A River, One-Woman Deep: Stories

By Linda Ty-Casper

Award-winning Filipina writer, Linda Ty-Casper, who is noted for her historical fiction set in the Philippines, presents a new collection entitled, A RIVER, ONE-WOMAN DEEP: STORIES The book includes her novella of the same title and short stories.

 

Her novella is set during the tumultuous Estrada years from 1998 to 2001 when the Philippine president rose to power and was impeached after massive rallies. The main character is a Philippine American woman who uncovers a family secret during her visit to Manila, a secret caused by another traumatic event in the Philippines -- World War II.

 

The other stories in her collection are about Filipino and Philippine American women. These stories, as well as her earlier works, are about characters whose lives have been changed by historical events. So powerful were/are the author's character-driven stories, that her books Fortress in the Plaza and Wings of Stone were banned in the Philippines during the Marcos dictatorship. Readers International of London published both novellas.These two novellas continue to be read and studied by Filipinos who are dealing with the current Philippine drug war and extrajudicial killings.

 

PRAISE by World Literature today

In this collection of stories, Filipina American Linda Ty-Casper runs her fingers along the scars left behind in the wake of historical events in the Philippines, parsing out what it means to live through and after the trauma of dictatorships and war. Her sobering descriptions of the intersection of the global and personal create a moving narrative, brimming with strength and humanity. 

 

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: PALH
• Release date: Nov 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781953716347

Book preview

For Len and Roma

CONTENTS 

Introduction by Nilda Rimonte

Happy

Celery, Tulips and Hummingbirds

Hills, Sky and Longing

Sometimes my Body Remembers Singing

Application for a Small Life

After the Tinker

Where Unburied the Fig Tree Lies

A Small Party in a Garden

A River, One-Woman Deep

Author’s Bio 

Introduction

By

Nilda Rimonte

The subject of identity is a preoccupation of Linda Ty-Casper’s fiction—perhaps not surprising for an expat writer. But it is not so much cultural identity and its dislocations, staple of immigrant writing, that she broods over. It is about moral identity. Rich or poor, her characters confront an urgent need to make a choice: between conscience and convenience, self-gratification and selfless service; between, in short, a self and a better self—what they are now and what they can be.

How they arrive at this choice is the plot of much of her fiction where often nothing, or very little, seems to happen. Yet, her task is heavy and hard. She maps out their internalized to-ing and fro-ing, their evasions and vacillations, their steps forward and backward, their ups and their downs—as they approach that critical moment when they have to make a choice. And that choice will ultimately define who and what they are, as individuals and as a people. It is a contest that frequently reminds me of two lines from two poems: One from Yeats: Turning and turning in the widening gyre; the other from Donne: Batter my heart three-personed God... For the act of choosing is not as simple as clicking button A or button B.  It is a wrestling with the self that entails ruptures and brokenness, gains and losses, leaving a trail of blood, gore and discombobulating uncertainties in the lacerated consciousness.

Sometimes her characters do end up choosing.  But even when they don’t, the reader cannot but imagine that nothing will ever be the same again, for them as for their community. For even by choosing not to choose, they assert their dignity; merely realizing that they have a choice is empowering.  No longer mere will-less victims, subject to the kicks and blows of politics and history, they must now prepare to live with the consequences—fully alert to themselves as the central protagonist—of the drama they have unleashed with their action.

Exemplifying this conundrum are two of Ms. Ty-Casper’s most perfectly realized novellas, Awaiting Trespass (1985) and Wings of Stone (1986).  Telly in Awaiting, after nearly a lifetime of dithering, finally decides to join the anti-dictatorship fight, while in Wings, the reader finds herself waiting to see which road Johnny/Juaniyo Manalo will finally take.

Looking Back

Ms. Ty-Casper’s interest in exploring issues of identity was already notable in her first collection, The Transparent Sun and Other Stories (1963).  Privileged or impoverished, her characters are obliged to make a decision apparently driven by the need to protect their personal honor and preserve their dignity, when they are not trying to shore up an unstable sense of self.  Rich Don Julio, for example, must decide if he should yield to the importunings of his spoiled young wife and give her the beautiful gold necklace that she covets; or keep his palabra de honor and offer it to an impoverished cousin, who not only needs it to live, but has a prior claim to it. The peasant Mang Agusto persuades himself that he must avenge his sense of honor even if it means taking the life of the man who had forcibly dispossessed him of the land his life depends on. 

Personal honor is also the subject of the novel, The Peninsulars (1964). Here, true to the Spanish tradition, sense of honor is conflated with a definition of manhood and its implications of courage and the warrior ethic. But as her characters pursue this badge of hispanidad, we discover a desperate clawing for an idea of who they really are.

The first time I read this novel, I was angered by what I thought was an attempt to humanize the colonizers to render their atrocities and inhumanities forgiveable. Re-reading, I discovered the author was writing about a lot more: the relation of destiny to identity, of courage and cowardice, of the life- versus the death-instinct; and of the colonized, whose lives, both similar and different from their rulers, were bound by the same demands of moral identity. It has since become one of my favorite works by Ms. Ty-Casper.

A Meditation on Memory

The writer continues her exploration of identity in the present collection. She focuses this time on personal identity and the role of memory in all but one of the stories.

The Ani of the novella recalls Johnny Manalo of Wings. Both long-term expats in the U.S., they return impulsively to Inang Bayan, perhaps to reclaim their birthright, definitely to know who, finally, they are. Both adopted as infants, they are haunted by illegitimacy, if not a suspicion of it, as if that fact alone should determine their identity. Because Ani is not faced with an urgent need to choose, the tone in this novella is largely meditative, has none of the tensions of Wings or even Awaiting. Again and again she returns to fragments of memories she has saved from her happy childhood in the bosom of her aunts who raised her. 

But Ani’s memories are incomplete; relatives have to fill them in, both with theirs that are, importantly, entwined with historical and political events, and with their filial acts. An uncle offers her the last bit of his once extensive patrimony as legacy, having chosen her as the most deserving of the younger generation. Another gives her a pendant that he might have bestowed on a daughter if he had one. From both she absorbs hints that her birth was unusual. She had been born twice, the second time when the aunts kept her and loved her fiercely as their own, despite their inability to show it. The present of a birth certificate is almost anti-climactic: already she knows now to whom she belongs.

Uncle Peping in the novella declares, We have problems because we have no memories. What is he saying? Do we have an obligation to remember? Apparently we do. For it is in remembering that we are able to connect the dots. Remembering is how the past communicates with the present, without which we would not even exist, let alone know who we are. Personal memory is dialogic, it is collective; and as a record of choices—both ours and not ours—it is history.

In the stories—by women and mostly about other women—the characters continue to excavate their past by unspooling their memories—or not. The immigrant young woman in the first story rejects her memories, why we are not told, though how she could live without them, short of getting her hippocampus excised, is another question. But someone who deliberately turns back on her past suggests a shielding of a fearful wound that cannot survive sun or air; unless this is a first step towards self-reinvention. In another, a mother recalls the power struggle she had with her headstrong young daughter and wonders if she had loved her enough. A middle-aged daughter, resentful for feeling unloved, is surprised by her discovery of a small room that contain the relics and souvenirs of her life, all lovingly preserved. Another young woman searches her memories for clues as to who her real father might be. In these stories—and there are others—the characters examine their past, query their self-interpretations, trying to discover the truth of their lives.

The very last story, apparently excerpted from an earlier novella, depicts a harrowing moment of truth for the central character. She had previously distanced herself from the realities round her despite the suasions of her father, preferring the safety of her job with the dictator’s wife. How would the experience change her? Oddly, though the story potentially explores the issues of choice, it doesn’t seem to belong in this collection. 

I wish someone would collect Ms. Ty-Casper’s works and re-issue them in the U.S. No one else has consistently explored in fiction the historical and political events of Inang Bayan to the extent she has. Reading about their past, from the Philippine-American wars through the Martial Law years and after might teach her readers—especially Filipino-Americans—something about themselves as a measure for how far they have come. And that will be a gift.

For Ms. Ty-Casper portrays her people as thinking  human beings grappling with moral issues as though they were matters of life or death—which they sometimes are—grieving when they fail. Such a portrait is a poke in the eye of those who would stereotype them as simple-minded, chattering monkeys mired in corruption and consumed by thoughtless greed.  It isn’t that I wanted Filipinos to come out as victors, Ms. Ty-Casper once said in a private communication, ... but to show we have honor and dignity to recover. And how she has succeeded.

***

Happy

During the week she clerks in the craft shop where, looking across Sausalito Bay to Angel Hill past the marina and houseboats floating no higher than eight feet above mud-bottom at low tide, she thinks of going to Muir Woods. But she never goes.

It's only ten, fifteen minutes away by U.S. 101 or California 1. Twelve miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, it's open all year round, up to sunset.

Four days a week she answers questions about vases edged with pumice, pink stoneware throats fleshlike, quietly alive. No, it will not separate; the rocks are part of the process, she tells customers, and thinks of the fog that waters the needles of redwoods rising up to 367 feet along the upper coast, a narrow strip indicated by a red gash in the map on the information booth by the entrance to the marina; imagines the Stellar jays scolding the wind sweeping over silver salmon and steelheads that populate the sorrel carpet of the Woods. 

It's been only months since she moved to Sausalito from the barrio in San Francisco which hangs about Saint Patrick, where Mass was celebrated after Ninoy Aquino was assassinated in ‘83, and where her mother used to take her until she learned to make excuses so she would not have to walk home Sundays with people who, since emigrating to the West Coast, had only hard-luck stories to exchange.

Sausalito is a different mindset. Safe from common memories, she can call herself Velvet there. Just Velvet? Just! And wear her hair thick and long, a rippling dark shawl; or shaved to the ear on the left. And stand beside vases taller than herself, drawing stares with her silence. Stand almost without moving, without blinking: someone posing for the light, allowing it to move about her the way cameras move around a model, picking out flattering shadows.

Barbara hired her on first impression. She went to the shop in a long cotton cape with bright yellows and greens, strange windows on a purple field. I'm Velvet, she said. Very ethnic with her straight bluish black hair and broad, high cheekbones; a tiny mouth stained coral red, open wound-like; stark.

People look in, see the vases and her—shadows of each other—and enter to see if she speaks; if so, what she might say. Some days she wears tartans, the badge of clans in Scotland where she has never been. Instead of a gold safety pin she lets the skirt fly. On her dark skin people see cultures in collision; coalescence. They come in to see if her flesh is warm. Some days she wears a saya with butterfly sleeves; other days, unrelieved white, like white-on-white paintings, with a Tausug belt of many beads, and bells from Mindanao.

Where do you shop? Customers ask.

Here and there, she answers.

Barbara wears jeans and loose Madras. Beside each other, they appear to impersonate the architectural collage of different-style houses side by side along highways, like continents that have slid into each other. In Manila they lived on a street named Santa Barbara where the Spanish barracks used to be, very close to the old Spanish walls beside the bay. It amused Barbara to be told her namesake is the patron saint of artillerists.

Since moving to Sausalito, a year after her parents died in that car crash heading for Big Sur past Monterey, she has not gone anywhere. When she’s not working, she sits all day by her window, watching boats that appear anchored with concrete bottoms to Sausalito Bay, making distance slowly toward Angel Hill.

Still not been to Muir Woods? Barbara asks her Mondays when she returns to work. Go. Go see trees the height of five-story buildings with no taproots to the water table. It's coastal fog that waters them. Some are a thousand years old. Go with Stanley. Don’t waste weekends.

No hurry, Velvet thinks. The trees will be there longer than forever, with towering white fog to feed them. Fog running along the coast like the faint capillaries of color on the tender vases Barbara fires.

She does not want to go; or talk about her great grandfather who jumped ship when he saw her great grandmother passing by the Luneta, along Manila Bay, in a two-wheeled quelis. Long ago in memory not hers. Why ever mention her cousin in Metro Manila who trains pigeons to race? His birds land on trees or electric wires, and not until they get down to the ground are they judged to have returned.

She is weeding out all memories from her life, fighting them when they come unbidden while she stands, darker than the bark of redwood, shimmering inside a caftan beside a vase slashed across by stones that mimic riverbeds dried out by summer. She thinks many things in their place, things she will not say while waiting for Sunday, any Sunday, to see if she’ll go to Muir Woods across from Mt. Tamalpais on U.S. 101.

She likes to think of the redwoods which have been covering much of the Northern Hemisphere since about 140 million years ago. According to the tourist map, three noted species remain, each within a limited range with roots no deeper than thirteen feet into the soil. Spend the day, the brochure suggests. Walk past Cathedral Grove to Fern Creek. Take a different trail each time. It's mostly level. Mostly paved, except for trails that lead to Mt. Tamalpais. In a rainstorm the creeks become torrential, running down to Muir Beach....

There's poison oak and stinging nettles, according to Barbara who named a vase Nettles. Once you get the rash, you get it for seven consecutive years whether you brush against them again, or not.

All of Barbara's vases have names. Saragh is radish-white with purple veins. Anglo nude, Velvet calls it. Muir has redwood cones along one side; rough as bark hiding heartwood. A couple from Seattle bought Muir, ordering a birdbath to match. Customers think the vases are Velvet's creations because she explains the technique without consulting the catalogues, breathlessly; while in the backroom Stanley fashions crates for each vase.

Barbara thinks Stanley is tres creative. With him it's instinct. Look at his hands. Did anyone teach Van Gogh? You're creative, too, Velvet. Right now, with yourself. You look like my vases.

She lets Barbara talk on and on, just like the radio in her apartment spinning songs and talking just like another person in the bathroom; turning the place vibrant with its staccato. She keeps the radio on day and night. Yah, yah, she talks back to it from time to time. Depending on how she feels, she'll throw it a smile; or crack a joke back. Repartee in the dark. With strangers.

She calls it Happy, sits across it while she paints her toes the pink color of Barbara's Zamboanga vase, winking back at the faces on the wall tiles, marble veins giving the impression of photographs in a gallery.

Her favorite is the one with downcast eyes, lower lip hanging like a cigarette. It reminds her of Markham who works as a guide in the Hess Winery built into the old Christian Brothers monastery carved out of the hills, with the sky stretched over the vineyard. State-of-the-art equipment; galleries of modern Swiss and American artists. It's $2.50 to taste the wine.

She never took his invitation to tour the winery. She has no strong desires though she's nineteen when hormones supposedly peak and move coffee breaks into bedrooms. The other girl who worked for Barbara, but left after she trained Velvet, talked of tussles among white lace pillows. She told Velvet she comes from a wealthy Shanghai family. How about you?

I don't remember, Velvet answered. She is all she wants, with her own apartment and the birdbath into which Barbara pressed ferns and berries; which sits on her deck like a guest enjoying the view of the Bay and the Hill. Nothing else worth stealing. No rugs on the floor. Just clothes in the closet. And shoes.

Heading up to her apartment after work Friday, Stanley asks her out for a drink in the bar two flights up from the shop which is six flights down from her place.

Fine, she says. She can stand an hour or so talking about work, or Muir Woods, or crates for vases.

Right away Stanley says, What matters is being happy. It does not come from being married. My parents are divorced but they're happy.

Oh! The lights on Angel Hill are like fireflies, dimming/ brightening in her forest of hair.

And happiness certainly does not come from perfection. Stanley reaches for her hand, counts her fingers.

The stone in her ring sparkles. It used to fit her mother's finger but it feels too large on hers, though it also fits.

With a car I could get a job on Nob Hill. Stanford Court, the Fairmont. Been to the Sky Room? Tourists spoil it. It used to be the haunt of those who can afford to rent artists for their amusement.  You know, tax shelters, cattle ranches and the like.

The Campari has made her feel weightless. As if she has been confined for days, she wants to stretch up to the stars; but it might mean something else to him.

You always this quiet when not working? His ears are pressed to his head like a child's hands. That's a pretty ring. From someone?

What kind of car do you have in mind? she asks, thinking how tight his face looks, eyes slashed against the glare of the lights reflected on the window behind her. Perfect for one of her bathroom tiles. She’s light years older than him in their thoughts.

So what's happiness?

She lets him talk, lets him pull statements out of the air like shoppers rummaging through boxes of miscellany, while she sips her Campari and thinks of going to Muir Woods, returning by Bohemian Grove along Redwood Creek; thinks of the women who talked and talked outside the shop that morning, then after one left, the other two entered saying to each other, I wish we can remember her name; thinks of