Reading, he says, “had given me a view of my wretched condition…”, turning Douglass back to his own situation with a critical disposition. In the essay On My Education, Bulosan tells us he studied Herman Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Walt Whitman. He was particularly attracted to writers who “stayed near their roots and walked proudly in familiar streets.” He brings this insight to bear in nearly all his writing—from his short stories to his letters, his poetry, and his two novels. But it is especially present in an essay he titled How My Stories Were Written, an account of his time from his childhood in the Philippines and the inspiration he gleaned from his village storyteller, a kind of Filipino Socrates. “Laughter is the beginning of wisdom,” he tells the young Carlos. Keep your heart close. Tell the stories of your people. If Bulosan was going to be a truly radical writer, he would need to face Filipino America, in its ugliness and glory, in its despair and its hope.
Bulosan died in 1956, and just a few years later the expanding civil rights movement would grow to national proportions. Labor organizing on the West Coast would take hold, too, fomenting cross-racial solidarity in a movement we now know as the Delano Grape Strike. Mexicans and Filipinos/as and African Americans would protest farm produce like grapes, demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Was this the struggle for freedom that Bulosan anticipated ten years earlier when, in his conclusion to his letter in The New Republic, he writes that “the old world will die so that the new world will be born with less sacrifice and agony for the living …”? It seemed so, as genuine rights were being won. Even Martin Luther King Jr. was trying to radicalize the political potential of the movement, with his fiery critiques of class exploitation and American militarism in response to a struggling labor movement and the Vietnam War. But then King was assassinated, alongside Medgar Evers and Malcom X and Fred Hampton.
Today, Asian American freedom continues to be constrained. Filipino/a nurses in the United States died of COVID-19 at rates higher than other nurses during the early pandemic. Violence against Asian Americans skyrocketed as Donald Trump cast blame through a decidedly anti-Chinese rhetoric. This anti-Chinese mantle has been taken up by Ron DeSantis’s recent bill restraining the kinds of property Chinese citizens are allowed to purchase. Meanwhile, Biden has rekindled an alliance with the Philippines, just months after the United States announced its military occupation of four bases in Cagayan, Isabela, and Palawan. In all of this, one is reminded of America’s perennial, and perhaps inevitable, contradiction, that its democracy remains tainted by nativist, white-supremacist, and militaristic sentiment. Seeing these conditions from within, or as the horizon of what is to come, we can turn to Bulosan, that sickly and oft-forgotten Filipino American writer who was ever committed to the struggle for freedom and warned of its “mortal danger, from within and without, from selfishness and greed, from the terror of the powerful who want more power.”
Colton Bernasol is a writer and editor based in Chicago, Illinois. You can find more of his writing here.