America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo

Hands are never the same.” The theme of the contrast between hearts and hands - feelings and deeds - is threaded delicately throughout the book, as Hero’s aching hands become a constant reminder of the parts of life from which she is now excluded. But then, as Pol, a former doctor himself, observes, “Hands were more complicated than the people attached to them. Hero enters this scene eager to be useful.

5, whose popularity in the community may have originated with the balikbayan boxes sent by Filipino-Americans to family back home. But grounded by Hero’s perspective, readers unversed in Filipino culture can absorb and come to appreciate the rich texture of life in Milpitas, from lechon kawali to scents like Tabac and Chanel No. The prose - saturated with details of Filipino culture and untranslated snippets of Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan - might be overwhelming in a wider-ranging novel. Milpitas, like the Philippines itself, is at once a tight-knit community governed by traditions and a crossroads of conflicting cultures. Yet the choice to focus tightly on Hero’s comparatively mundane daily existence in Milpitas, where she looks after Roni and gradually becomes a part of Rosalyn’s tight circle of friends, is a strong one that anchors the book’s many wanderings. It may sound like a small-scale premise for an intergenerational immigration epic, and indeed, many of the book’s most dramatic events - Hero’s imprisonment and torture, Paz’s impoverished childhood in Pangasinan, Rosalyn’s realization that she’s gay - happen long before the book begins.

The main action of the book unfolds in Milpitas during the early 1990s, as Hero’s heart struggles slowly back to life with the help of Roni, a pretty, foul-mouthed makeup artist named Rosalyn and the ad-hoc family of Filipino-Americans that form their community. Rejected by her parents, Hero immigrates to Milpitas, a San Francisco suburb where her favorite uncle Pol lives with his wife, Paz, and 8-year-old daughter, Roni. Ten years later, she has a pair of broken thumbs to show for it as well as other, less visible damage. Trained for the high-status life of a doctor, Hero instead ran away from school to join the New People’s Army, the insurgent Communist guerrilla group formed in 1969. Hero (short for Geronima) is the daughter of a wealthy Ilocano family in Vigan, one of the oldest Spanish colonial cities in the Philippines.

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo