Philippine Daily Inquirer Magazine
"Weather Dark and Clear"
Foreign novels about the Philippines often serve up surreal landscapes of magical realism or maps of journalistic observation. But Bino A. Realuyo’s first novel “The Umbrella Country” is gracefully complex, achingly real story of love amid poverty and dreams amid squalor, none of it romantic. While other novels evoke an exotic wonderland, “The Umbrella Country” is a walk down an unpaved eskinita—without rubber sandals.
The ironic action in “The Umbrella Country” all takes place up and down a single unnamed street. The novel tells the story of two brothers, Pipo and the younger Gringo, as they grow up in an impoverished household with a silenty suffering mother named Estrella and a jobless, violent father named Daddy Groovie, whose only dream in life is to join his sister Dolores in the United States.
Set in the Martial Law years, it is a grimly haunting story of life between the tortured walks of their house, as seen through the eyes of the impressionable, observant Gringo. The chapters are peppered with old wives’tales, Tagalog, as Realuyo writes, “the smell of these streets.”
Realuyo knows what he’s talking about. The poet was born and raised here before heading to the States to escape poverty. Now based in New York, he does not pretty up the two countries’ tangled histories. “’The American Dream’ is as strongly felt in the streets of Manila as iti is in New York City. While it works to the advante of some, it breaks the hearts of many.”
Drawing from the experiences of his own family, he says, was not easy. “…these stories do not come without a price. They may be rich sources for future literary works, but writing about them is very painful and difficult.” Filipino writing, he says in an interview with Boldtype Magazine, has always been around in the United States, but is gaining attention now. “We are reclaiming our voices.”
There are no easy definitions for “The Umbrella Country,” due to the depth of the experience that the book covers. IT delves, for example, into the phenomenon of cross-dressing, as embodied by the street’s beautician, Boy Manicure. IT’s also a murky view of the Philippines’ relationship with the States, as presented by the warmed intimations of Groovie. More than than, it is an ode and lament to a family’s secrets and wretched history, as exemplified by the desperate pairing of Estrella and Groovie.
Realuyo’s prose is vivid and fluid, often impressive in its attention to poetric detail. This street feels real, thus feeling borth right and wrong at the same time. WE know these characters, have heard some of these stories. But even as these are familiar locations, Realuyo gathers them in a moving, insightful tale of a Philippines within the Philippines. The we know these stories are true only adds to the power of Realuyo’s telling. It’s a memorable, satisfying read in any weather. But, in this country where the weather still blows dark and then suddenly clear, “The Umbrella Country” seems as delightfully familiar—and as emotionally pungent—as the scent of sampaloc in the wet wind. Ruel S. De Vera
"Bino's Song Page After Page"
I’ve alwas been a sucker for brother-bonding stories, but this isn’t the only reason why I’m enthralled by The Umbrella Country. Impressive and memorable indeed is this first novel by Bino A. Realuyo. That he’s only in his early thirties makes the achievement even more significant.
A Fil-American based in New York City, Bino is part of a select group of Pinoy writers making their mark in a fiercely competitive arena. This group includes the now celebrated Jessica Hagedorn, poet and journalist Luis Francia, the relatively recent transplant Eric Gamalinda, and the poets Luis Cabalquinto, Nick Carbo and EileenTabios. Toss in the superb fiction writers Lara Stapelton and Gina Apostol, and you have quite a group of collegially supportive comrades-in-arms notching their way up the steep ladders of recognition and publishing success. They’ve won contests, fellowships and grants, made their way to artists’ and writers’ colonies worldwide, and broken into print courtesy f established publishing companies.
Bino’s poetry was first featured locally in the late-(un)lamented The Evening Paper, I recall how, a couple of summers back, NVM Gonzalez had faxed an appeal that the poems be sent posthaste to the ongoing UP writers Workshop in Baguio. Our National Artist for Literature said it would help enlighten young workshoppers on the crafting of exemplary poetry.
Realuyo has since distinguished himself by receiving a Pushcart prize nomination and the 1998 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. I take it this was for the first poetry collection, In Spite of Open Eyes. He has also edited The NuyorAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings on New York City.
It was with some trepidation, however, that I greeted the otherwise exhilarating news that the prestigious Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, would be offering his first novel as a Spring 1000 title in softcover. I have been corresponding by email with Bino. Like his Fil-am support group, however, vicariously, I had crossed my fingers that his book would not sink into the customary morass or remaindered titles.
It was a novel set in the Philippines, after all. And conventional wisdom had it that literary titles with that setting didn’t sell, despite the Fil-Am community’s substantial representation in the U.S.
Early word on The Umbrella Country proved enthusiastic, however, so that now we’re all glad for, and encouraged by, Bino’s softcover breakthrough. The book is sold at Powerbooks, and I urge you all to acquire a copy, as Eileen Tabios passionately had everyone within e-mail shot not too long ago. And not just so the lie can be further given that poor sales presumption, but because The Umbrella Country is an excellent novel.
Born and raised in Manila, the immigrant Bino Realuyo succeeds [to] no end in tapping the marvels of memory. One one level, he paints a nearly palpable mise en scene, with Manila’s alleyways, ever regnant with sights, sounds and smells, serving as a virtual protagonist. I say virtual, because despite its restrictive features, especially during the period of martial law, there is also something benign in the way the city provides a touchening environment for boyhood growth.
On another, more intimate level, Realuyo portrays a lower-income family that so in-your-face, alternatively bared and clothed as it is with altogether identifiable character traits, loyalties and affiliations, fears and desires, and indeed supremely, a catalog-like gamut of behavioral clues, oddments and inklings that are so utterly Pinoy.
His book has been called a coming-of-age novel. I would agree, but that sort of pigeon-holing doesn’t exactly do full justice to its multilayered narrative, where texture is as much beholden to personal, as to cyclic, progression—of topical weather, tropical ambience, universal ties that bind, and the inexorable unfolding of well-nigh scripted tendencies.
Phrases in Pilipino punctuate and flavor the narrative—an editorial judgment that works as well as or even better than in Hagedorn’s precedent setting Dogeaters—in as kosher a level of acceptability as Jewish terms safely ensconced, nay, enshrined, in American literature.
The heat, the rain, floods, roof gutters, corrugated iron sheets with wash laid out to dry, pushcarts and jeepneys, rats under the sink, dead cats on the street, birds out of urban crumbs, cocks heralding the day, “the wind of curfew,” tears and laughter, even an umbilical cord kept in a souvenir box through the years—these are cyclically regurgitated not so much as ambient images but previous leitmotifs that parallel the litany of trade names turned Pinoy-generic: Frigidaire, Kodak, Johnson’s Baby Powder, Singer machine, Jockeys, Tupperware, “Pacorabang.”
It is so Pinoy a novel, so “true” so authentic, that a first reading may waylay one into mere surface appreciation of what does ring true, inclusive of further setpieces that dwell variously on omens of the hours, tawas as a deodorant, the malas of a shattered mirror or umbrellas opened indoor.
And yet, all through this textual and textural layering, Bino weaves a memorable tale with unforgettable characters going through scenes that defy oblivion: two brothers approaching puberty as latent sensitifs ona logical, inevitable course toward homosexuality (as wonderfully foreshadowed in their serial staging of a Miss Unibers contest); a “hang-around-and-do-nothing” father named Daddy Groovie—brutally abusive, occasionally obsessed with turning his boys into “real men”; a mater dolorosa in Mommy Estrella—suffering in silence, as archetype more than stereotype; and a voluble chronicler of origins and myths in Ninang Rola.
These are the main characters. They are surrounded by a cast one has seen in hundreds of Pinoy movies—Boy Manicure, Sergiou Putita, Boy Spit, Big Boy Jun and all the other Boys and Juniors of a tradition of Catholic lassitude…
Eggwhite is applied on indoor plants, clotheslines are subjected to thievery by fishhook, ironing obards are dressed with old blankets, toilet seats are squatted on, a length of yantok regularly beats butts, backs and spirit not so much into submission but an acceptance of how things are, or can be, when growing up bakla and Pinoy.
And boy, how this boy-writer of the prodigious racial memory CAN write, CAN limn his prose with the quietly lyrical line as wise as it’s efficacious: “To live in our street was to have a skin as thick as rubber slippers. OR: We all slipped into the morning as if the night had its hands on our backs, pushing us up,” OR “…they both had scapulars hanging around their nexts, these little brown square things that looked so old and holy that anybody who wore them was instantly bless.” OR: “Every time I emptied the dustpan and heard the lang of the broken mirror I thought about what he had done. Mommy didn’t bother to remove the shards of glass that could have hurt them more if they accidentally stepped on them. Daddy Groovie just stepped over them. He spent much time standing in fornt of that mirror to spray himself with his Pacorabang. As I slowly put them in the dustpan, I was also removing parts of Daddy Groovie from my mind, throwing them out, wishing his memory could stay in the garbage can.”
Heartrending are several passages that involve the brothers in milestone rites of accidental bonding. Pipo shooing the younger Gringo away while taking a severe beating froma drunken Daddy Groovie; Gringo trying to cover Pipo’s bloody shorts as the latter walks home from a deflowering; Pipo finally breaking the yantok into small pieces as Gringo longs “to tell mommy to hold him and tell him that nothing bad would ever happen to him anymore.”
It is only right that Pipo the kuya figures centrally in the physical and emotional abuse, for Gringo’s faculties as incidental participant, reflective observer and narrative voice are what prepare him to become the stronger sibling. It is his fated luxury that Pipo has come to unwanted before him; he learns more from all the terrible precedents.
This novel is rich in portents as well as hopes despite all the gut-wretching episodes; there is ever a tenderness that transcends the poverty, the city, the humor and tragedy and all the eyes “looking constantly and judging everything they saw.” Gringo chooses when to look back at everyone and everything, even as he looks forward with more resoluteness than his brother, because he’s been pre-empted by one year in the conduct of becoming not as much as a “real man” but a caring human being.
I see generations
of creative writing classes analyzing the levels in which Gringo’s
story is told, from the opening scene where Daddy Groovie installs
Stateside plastic gutters, through the subtle immersions
into what a workshop panelist may announce as an
objective correlative” (“Fly, fly the butterfly” is
sung some chapters before a yellow swarm of mariposa is seen hovering
around a window—The sign of flight…), to a possibly fool-marxist
reading of the further dangers inherent in living “the American
dream,” to which the brothers Gringo and Pipo are headed in the
final airport scene, with “The face of the no-turning-back. Not
a quick glance. Not a spit of goodbye.”
In his Acknowledgments, Bino Realuyo writes: “At sa mga Pilipinong bahagi ng aking mga ala-ala, at sa bansa ng paying ng hanggang ngayo’s nagdudulot ng hiwaga, sa init at bagyo, para sa inyo and aklat na it…”
Thanks, Bino. Page after page, it is beautifully your song, our song. The Umbrella Country is a splendid book. Quite honestly, it’s the most moving novel I’ve read in years. - Alfred Yuson
Editorial
In his first novel, The Umbrella Country, the poet and “Nuyorker” Bino A. Realuyo spins a spiderweb of memories of Manila of the ‘70s as the almost autobiographical narrator leaves the city to follow his father into the land of the Filipino dream, America.
The boy is called Gringo, which should tell you something about that dream, and his father is a beer-drinking, “hang-around” (sa tabi-tabi, you see) macho who will not respond to any name but Daddy Groovie. It is basically a coming-of-age story, but reading the book (Ballantine, available at Powerbooks) sent shivers up and down my spind, and the pores on my arms opening and closing like a porcupine’s spine when it senses danger.
This is a dangerous book because it reveals the Filipino soul: tortured, tormented by poverty with a little persion on the side for entertainment to relieve the pian, and overall a sense that as bad as things get, there’s always an escape hatch—a visa to fly to America, a flight into noctural adventures in the backside of Manila’s maze of darkend streets, or as in the case of Gringo’s long-suffering-in-silence mother, the stoicism provided a martyr-madonna complex rooted in religion.
Everything in this book has the sting of reality. The images are stunning but true. The smells are so strong they assault the reader. The people are familiar characters we have met in the comings and goings, ups and downs of our city lives: They may be stereotypes and archetypes, but you know them all, they were all part of each of our past and they’re still still very much around, 30 years after Gringo’s recollections.
*
You’ve met them all. The Juns and Juniors and Boys and Big Boys: “Could it be because they were all born with the same name?” The bakla Boy Pedicure who operates a beauty parlor lorded over by a mannequin named Delilah de Samsona, who is murdered by a brutal lover, stranger or robber, nobody ever finds out because they’re scared, but after that, who cares?” The “hang-around-do-nothing” barkada of men waiting for their wives to finish the housework so they can cook tem their supper and then wash the children. The ninang who provides loving care, support, and gossip The querida who has just moved in next door, the one whose monthly rent is paid by a man they have never seen. The hunk of a scavenger who comes around to pick up the diario, bote. The women in their go-anywhere (duster/daster, we call them Bino). The children living in crowded quarters, watching with their eyes, not saying anything.
Gringo has just found out a secret from his ninang which confirms the strange behavior he has observed between his father and mother at night, in their bed. Gringo’s mother, Estrella, was only forced to marry Daddy Groovie because he got her pregnant after one date in the motel. And now Estrella’s first child who is Gringo’s elder brother is turning out to be a homosexual.
Meanwhile, Daddy Groovie has a sister in the States, Dolores (whom he calls Dolares, as in dollars), who has petitioned for him to join her. Daddy Groovie is os excited about going to the embassy to apply for a visa that he cannot find his lucky blue suit. He is overwrought and over-agitated, every man must have his own superstition, so maybe his wife has sold his Americana to the buyer of secondhand clothes?
*
There are other landmarks, scattered throughout the novel like signposts along the highway of our collective remembrances:
The Miss Unibers pageant, followed by its gay versions. Religious processions and house-to-house rosary novenas (don’t forget the rosaries used as décor). Juicy Fruit and San Miguel beer. Typhoons and floods. Children making beautiful eyes, signs asking for Female Boarders, women stitching away at their Singer. Boys going through their circumcisions as a public event. Girls with mothers stuffing pasador into their panties. “Pare” as a favorite expression with “the power only grownups had, the face of what men were, and what they should be.”
Growing up in a house where Bible studies are held religiously, once a week. The power of tradition and superstitions: “Anything that accidentally broke was a premonition of something bad.” Mazola cooking oil poured from a plastic scoop, Prell, a Stateside product so precious it’s locked up in the cabinet. The smell o ffish and longganisa and garlic cooking in the kitchen, the scent o fletters from Woodside, Nuyork, describing snow.
Paciencia, waiting a whole night to fill buckets with water. Brownouts by day, blackouts by night. Curfew.
Taking Kodak. Everybody wanting to look like Elvis. Beer-bellied men like Big Boy Jun, occupying half of the street with his wide body: “His stomach ahd a life of its own by the way it bounced over his belt. His belly had an eye at the center with plety of hair coming out of it. “ Suitors borrowing cars like a Mustang to impress their dates, polishing the vehicle the way polished the vehicle the way they polished their shoes, to make them shine like mirrors. Speaking of shine, they used Johnson’s floor wax like there was no other brand.
Pomaded hair and dirty ice cream, crowds and anarchy at the airport, rented komiks, small Gerber jars to keep nails, carton boxes of powdered milk to store clothes and memorabilia. Everyone is a collector of garbage: “Ahh. The smell of this country”—the odor of the jeepney streets, the afternoon sewer, dead animals, children who had not bathed in days?
Finally, Daddy Groovie wrties from Nuyork to say how wonderful it is, how different. People don’t even take Christmas seriously. “Here we have no floods, just snow . . .thank God I left. Merry Christmas.”
Finally, without wishing for it, Gringo and his brother take the plane to join Daddy Groovie, but there’s a heartbreaking twist at the airport, and the reader’s premonition is fulfilled. This, after all, is the umbrella country: “Here, we never know what’s going to happen next. It’s like rain, you never know when it comes and hits us hard.” - Jullie Yap Daza
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