A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

text Noli mi Tangere is as much part of a canon as José García Villa’s short stories and
poems of the 1930s to 1950s. A typical immigrant sensibility is exhibited by Carlos
Bulosan, whose 1946 memoir America Is in the Heart has been among the texts retrieved
and canonized by Frank Chin and the Combined Asian Resources Project (CARP) in the
1970s. Bulosan’s text addresses the hardships that he and other itinerant Filipino workers
in the American West had to deal with, but in the face of discrimination and
disappointment, he maintains:
You did not give America to me, and never will.
America is in the hearts of people that live in it.
But it is worth the coming, the sacrifice, the idealism.
Yes, it is worth all these – and the loneliness at night,
The bitterness of prejudice, the sharp fangs of hunger,
The terror of rootlessness. 188
Bienvenido Santos, whose 1989 novel What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San
Francisco is assessed as “the quintessential Filipino American novel to date,” 189 reiterates
the unwieldy self-perception of a writer who refuses simple labels: “I’m an Asian writer
who writes in English. And we live in America. I want to be called a Filipino writer
writing in English. A Filipino writer who has been in and out of this country, who has
been more in than out of this country, perhaps.” 190 Other important figures are Ninotchka
Rosca, author of State of War, and Jessica Hagedorn, whose novel Dogeaters was
nominated for the 1990 National Book Award. She has also edited Charlie Chan Is
Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction in 1993. This anthology
acknowledges its debt to the trailblazing activity of the two Aiiieeeee! books, but intends
to transcend their narrow definition of what Asian American literature is. Thus, Hagedorn
includes Vietnamese American and South Asian American writers alongside the already
188 From a poem quoted by Gonzalez in Cheung 1997: 72.
189 Gonzalez in Cheung 1997: 70.
190 Quoted by Campomanes in Cheung 1997: 78.
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