Funny Little Island People, A Synopsis

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Funny Little Island People opens with 62-year-old Sandra Delgado dropping a bottle of fish sauce in a speeding subway car and landing, unexpectedly, on the front page of the New York Daily News, the story that earned author Bino A. Realuyo his second New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship, and ends in a writers’-room argument between Kiko Rosas and Dr. Quack-Quack, the collection’s resident gadfly, over the script of the fictional F.L.I.P. Show, the first Filipino-American sitcom slated for primetime, being written and rewritten in real time by the very people it claims to represent.

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Set in 2009, the year Obama granted reparations to Filipino WWII veterans and the year of the misguided fantasy of a “post-racial” America, the collection unfolds in the immigrant enclaves of New York City, from Woodside, Queens, to Stuytown in Manhattan, offering a long-overdue spotlight on East Coast Filipinos, whose stories, unlike their West Coast counterparts, have remained largely invisible in mainstream American literature. Structured as seven interlinked episodes, each drawn from the real-life source material behind the fictional TV show, the book introduces a vibrant, biting cast spanning generations, from first-wave immigrants to mixed-race, third-generation Filipino Americans, for whom a beauty pageant, a dildo named Joseíto, or Spanish surnames from a 19th-century directory can turn into the plot of a whole life, and who make it funny before anyone else gets the chance to.

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Why Write a Comedy?

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Initially, poet and novelist Bino A. Realuyo wrote the stories as a gift to his friends—to make them laugh a little at life and the mundane, and to find delight in what is often deemed irrelevant. But the collection grew into a personal reflection on the intersection of race, ethnicity, and immigration, told through the voices of an all-Filipino-American cast of characters. He asks: How deep is our complicity in American racism and bigotry? How does it shape our everyday experience?

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Realuyo believes that writing comedic fiction dilutes the acerbity of racialized dialogue in fiction, making it easier to digest. By blurring the slate of white and Black characters in American fiction, he brings to the foreground an all-Filipino cast of characters who are unpacking and complicating racial hang-ups and internalized bigotry, while also inviting readers to a plateful of quirky immigrant narratives.

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Humor and Filipino food are at the heart and palate of each story, an important context that is necessary for understanding Filipino-American life, community, and resilience. Dr. Quack-Quack, the co-editor of Filipino USA Today, threads the eight stories with hashtags and tweets, leading the collection to a surprise metafictional ending.

 

Read an excerpt from Asymptote.  

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The Atlantic's Take on Comedic Writing

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​I do love funny books, but the literary industry that is so engaged in trauma writing doesn't see the legitimacy of comedic writing.  But I haven't given up on Funny Little Island People.   It will get out there.   Filipino writers and Funny Bones are one and the same.

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Dan Brooks:

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"The phrase serious literature comes with an unfortunate double meaning. When we call books serious, we mean they are satisfying, well written, and worthy of consideration. But we also use serious as an antonym for funny, which can mislead us into assuming that a good book shouldn’t make us laugh. That’s too bad, because humor is a bona fide literary effect, right up there with tragedy, suspense, and profundity—just as much a part of the author’s toolbox, but a lot harder to fake." More HERE.

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