From The Manila Standard

July 28, 1999

'Umbrella Country'

By Jullie Yap Daza in her column, Medium Rare

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 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 sent shivers up and down my spine, 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 perversion on the side for entertainment to relieve the pain, 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 nocturnal adventures in the backside of Manila’s maze of darkened streets, or as in the case of Gringo’s long-suffering-in-silence mother, the stoicism provided by 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 part of each of our past and they’re still very much around, 30 years after Gringo’s recollection.

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 Manicure who operates a beauty parlor lorded over by a mannequin named Delila 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 them 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 g0-anywhere sundresses (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 so 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 higway 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, radio bulletins alternating with love songs. Children making beautiful eyes, signs asking for Female Boarders, women stitching away at their Singer. Boys going through their circumcision. 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 superstition: "Anything that accidentally broke was a premonition of something bad." Mazola cooking oil poured from a plastic scoop. Prell, and Stateside product so precious it's locked up in the cabinet. The smell of fish and longganisa and garlic cooking in the kitchen, the scent of letters 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 had a life of its own by the way it bounced over his belt. His belly had an eye at the center with plenty of hair coming out of it." Suitors borrowing cars like a Mustang to impress their dates, polishing 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 ths country"-- the odor of the jeepney streets, the afternoon sewer, dead animals, children who had not bathed in days?

Finally, Daddy Groovie writes 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 heart-breaking 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 the rain, you never know when it comes and hit us hard."

From Philippine Star

July 26, 1999

Bino's Song, Page after Page

By Alfred A. Yuson

I've always 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 Eileen Tabios. Toss in the superb fiction writers Lara Stapleton 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 of 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 the 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 his 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 1999 title in softcover. I had been corresponding by e-mail 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 US.

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 no end in tapping the marvels of memory. On 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 toughening environment for boyhood growth.

On another, more intimate level, Realuyo portrays a lower-income family that is 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 catalogue-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 pigeonholing doesn't exactly do full justice to its multi-layered 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 destinies.

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 regurgigated not so much as ambient images but precious 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 hour, tawas as a deodorant, the malas of a shattered mirror or umbrellas opened indoors.

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 on a 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, Sergio 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 boards 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 necks, these little brown square things that looked so old and holy that anybody who wore them was instantly blessed." OR: "Every time I emptied the dustpan and heard the clang 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 front 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 from a 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 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-wrenching episodes; there is ever a tenderness that transcends the poverty, the city, the humor and tragedy, and all the eyes "looking constantly 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 so much 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 Acknowledgements, Bino Realuyo writes: "At sa mga Pilipinong bahagi ng aking mga ala-ala, at sa bansa ng payong na hanggang ngayo'y nagdudulot ng hiwaga, sa init at bagyo, para sa inyo ang aklat na ito..."

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.

From Philippine Studies

The Filipino Writer in the United States

Leonard Casper

Philippine Studies vol. 49, no. 1 (2001): 123–129

The Umbrella Country

Among Filipino producers of the printed word in America, Sionil Jose leads with his entire Rosales epic gradually appearing under the Random House/Modem Library imprint. On a different scale it is Realuyo's first novel, The Umbrella Country, which has attracted rare admiration. Both Jose and Realuyo are writers with a strong, broad (non-ideological) social conscience. Jose can present the action and motives of both rich and poor; Realuyo so far has provided access only to the latter, but his sensitivity to language (he has also published in America, a book of poetry entitled In Spite of Open Eyes) provides intimate nuances which prevent his principal characters from seeming pitiable stereotypes. His language serves rather than competes with the authenticity of his characters. They are as they are, but their starkness comes in multiple shades of chiaroscuro. (It should be pointed out that, when Realuyo became guest editor of the second special Philip pine issue of Fairleigh Dickinson University's Literary Review, Spring 2000, he entitled that issue "Am Here." Admittedly he was proudly imitating Villa's proclamatory Have Come, Am Here. Yet "here" becomes not America or the New York metropolis of the arriviste, but "Wherever I am." The title therefore could just as well have been simply "I am," which is really the theme of that issue and of many other Philippine American writers. "Here" is "Anywhere; everywhere. See me seeing you!")

The Umbrella Country occurs during the endangered days of martial law; but with only slight variations its human environment could just as well depict the country's malaise under each of the three presidents who have succeeded Marcos: Aquino, Ramos, Estrada. Although the San Juan family of critics might prefer to interpret the "Philippine condition" in this novel as the result of class warface (Epifanio San Juan, Jr.) or, less inappropriately, of gender imbalance (Delia San Juan), any such narrow agitprop emphasis would wrench the novel's alignment away from the original author's purpose and constitute an abuse as severe as those dramatized in the novel itself.5

Characters in The Umbrella Country undeniably come from Manila's underclass ("casual" construction workers, often drunkenly inflicting their failures on blameless wives and children). But in the midst of all that evil flickers a heartening bond beyond bondage: between mother and children, between adult sisters, between young brothers-between blame and mea culpa. The same umbrellas that provide protection against the typhoon's torrents keep off the biting sunlight as well. They are the shield against excess; they are the balancing device safeguarding the tightrope walker. Whatever compassion, whatever human communion defends the staggering self against despair: that is the umbrella image secretly lodged in Realuyo's imagination and released with a subtlety that, yes, is vulnerable to manipulation by the hasty Uncritic but that, yes, ultimately is inviolable.

Picture the monocular Director in his weatherproof office in the States, which he "heroically" chooses to call "the belly of the beast"; and though himself an empowered, sometimes hegemonic expatriate: consider how he will mock Daddy Groovie's dream of escape-to America. Yet Realuyo, who is anything but naive, can admit that America "saved me and my family from poverty"; can be appreciative of opportunities, without feeling himself the object of condescension or special treatment; can say that he has been born again, like many an other Filipino abroad, unashamed of having two navels, two homes. He is determined to find his own voice, so that he can also speak for his silent countrymen wherever in the world they may be. It is this sense of shared suffering which, in his novel, offers the best way to alleviate/mitigate that suffering.

The desperate sociopolitical situation in The Umbrella Country is soul-wracking: in the name of manliness Daddy Groovie regularly beats his wife Estrella. Through the same unrestrained violence he nearly emasculates his elder son Pipo, by refusing him the shelter of "Miss Unibers" fantasies, because they remind Daddy Groovie of his own delusion of manliness, his over-dependence on his sister abroad in America. Pipo, in search of comfort, becomes the rape victim of the bakla beautician, Boy Manicure, who may be addicted to mixed-gender fantasies of his own. In the "cave scene" (the tall grass along the old railroad tracks) Pipo becomes the center of a milling crowd of home less boys anxious to touch one another, starving for companionship. Finally Pipo decides to follow Daddy Groovie to New York: what pro pels him? Masochism? Uncontrollable fate? An undeniable desire to be accepted by his father, whatever the cost, as male-enough, as elder son? An intuition that both he and his father share some terrible in completeness but that (as in so many of Tennessee Williams' plays, where the helpless are one another's best help) they must try to be each other's cure?

The Umbrella Country is as open-ended as a wound-but it may be a wound which finally knows how to heal itself. At the heart of this novel's nearly overwhelming pathos, its miseries and agonies ready for the Uncritic's reflexive search for someone, some habit native or imported, to blame (then why not just Adam? Or Satan?); at the core of that cascade of evil glimmers the flame of good. Good in the refusal of Gringo, the younger brother, to hate Pipo when the latter tries to tum their father's bamboo yantol onto his back. Good in the self-protective, yet sacrificial decision of Mommy not to accompany her sons to America. Good in the abandonment of the family by Ninang Rola, followed by her return ("People who run away," she says, "always end up in the same place") and by her offer of companionship to Estrella who may never again see the rest of her family. Neither son was originally wanted because of the timing of their birthing. Yet now Estrella knows how much she does love them; and it is with love that she sets them free. That is not abandonment so much as Mommy's releasing them to their potentials, as Felipe and Gregory. It is consis tent with her acceptance of both their unplanned births. Each time, she says, she gave life to them-her life. Pipo's preserved umbilical cord is nearly fossilized, and in her longsuffering she may seem like a Stonewoman: but each of these is a true icon.

The fact is that however seriously dysfunctional this family is, The Umbrella Country celebrates life as an ideal, in the form of family, ex tended to barrio community and democratic nation, and even to one's once and future blood-brothers (at Bataan). Is the Philippines dysfunctional? Yes. Is the relationship between the United States and the Phil ippines dysfunctional? Yes. Is the solution to these mismatched relationships despair, a with drawal into narcissism and hedonism? Realuyo seems to think not. After all, selfish greed is itself one of the prime causes of dysfunction. Some dreams disable, some enable: discerning the difference is often difficult. But not to dream, at all, ever-not to have faith in the possibility of grace and the redemption of man is to risk dooming oneself irretrievably. Not to have forbearance, not to try to understand (forgiving is always easier than understanding, and meaningless without it), not to be willing to concede, to sacrifice something in every human negotiation-not to love, despite everything: then life is futile. "Listen!" Realuyo seems to say: the man with the bamboo stick may be crying out; the rapist may be expressing a need that even he wishes didn't exist. "So, listen well!" Who heard Boy Manicure's scream during his mutilation? In this novel hate is as strong as lightning and thunder under the shawdowless pine trees of the Cordillera. Yet the answer to

violence is not more violence. The answer to the two-handed sword is the shield-the umbrella.

Much of what prevents The Umbrella Country from being disheartening, or disgusting, is the author's decision to have Gringo be the principal narrator. His innocence is constantly under attack, yet survives; experience puts an edge on his voice, but he will not remain mute. Not only is this text essentially bilingual/ multicultural: in italicized sections, the interior voice of several others-Daddy Groovie, Ninang Rola-is brought to the reader's empathetic attention. And there are minor characters such as Titay, Boy Spit, Sergio Putita who may be immature or behave bizarrely but are not permanently de formed. Each within his or her limited capacity reaches out, blindly perhaps, often with surprising tenderness, toward human contact; a hand, not a fist: be my umbrella; save my better self from my worst; I was not born to be this depraved, or even this deprived; help, help me-so I can help you. What will happen to Pipo, once he is beyond shame, being anonymous in America? To Gringo? To Daddy Groovie? What will happen to America, with such immigrants as these? Will they ever see Mommy again? Can they possibly forget her? God knows, but is as silent as Sergio's wooden statues-unless one listens.

Is Realuyo someone who remembers hard times as material simply to be exploited for an assumed hardened "American market"? Not likely. His memorial to his father, survivor of the Death March and Camp O'Donnell Concentration Camp/ testifies to his ability to honor the worth of those who endured great suffering with no loss of dignity. The father is depicted as "Quick to anger, hard to approach, with drawn," only to reveal that he suffered post traumatic stress disorder -"while all the time I simply thought that my father didn't know how to love." That love was secretly expressed when Augusto R. Realuyo applied for U.S citizenship and, having been sent to the VA hospital in Manhattan, successfully petitioned for his family to follow.

As the author did with italicized portions in his novel, so the feature article writer lets his father's personal record speak in its own voice, that of a peaceful man, and therefore a "tortured man of war." After the example of such a "hero," Realuyo could hardly fail to realize that some traumas go on and on, and disordered life goes on then too; yet that triumph later, "souls intact," is possible. For all its description of misery, The Umbrella Country is at heart a courageous offer of hope, based on faith in incorruptibility and the power to recover innocence after the fall. As Ninang says, Filipinos are like grass and can grow anywhere.

Many Filipinos have the adaptability and tenacity of grass; and beyond these qualities some have fidelity, loyalty, love. In their veins will always be their parents' presence. So far apart; and yet so connected.

Notes

See the author's "Dominion over the Horizon," Solidarity (Oct.-Dec. 1966), pp. 129-33.

A checklist of Philippine fiction and poetry appearing in American sources before 1965 showed over 300 items.

In the Reader's Guide to The Umbrella Country (NY: Ballantine, 1999).

Their place within the centenary achievements should be more apparent when Bert Florentino completes updating his 1963 Midcentury Guide to Philippine Literature in English. Florentino and Linda Nietes have in progress a definitive summary of such literature to the present.

As Luis Francia has said, "if you're writing literature, you're not writing propaganda. Because they think that because you have the'right politics therefore you must be good." "Confessions of a Born-Again Filipino: An interview with Poet Luis Francia," The Dispatch (Spring 1986): 11.

"A Conversation with Bino Realuyo," appended to The Umbrella Country.

"When Heroes Are Not Dead: An Easy in Two Voices," Filipinas (Aug. 2000): 43- 45, 71.