The Body Papers: A Memoir

By Grace Talusan

Winner of The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s critically acclaimed memoir The Body Papers, a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, powerfully explores the fraught contours of her own life as a Filipino immigrant and survivor of cancer and childhood abuse.

Born in the Philippines, young Grace Talusan moves with her family to a New England suburb in the 1970s. At school, she confronts racism as one of the few kids with a brown face. At home, the confusion is worse: her grandfather’s nightly visits to her room leave her hurt and terrified, and she learns to build a protective wall of silence that maps onto the larger silence practiced by her Catholic Filipino family. Talusan learns as a teenager that her family’s legal status in the country has always hung by a thread—for a time, they were “illegal.” Family, she’s told, must be put first.

The abuse and trauma Talusan suffers as a child affects all her relationships, her mental health, and her relationship with her own body. Later, she learns that her family history is threaded with violence and abuse. And she discovers another devastating family thread: cancer. In her thirties, Talusan must decide whether to undergo preventive surgeries to remove her breasts and ovaries. Despite all this, she finds love, and success as a teacher. On a fellowship, Talusan and her husband return to the Philippines, where she revisits her family’s ancestral home and tries to reclaim a lost piece of herself.

Not every family legacy is destructive. From her parents, Talusan has learned to tell stories in order to continue. The generosity of spirit and literary acuity of this debut memoir are a testament to her determination and resilience. In excavating such abuse and trauma, and supplementing her story with government documents, medical records, and family photos, Talusan gives voice to unspeakable experience, and shines a light of hope into the darkness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Restless Books
• Release date: Apr 9, 2019
• ISBN: 9781632061843

Grace Talusan

Grace Talusan is an immigrant from the Philippines. She teaches nonfiction writing in the English Department at Brown University. She has received support from United States Artists, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Brother Thomas Fund, the Fulbright, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council with residencies at Ragdale, Hedgebrook, Vermont Studio Center, Mass MOCA, and others. The Body Papers won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Massachusetts Book Award for nonfiction, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, and was recognized by the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center with the Beacon Award. Talusan graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine, and is on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

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Praise for The Body Papers

"Grace Talusan writes eloquently about the most unsayable things: the deep gravitational pull of family, the complexity of navigating identity as an immigrant, and the ways we move forward even as we carry our traumas with us. Equal parts compassion and confession, The Body Papers is a stunning work by a powerful new writer who—like the best memoirists—transcends the personal to speak on a universal level."

Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere

"[A] precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays. . . . The Body Papers doesn’t track a one-way march to triumph from adversity; Talusan’s essays loop in on themselves, as she retrieves old memories and finds unexpected points of connection. . . . Talusan describes such experiences with unadorned prose that conveys a startling specificity. . . . Such commentary, while righteous and earned, is not the point of this indelible book. Talusan has the instincts of a storyteller, teasing out her narrative through images and allusion."

Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times

"The Body Papers is an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor. From a legacy of trauma and secrecy spanning oceans and generations, Grace Talusan has crafted a wise, lucid, and big-hearted stand against silence—a literary lifeline for all who have endured profound pain and hope to be seen and loved through it."

Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

"Grace Talusan’s finely-wrought and eloquent memoir, The Body Papers . . . was the winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. The book is visceral, bodily, and throbs with pain and trauma—sexual abuse by a family member, cancer, the phantom-limb ache of an outsider in a foreign land, and later, as an outsider in the homeland. In less skilled hands, it all might be too much to bear, but Philippines-born Talusan . . . brings us along in spare, specific, sense-rich detail, and reveals, along the way, the power to be found in giving a name to the unnamable, in giving language to subjects and experiences that defy it. Therein, Talusan shows, one can find the possibility of healing what’s happened in the past, as well as moving into the future with gratitude, wisdom, and strength."

Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe

"But what renders the book memorable—perhaps what earned it the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing—is the author’s unstinting self-portrait. . . . At the doctor’s office, she weeps for the children she will never have, assuaged only by the unshakable love between her and her husband. In such powerful, evocative scenes as this one, The Body Papers comes fully alive. Now a lecturer at Tufts University, Talusan chronicles that fraught passage from one world, one body, to another, marking with sensitivity how an American life can be both burden and benediction."

Luis H. Francia, The New York Times Book Review

Awarded the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Talusan bravely alchemizes unbearable traumas into a potent memoir remarkably devoid of self-pity, replete with fortitude and grace.

Terry Hong, Booklist

A Filipino-American writer’s debut memoir about how she overcame a personal history fraught with racism, sexual trauma, mental illness, and cancer. . . . Moving and eloquent, Talusan’s book is a testament not only to one woman’s fierce will to live, but also to the healing power of speaking the unspeakable. A candidly courageous memoir.

Kirkus Reviews

"Grace Talusan makes use of immigration papers, legal certificates, and medical test results in her memoir about immigration, trauma, and illness. The winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing for Nonfiction, The Body Papers is timely and compelling."

R. O. Kwon, Electric Literature

"Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers is one of the fiercest and most intimate books I have ever read. It is a memoir of immigration, of multiculturalism, of family betrayals and loving binds, and deeply a memoir of the body: about the documents and silences that regulate it, and the memories and emotions that live inside it. Talusan has written an urgent and necessary testament for our time. Reading it left me raw. Reading it will change you."

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder & A Memoir

In this moving, clear-eyed memoir, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, she probes the events of her life, documenting them with photographs and official papers. She involves the reader in her quest to make sense of who she has become by charting where she’s been. . . . The portrait Talusan creates of her father, Totoy, is one of the most complex and beautiful parts of the book. . . . Talusan is still working on healing. It’s clear that telling her story with such openness and perceptiveness, is part of that ongoing process.

Jenny Shank, Barnes & Noble Blog

"In The Body Papers, Grace Talusan takes us to the space between what official documents say and what the body’s cells know—the understated prose startles with its beauty, the insights it provides are priceless."

Marie Myung-Ok Lee, author of Somebody’s Daughter

Grace Talusan is honest and elegant about some of life’s most difficult moments. . . . and it isn’t only her own story, as she writes in her author’s note: ‘While everyone has the right to report their own lives, I know that telling my secrets impacts other people.’ Yet ultimately, she concludes that she wrote the book for herself, ‘and for you, the living, and for those who come after [her].’ For that, we the living are grateful.

Ilana Masad, Nylon

"In The Body Papers, Grace Talusan positions her memoir as a series of bodies: the body of the family, the body of a city, the body of a culture and a heritage, and all link inextricably back to the personal body that Talusan inhabits. The topics she explores are numerous, which could become overwhelming if not for her undaunted prose, the connections drawn between images. The memoir itself becomes a body—many parts cooperating, an alliance of movement. It would be too simple to say this is a brave book. Talusan guides us, so we see what must be seen about how a body survives, the danger from within and without. . . . But in each of these narratives, Talusan finds a way to reflect on love, community, and responsibility—even in their most broken, desperate forms. . . . With The Body Papers, Talusan offers to cross with you, through distress and danger, always moving the body forward."

Joy Clark, The Arkansas International

In eloquent and oftentimes profound prose, Talusan examines her actions and the actions of others around her without self-pity, without assigning blame, and ultimately embraces big-hearted gratitude. And we, the readers, especially Filipino and Filipino-American readers, are equally grateful for Talusan’s gift of prose, of self-examination, of sharing her journey. Most importantly, we are grateful that she has paved the way for others to break the silence and become empowered through the written word.

Patty Enrado, Positively Filipino

There is so much to admire in this brave and fierce and deeply intimate memoir, most notably the author’s unsentimental and plainspoken approach to her material. There are no fireworks of language here, no false flourishes designed to obscure or somehow extract beauty from the events she recounts with unflinching clarity. Talusan simply demands that the reader pay attention: to make the rich and often devastating connections among the events of her life: some harrowing, some tender, all of them delivered with honesty and forthrightness. The memoir is told in thematic sequences in which the author and the family come continually to light, but only in flashes; these flashes get brighter as we read, and by the end we see everyone in their full humanity, and we fully comprehend the depths of both despair and love at their core. As a child of immigrants, I found much to relate to in the family dynamics -- alternately laughing and shuddering with recognition.

Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men

Wow, this memoir/essay collection, Grace Talusan’s debut The Body Papers (Restless Books, 2019), is yet another one to add to what has been an extraordinary year in this genre. . . . The weight and heft of the work changes dramatically at this point, precisely because Talusan is moving across many years of trauma. This process of working through is obviously painful but enables Talusan a chance to bring light to the complex dynamics of the Filipino/a American family. Eventually, it is evident that Talusan’s parents understand how important it is to support her, even if it means another kind of rupture in relation to the larger extended family. For Talusan, the site of the body is the site not only of identity, but of conflict, trauma, and ultimately reconstitution. I appreciated the thoughtful, incisive tonality throughout, and the work will no doubt receive attention through course adoptions and scholarly analysis.

Stephen Hong Sohn, Asian American Literature Fans

"Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers pulls Filipino American memoir to the forefront of Asian American conscience with heartbreaking prose, taking on the impact of immigration, sexual abuse, medical trauma, and the diaspora via the documentation of—and a meditation on—brownness and her body. With conversational lucidity and subtle, direct prose, Talusan unveils an account of suffering—the short-and long-term impacts of unaddressed mental health needs, becoming a citizen, systematic racism, cancer, fertility, and filial piety. . . . In this unvarnished, graceful memoir, Grace Talusan delves into the most intimate to tell us unforgettable stories from her body. The Body Papers is a double-ringed narrative where immigration is more than regional displacement, family is both destructive and restorative, and trauma presents and re-presents itself in a number of ways across her lifetime. This astonishingly brave work breathes life into a past that most would hope to forget. Talusan, however, does something different. She offers a meditative tour of immigration, trauma, and family. The Body Papers beats a different drum of triumph and sings a rare song of honesty; the book is an understated marvel that continues to sound even after the story is finished."

Lisa Factora Borchers, The Millions

For mga pamangkin, who I love like my own children

For those who told their stories first so that I could tell mine

For Alonso, my love, my family

Grace age 7 (center) with sisters Ann (left) and Tessie (right).

Contents

Author’s Note

1 How to Make Yogurt in Manila

2 Crossing the Street

3 My Father’s Noose

4 Little Bud

5 My Mother’s Silver Scissors

6 Arm Wrestling with My Father

7 Deportable Alien

8 The Gentle Tasaday

9 They Don’t Think Much About Us in America

10 Family Animals

11 Monsters

12 Man in the Mountain

13 Unspeakable Sadness

14 The Bullet in the BVM’s Crown

15 Yellow Children

16 The Small Red Fox

17 Foreign Bodies

18 Carriers

19 Pasalubong

20 A Way of Coming Home

21 Balikbayan

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Reading Group Discussion Questions

An Interview with Grace Talusan and Joanne Diaz

About the Author

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Author’s Note

My story is not only my story. While everyone has the right to report their own lives, I know that telling my secrets impacts other people. To preserve their privacy, I have changed the names of most living family members and friends who appear here. In some instances, I named people with a Tagalog word for our kinship tie.

This book is a memoir and is based on my memories, but I also cross-referenced documents, photographs, records, timelines, elementary school report cards, and the journals I’ve kept since I was a child. Still, some may dispute my recollection of events. Others may wish I had not written down such things for everyone to see.

Because I wanted to protect others from my story, I did not share or write about these memories as nonfiction for a long time. Once I became an aunt and held my niece for the first time, tiny and only days old, I realized how dangerous it was to protect the wrong people by telling only the happy stories. Lies of omission created the conditions that allowed someone more powerful than me to hurt and exploit me for most of my childhood.

At this point, I’ve waited long enough that many implicated in this book have died. I didn’t write this book for them. I wrote it for me, and for you, the living, and for those who come after me.

the

BODY PAPERS

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1

How to Make Yogurt in Manila

Grace leaning out of the window at her mother’s family home about a three-hour drive north of Manila. The compound was commandeered in World War II by the Japanese military as a headquarters and later taken over by the U.S. Army after the Japanese withdrew. Photo: Alonso Nichols.

The recipe for yogurt can be contained in a single sentence: add a spoonful of yogurt to scalded milk and leave it alone in a warm place until it thickens.

It’s a deceptively simple recipe that doesn’t fully describe the process. The first time I made yogurt, I was in the closet-sized kitchen of my long-term rental in Manila. I wrapped a towel around the warm pot of heated milk as if it were a baby fresh from the bath and tucked it into the microwave oven, the door ajar so that the light bulb stayed on. I let it sleep until morning. I felt the anticipation and excitement of a childhood Christmas morning as I reached into the microwave and unwrapped the towel. The pot felt warm, but it didn’t slosh. I lifted the lid and broke the white surface with my spoon. The milk had thickened into a creamy solid. At first, I was reluctant to put the warm substance into my mouth, but it was delicious. Smooth, mild, and unlike anything I’d ever tasted. It was such an unexpected marvel that I walked a spoonful to the bedroom and woke my husband Alonso from a deep sleep so that he could taste the magic too.

My beginner’s luck motivates me to try for perfection again and again. I experiment with different processes, shorter and longer incubation periods, and several brands and fat contents of milk and yogurt starter. I use the milk of cows, goats, and even carabao, the Asian water buffalo. I play around with the consistency by straining the yogurt in cheesecloth or by adding powdered milk. Powdered milk in the Philippines is a revelation. This is not the chalk dust of my American childhood. Opposite the baby formula aisle is adult milk, an exquisite yellowish powder that tastes like clouds and sweetness, like your mother soothing you back to sleep after a nightmare.

Eventually, I decide that carabao yogurt yields the best results. Filipino farmers depend on the carabao for growing rice and sugar; for transportation; and for milk, meat, hides, and horns. When we travel outside of the city, I always look for the hefty carabao stepping slowly through the flooded rice paddies—a beautiful brown beast amidst a landscape of palm fronds and grasses. The green looks electric after being in a city of skyscrapers, condo buildings, and malls—with its haze of gray dust covering everything and everyone. Every night in the megalopolis, I wash this dust off my skin, comb it from my hair, and blow it out my nose.

*

For the first time since I was two years old, I am living in the country where I was born. I visited the Philippines briefly with my parents a few times in my twenties and honeymooned there with my husband in my thirties, but this time I will stay here half a year, long enough for me to celebrate my forty-second birthday. We’ve rented a studio apartment from my cousin Jojo in BGC, Bonifacio Global City, a high-end shopping and entertainment area in Metro Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. This is the land where I began, Luzon, one of 7, 641 islands, give or take, that comprise the body of this archipelago nation. I’ve returned to the place where I was born because I’ve always had the feeling that I was missing something, like the insistent ache of a phantom limb.

*

I could not imagine what my life in the Philippines would look like, which made planning for it difficult. My husband and I prepared for the journey over many months: shopping for mosquito spray and sunscreen, subletting our apartment, settling job responsibilities, and filling out government forms. I worried about access to clean drinking water and how best to traverse Manila, famous for its gridlock. I spent hours with my sisters auditioning just the right song I could perform in case someone handed me the requisite karaoke mic at a Filipino party. I had read in an alarming article in the New York Times that people had been killed for sub-par renditions of Frank Sinatra’s My Way.

I had fewer immigration hurdles to navigate than my American-born colleagues on the same Fulbright fellowship trip, whose blood and stool were tested before they were granted a visa by the Philippine consulate. Unlike them, I could invoke balikbayan privilege as a former Filipino resident. At the travel clinic, my husband and I submitted to vaccines for rabies, hepatitis, and typhoid, and were given a yellow card certifying the ways we had protected our bodies from the threats we were about to encounter.

During the preparations, I had joined a Facebook group for foreign women living in Manila. Many of the women in the group, although not all, are the non-Filipino spouses of men who work for their home nation’s consulates, global corporations, or nonprofits. As wives and mothers, they share information about the best doctors, schools, supermarkets, and other concerns. They are like me and not like me.

Upon arriving at my rental, which had not been occupied for over a year, I discovered it had been taken over by tiny ants. They traversed in orderly lines across the bathroom, kitchen, and under my bed, and when I woke up in the mornings, I swear I could feel them crawling over my scalp. When I reached the last of my drinking water, contained in an opaque blue plastic box, I was horrified to discover it thick with drowned ants. The women in the Facebook group suggest borax and solve my ant problem quickly and permanently.

Many posts in the group are devoted to the topic of household helpers: how much to pay them, how many days of vacation and sick time to give them, which ones are available for work, which ones to avoid. Help is cheap, and you don’t have to be wealthy to have a household staff of drivers, housecleaners, and a nanny for each child. I often feel uneasy reading the complaints the women from Australia, Europe, and the U.S. have about their Filipino helpers, but still I post a request for a housecleaner recommendation. Someone explains that there are four kinds of people in the Philippines: A, B, C, and D. Your grade correlates with your wealth, social connections, education, and skin tone. Helpers are not generally A and B grade people, she says, and without their ma’am by their side, they could never get past the security guarding the glass doors of elite shopping malls.

The first person I hire to clean