Vigan and Other Stories

By Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

Finalist 31st National Book Awards

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's Vigan and Other Stories collects twenty short stories, some of which were inspired by her visits to various places including Vigan in the Philippines, Cuzco in Peru, San Miguel Allende in Mexico, and India. The sad stories about mothers were inspired by her own mother whose complexity will always be a source of contemplation for Cecilia.

Professor Oscar V. Campomanes (Ateneo de Manila University) writes in his introduction:  "Cecilia's style is even more spare or sparing, letting the words do the barest possible work of depicting action, description, or sequencing the events in the collected narratives…I'd call this style, which seems fairly unique to her (even when compared to that of old masters like Bulosan and Gonzalez), as scenographic, to borrow a term from cinema."

The author, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, has written and edited over 20 books, including the novels, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Magdalena, and The Newspaper Widow. She has received a California Arts Council Fellowship, a Brody Arts Fund Award, an Outstanding Individual Award from her birth city of Cebu, Philippines. Her literary endeavors are considered significant contributions to Filipino, Philippine American, and Asian American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PALH
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781953716408

Book preview

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

F lip Gothic first appeared in Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America (Anvil 1997)

Romeo first appeared in A La Carte Food & Fiction (Anvil 2007)

The Last Moon-Game of Summer first appeared in Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults (PALH 2003; Anvil 2004)

The Dirty Kitchen first appeared in Fast Food Fiction (Anvil 2003)

Tiya Octavia first appeared in Fast Food Fiction (Anvil 2003)

Vigan first appeared in Going Home to a Landscape: Writings by Filipinas (Calyx Books 2003); it also appeared in Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults (PALH 2010)

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

Contents

Vigan

The Pink Poodle Skirt

The Artist

The Day I Stole Lola’s Ruby Earrings

The Last Moon-Game of Summer

The Rice Field

1943: Tiya Octavia

Jorge in Sagada

1973: Recruiting

Christmas Eve

Flip Gothic

The Dirty Kitchen

Flying a Kite

Romeo

My Mother is Dying

The Che Guevara Night

On the Way to Kalighat

The Circle of Life

San Miguel de Allende

Remembering Che Guevara

PREFACE

This third collection gathers stories I have written since the publication of my second short story collection, Acapulco at Sunset and Other Stories (Anvil 1995). The prodding to come up with this book came one morning when I woke up thinking, I should really gather my stories for a third short story collection. Perhaps in an unconscious level, I worried that these stories would be lost in the clutter, and with them bits and pieces of my life. That morning, I started compiling this collection. I was appalled to find my stories in various folders and computer diskettes, some of which my computer could no longer decode. I had been so preoccupied with personal matters— in particular the deaths of my brother in 1993 and my mother’s death in 2002—and had neglected aspects of my professional life. 

Despite the personal challenges however, I had kept busy. 

Aside from writing, I edited books. In 1993 and 1997, I edited Fiction by Filipinos in America and Contemporary Fiction by Filipinos in America respectively. I followed these with:  Journey of 100 Years: Reflections on the Centennial of Philippine Independence (coedited with Edmundo Litton, 1999); Growing Up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults (2003), and Growing Up Filipino: More Stories for Young Adults (2009). I coedited with Marily Ysip Orosa three books: Behind the Walls: Life of Convent Girls (2005), A La Carte Food & Fiction (2007, Gourmand Award winner), and Finding God: True Stories of Spiritual Encounters (2009, Gintong Aklat Award winner).

My first novel, Song of Yvonne, came out in the U.S. under the title of When the Rainbow Goddess Wept in 1994; my second novel, Magdalena, came out in 2002.  Cecilia’s Diary 1964-1968 came out in 2003. But the third novel I was working on when my mother died all but withered; I found myself on another emotional plane after my mother’s death and had difficulty relating to that book project. 

But I largely ignored my short stories. When inspiration came, I wrote them and tucked them away. I rarely submitted them for publication.

As I went through my files, I salvaged the stories that had been published and I leafed through folders and computer files, coming up with twenty stories (I trashed quite a number of stories which I judged to be weak or duplicated other stories).

The inspiration of these stories came from different sources.

The story Vigan grew out of my visits to the enchanting Spanish Colonial city of Vigan in Northern Philippines. The story, Remembering Che Guevara grew out of my visit to another Spanish Colonial place, Cuzco, Peru, which the Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara visited. Cebu, my hometown, which I have fictionalized as Ubec, is the setting of The Artist, Flip Gothic, The Dirty Kitchen, and Flying a Kite.

The sad stories about mothers were inspired by own mother whose complexity will always be a source of contemplation for me. Likewise, true-life anecdotes inspired The Pink Poodle Skirt and The Circle of Life. 

The Day I Stole Lola Ruby’s Earrings grew out of a writing exercise with my internet group of Filipina writers. The prompt given to all seven of us was: Lola Pina’s ruby earrings were missing. There may be six other stories out there that begin more or less like this story. There are a number of other stories that grew out of this internet workshop, among them: San Miguel Allende, On the Way to Kalighat, and Remembering Che Guevara.

A number of stories came from the third novel that fizzled after my mother’s death: The Last Moon-Game of Summer, The Rice Field, Tiya Octavia, Sagada, Jorge in Chartres, 1973: Recruiting, and Christmas Eve.

These stories have trickled in from various sources of inspiration, but ultimately they have come from the Creator who has been consistently generous to me, and to whom I remain grateful.

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

INTRODUCTION

by Oscar V. Campomanes

Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Scenographer

It gives me great pleasure to introduce this new anthology of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s fiction even as she really needs no introduction to a Philippine readership. As the young scholar Marge Rafols discovered in a recently completed study of Brainard’s institutional politics and creative work, Cecilia has consistently pursued a rather telling strategy, of which the publication by Anvil of this collection is only the latest example. Despite extended residence in the US for much of her adult life, and her considerable publishing success in that country, Cecilia has primarily oriented her writing to—and sought to circulate/publish it for the most part in—the Philippines, wanting Filipino readers to have first access to the fruits of her labors as a literary artist. Rafols reads this bifocality of Brainard’s career as an institutional politics on the writer’s part that addresses two major concerns: the constant need for diasporic storytellers like her to affirm and sustain a connection to and an investment in the cultural development of the ancestral homeland; and the endemic institutional invisibility or exclusion of Filipino Americans and migrants in the American cultural and political arenas (Rafols 2010). One, obviously, has everything to do with the other, and both can make sense, as Rafols amply demonstrates in her accomplished study, when construed in the context of the special (that is, neocolonial) relationship between the Philippines and the United States.

The cultural and political liminality in US society to which Filipino Americans and migrants had been historically and chronically doomed (a fate that is beginning, fortunately, to look up)—on account of the politics of self-disavowal of the American Empire which is now the object of a flourishing Filipino American postcolonial critique—might in some way explain the effet de retour of diasporic identity politics of the kind Brainard manifests. And the strategy to reorient one’s work as a writer to readers back ‘home’ without much care as to its potential for recognition from an American or international audience could perhaps mean, at one and the same time, an investment in Philippine literary culture, and an oblique but pragmatic realization of the nearly irremediable lot of Filipino American and migrant marginality in the colonizer’s context. One is then led to the unlikely wager that by contributing to homeland cultural development as the priority, the diasporic writer might effectively escape from the limiting and oppressive determinations of American institutional invisibility or paradoxically induce American establishment culture and institutions (still the arbiters of global literary visibility and celebrity) to take notice of one’s iconoclastic work or perspectives resulting from such a politics of location and self-displacement.

Whatever the actual results of such an institutional and publishing strategy in terms of critical and publishing coups in the United States, Cecilia’s ‘wager’ has been rewarded by an unusual number of local critical studies devoted to her writing, and the sustained interest expressed by Filipino academic students in her literary innovations,  cultural activism, and personal identity politics. Apart from Rafols at Ateneo and others I know, University of Santo Tomas literature professor John Jack Wigley wrote his splendid MA thesis (2004) on the strategic and political gynocentrism of Woman with Horns and Other Stories, and the up-and-coming local literary critic of Filipino American literature, Frances Jane Abao of the University of the Philippines has rigorously located When the Rainbow Goddess Wept in an emergent tradition of the ‘ethnic bildungsroman’ (2001). By the late 1990s and early 2000s, other Filipino American and migrant writers like the poets Eileen Tabios and Ma. Luisa Igloria, the fictionist M. Evelina Galang, even Filipino diasporic writers from other global locations like Australia, Europe, and Japan, had begun to follow Cecilia’s lead and, at the very least, to count publication in the Philippines and access to a Filipino readership as an important component of their individual quests or career aspirations. The ‘return effect,’ in Brainard’s own case, saw not only the eventual republication of When the Rainbow Goddess by both an American trade publisher and university press after first being published as Song of Yvonne by New Day in Manila, but also a spate of critical studies of this novel and her other works by feminist and Asian American literary critics like Helena Grice, Dolores de Manuel, Guiyou Huang, C. Hua, Rocio Davis, Alicia Otano, S.T. Leonard, etc. in American learned journals, critical anthologies, and reference volumes.

What has been said of Carlos Bulosan’s village stories that [they] are so simple as to seem effortless—something similar having been said of N.V.M. Gonzalez by a crusty American critic that the latter’s stories are so understated as to seem so artless—may be said of Brainard’s fictions, generally, and of her stories in this collection, in particular. I qualify this seemingly left-handed assessment by citing a caveat made by the same critic of Bulosan’s village stories that, in fact, such stories are the most difficult to write. Cecilia’s style is even more spare or sparing, letting the words do the barest work possible of depicting action, description, or sequencing the events, for example. I’d call this style, which seems fairly unique to her (even when compared to that of old masters like Bulosan and Gonzalez), as scenographic, to borrow a term from cinema. In flash-fiction pieces like The Dirty Kitchen, Flying a Kite, and The Che Guevarra Night, this tendency and skill of staging fictional character, event, or setting as barely apprehensible scene/s—moving at a pace like that of briskly edited montage—is in most evidence. But the scenographic style also marks the stories that seem to form a cycle by their common setting of Ubec (Brainard’s noteworthy fictional inversion and immortalization of her beloved city of birth, Cebu), or are presented as separate pieces that can stand on their own, from their obvious provenance as chapters in an abortive novel (Vigan, The Rice Field, Tia Octavia, The Last Moon-Game of Summer, Sagada etc).

Like Manuel Puig’s cinematextual idiom in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jessica Hagedorn’s filmic crosscuttings in Dogeaters, or M. Evelina Galang’s phototexts (as I call her ‘verbal pictures’) in One Tribe, but again less opulently so, Brainard’s fictional scenography seems calculated, by contrast, to allow for the emergence of what Walter Benjamin once predicted, marveling at the power of the cinematic, as a new habitus of perceiving and thinking, to which Benjamin gave the enigmatic appellation the critic in a state of distraction (1968 [1955]). This is another way of saying that Cecilia’s stories, by their narrative minimalism (they are so scenographic as to seem uneventful), ostensibly seem to create the ample space for a more active readerly collaboration that is not so much consciously thought out as reflexively elicited. Here I have in mind a story like Romeo which  willfully violates the rule that first-person narration cannot be omniscient, suggesting that it can be scopic if the forgiving reader is willing to supply the missing angles of vision—a pretty defamiliarizing strategy of rendering fictional action as scene/s best exemplified and demonstrated by the clairvoyant narrator of My Mother is Dying or in the epistolary exchanges between immigrant mother Nelia and the Old World grandmother (‘Mama’) about the errant Filipino American daughter Mindy/Arminda in the delightful yet poignant story Flip Gothic. In short, Cecilia’s compositional aesthetic allows for that strange physics that the technology of cinematic vision and storytelling—one that penetrates and dissolves dimensional planes—enables, or makes eminently imaginable, according to Water Benjamin.

I would like to speculate that this scenographic style is very much in accord with what the late Southeast Asianist scholar Les Adler once determined to be Brainard’s historiographic politics of keeping the lives of her men and women characters—set as these are in both historical and contemporary milieux—continually in the camera’s eye (Adler 1996). Watch these stories unfold, do not simply read them, in other words. When watching them—like they were projected on the screen of one’s osmotic imagination—do so, as Walter Benjamin says, as if one is engulfed by the flood of scenic images (mindful in some way that they are strategically arranged or sequenced by the writer’s filmic and historiographic sensibility), and