Literature and Cosmopolitan Imaginings: On the Diasporic Representation and Imaginary Cosmopolitanism in America is in the Heart and “One out of Many”*

WANG Li Nanjing University/ Emory University

Abstract: America is in the Heart (1946), the debut novel written by the contemporary Filipino American writer and poet Carlos Bulosan, has aroused heated discussion since its publication among the literary circles within and without America.This semi-autobiographical novel provides a lens to the early Filipino immigrants’life in the United States, and secures a shrine for Carlos Bulosan in the Philippine American writers as well as Asian American writers. This paper attempts to use “One out of Many,” a short story by V.S. Naipaul, as the foil and contrasts it with America is in the Heart so as to pinpoint the fantasy and illusion of the American dream depicted by the writer in the novel. In a main WASP American society, the universal values are actually substantial cultural hegemony for the minority groups. In addition,Carlos Bulosan somehow internalizes the white consciousness and shows a distinct and colored gender prejudice in his narration, which can be seen from the different attitudes towards Filipino and American women respectively. Besides, the paper points out that assimilation cannot be offered as a strategy to solve the problem and explain the failure of Santosh, the average man among the great immigrants in “One out of Many.” Thus the cosmopolitan world of socialism and brotherhood is nothing more than an imagination. Nevertheless, through the literary imagination, Bulosan is capable of depicting the bitter life experienced by Filipino immigrants and other ethnic minorities in the United States, and at the same time, it also re fl ects the promising and hopeful expectation that the author has in the future for his ethnic group.

Keywords: Carlos Bulosan; America is in the Heart; “One out of Many”;diasporic literature; Imaginary cosmopolitanism

1. Introduction

America is in the Heart (1946) by the Filipino writer and poet, Carlos Bulosan, and “One out of Many” written by the Indian-British writer, V.S. Naipaul, both touch upon the very issues of minority immigrant experiences and some key concepts of cosmopolitanism in a post-imperial world,which render us the possibility to explore the correlative commonalities of and diversi fi ed responses to cosmopolitanism between the two writers by contrast and comparison. Both set in America, the Promised Land to many immigrant settlers, both writers approach the above-mentioned issues quite differently through which their respective responses and attitudes are saliently disclosed.

Hence in this paper, I would like to conduct a tentative study on the two texts from the perspectives of post-colonialism and cosmopolitanism, and would argue that the cosmopolitan ideas put forward by Bulosan are limited to gender politics of America, ignoring the existing large number of female fi gures in both Philippines and America, and in the meantime oblivious of the minor and classless immigrants who cannot claim America but to meet with numerous exploitations and varied kinds of racial and class discrimination, like the protagonist in Naipaul’s story. Therefore, this paper mainly focuses on the former text while referring to Naipaul’s text as pertinent evidences when necessary for the exposition.

By resorting to Walter Mignolo’s idea of “critical cosmopolitanism” and other critics’ responses to their respective texts, this paper points out that Bulosan’s imagined cosmopolitan America, which generally addresses the fraternal brotherhood for a working class community, is still heavily gendered by excluding the female Americans or women labors either from the mainstream Caucasians or the colored minorities. What’s more, he is blind to the dilemmas and doubts people like Santosh in “One out of Many” confronted in their lived immigrant experiences.

2. Allos’ Disillusioned Dream and Bulosan’s American Dream

In the former text, in spite of the few chapters’ description of landscape in Philippines and the protagonist-narrator Allos’ remembrance of his pathetic yet not unhappy childhood years, the author,Carlos Bulosan, mainly and minutely exposes the miserable and suffering life experiences, unfair treatments and exploitation of the working Pinoys up and down the American west coast for decades.It seems incomprehensible to many that the narrator Allos, after experiencing so many struggles and unbearable sufferings under the context of racial and class discrimination, can still stick to his American Dream tightly, calling for a better future of America without racial bondages and any kind of inequality.According to the editor of this book, San Juan, Bulosan’s America is nothing but a Utopia full of possibilities. It is not dif fi cult to fi nd that Bulosan deems America as the fi nal salvation to redeem all kinds of social struggles and conflicts in his home country. Compared to the backwater Philippines where diligent and hard-working pheasants like his own parents are exploited by invisible privileged plutocrats and can hardly work enough to meet the ends or keep their soul and body together, America is undoubtedly a dream land to the narrator. It is a wonderland for people to settle on thus to fl ee from poverty back in Philippines. Though Allos has only three years of formal schooling, he holds on to the values of equality and freedom deep in his heart as he later uses Abraham Lincoln as a model by addressing his contribution to the black people and his promotion from the son of a peasant family to the president of America. Simply put, America is where Allos wants to tap his potentials and upgrade his social status.

Being blinded to the erected wall of racial discrimination, Allos’ former American Dream to achieve his self-value within the working class community is doomed. After many years’ bitterness in America, Allos “came to know afterward that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California” and “that the public streets were not free to ［his］ people: ［they (the Pinoys)］ were stopped each time these vigilant patrolmen saw ［them］ driving a car. ［They］ were suspected each time ［when they］ were seen with a white woman.”The imposed crime on their whole minority cannot be easily done away with in the ruthless reality. As we know, Bulosan deliberately distances himself from the narrator Allos. It is very interesting that many critics point to Bulosan’s discrepancy, in lived experience description and his personal and emotional expression respectively, as they point to the slight difference between Carlos and Allos.

Some appreciate his narrative strategy in dramatizing it and others criticize this discrepancy and point out that incongruity will indirectly lead to further complicated identity puzzles about the minority group. As far as I am concerned, I agree with the latter point of view. What Allos or Carlos, the Marxist materialist committed to social justice all his short life, wants is but radical political rights for the working class Pinoys in America. Bulosan once said that by his writing he wants to “give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawai’i, and Alaska.”Based on Bulosan’s life experience that he “never returned to the Philippines, and he never became a U.S. citizen,”we can say that what he resorts to is actually his beautiful pipe dream and imagined cosmopolitanism which can never be achieved within the framework that dominated America is in the Heart.

Bathed in American Dream and its ideologies, Bulosan cannot even comprehend what“America in the heart” actually is, needless to say finding ways out of the plight for numerous minority immigrants. Thus the contrast between Bulosan’s American Dream and Allos’disillusioned dream reveals to us clearly the cleft between the dream of Bulosan’s cosmopolitanism and the ruthless and race-bind reality.

3. Naipaul’s Observation and His Small Figures’ American Life

“One out of Many” is one of the short stories in In a Free State by the Indian British writer V.S. Naipaul who harvested the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001. As an immigrant novelist like Carlos Bulosan, Naipaul touches on the racial or class issues, which seem lighter and less miserable. However, it does not mean that he takes them less seriously.

Santosh used to be a servant in Bombay who cook and take care of the house for his Sahib who was working for the local Indian government. Since the areoplane landed on the land of Washington, his life seems a lot different then. He was made fun of by the passengers on the plane and felt homesick now and then when he lived with his master in the city apartment without a room of his own. As minority immigrants, both the master and the servant were confused by many things that they could not fi nd ways out. To his surprise, Santosh fi nds his boss as shy and ordinary as he is when confronted with the dominating whites in America. The class difference he never realized back in India is now brought vividly to him when he makes comparison between the Negroes and the whites and relates to his relationship with his master, fi nding that he is no longer in his Sahib’s presence.

Little by little, Santosh is awakened by his new fi ndings in America and begins to fi nd his own handsome appearance and entertain his own life by walking around the street, the fountain and the city where he wants to explore. One day he ran away from his former master after he had sexual affair with a black woman across their apartment. He met one Indian American Priya who ran a restaurant and immediately decided to work as a cook for him. He seems satis fi ed because he earns his own freedom now. Without green card protecting him, his former dread of running away from his master and his self-thought dishonoring behavior to a Negro thrust back at him altogether.Hiding his own secrets, his life in America then seems miserable and unbearable. He con fi ded to Priya, the sociable and sophisticated Indian, and took his advice to marry the black woman after thinking twice and decided to be an American citizen legally.

Conversely, Naipaul in this text also touches on the same issue yet from quite another perspective and with much subtlety. At the end of the story, it appears that Santosh succeeds to bury his past life in India and meditates on his own ways in embracing his newly earned freedom in the new world. But if you have not forgotten the opening sentences of the novel, you will fi nd that it is still not the whole story because Santosh said in the very fi rst place that “I AM NOW an American citizen and I live in Washington, capital of the world. Many people, both here and in India, will feel that I have done well.BUT.”What I want to call your attention to here is that there is the big BUT and it’s really dif fi cult to interpret it, not to mention fi nding ways out of the “BUT.” As to what it is, Naipaul doesn’t tell us directly. Naipaul subtly approaches the complex issues that keep popping out of the immigrant lives of many individuals, especially of those marginalized fi gures who are classless and helpless.

It is obvious that Naipaul is comparatively conservative to what Bulosan dreamed of. His response to the idea of a cosmopolitan world in the postcolonial America, as far as I am concerned,is a critical and aloof one. To a classless and small potato like Santosh, a former Indian servant for his Sahib, the working class union or community are just like high-end theories which cannot be applied to reality. Santosh comes to America with the fl ow and ultimately still goes to where the wind blows as many other immigrants do. Although sometimes Santosh is bewitched by the fabulous fable of American Dream and once held on tightly to the ambition to rise in this new world, the relentless reality turns out to beat him down and totally topples down what he once dreamed of — having freedom and happiness like other mainstream individuals in America.

4. U.S. Cultural Imperialism through Cosmopolitan Projects

America is in the Heart displays a position that is relatively pro-America even though Allos has always been fi ghting for his Pinoys comrades hoping to be naturalized American citizens. His appealing for a harmonious world community of all human beings in America, the heart of the world, seems futile and doomed since it is still within and at the mercy of the whole framework of American hegemony and postcolonial rules. More often than not, the protagonist tends to be in fl uenced by the American culture and its imperial ideology that he bathes in, and unknowingly embraces its ideas and values.

U.S. imperialism in Philippines can fi nd perfect expression in Carlos Bulosan’s text as well as in Philippines’ historical episodes. On the one hand, America took over Philippines under the very name of tutelage from the former controller and exploiter, Spain, at the end of the 19th century. Without breaking the framework of the U.S. cultural hegemony and post-imperialism,there is no way to pursue ethnic freedom and individual equality. In part four of Bulosan’s book particularly, there seems to be a reconciliation between the white Caucasians and the Filipinos when America, the country they keep in heart, was attacked by the then imperial Japan at Pearl Harbor and involved immediately in World War Two. Bulosan’s two brothers and other friends joined the American army, protecting America for a better future with freedom and democracy that they pursued. This event echoes well with Allos’ fi rst meeting with his eldest brother Leon, who“had gone to fi ght a strange war in Europe”and came back later. The whole novel begins with his brother fi ghting for America in Europe and ends with another two brothers of his fi ghting with Japanese enemies,which altogether provide us the af fi rmation that they claim America as their country in the fi rst place.

Mignolo in his essay points out the two missions of cosmopolitan project — modernizing mission and Christian mission, and both of them promote the process of globalization along the history in which we can also fi nd evidence from the text. For example, Allos is a Christian and had been baptized before he came to America. The primary education that fl ourished in the period of American tutelage of Philippines not only aimed primarily at civilizing the local natives but also at advocating the ideologies of America. Becoming one part of America is always Bulosan’s dream which can date back to his childhood days in Philippines. He is a pious Christian and his dream of going to America one day is like a seed germinating at the very bottom of his tender heart. His American Dream is a dream of such an America where freedom fl ows without discrimination. The two kinds of cosmopolitan projects are well re fl ected in Allos’ education and his theological beliefs. The confrontation and intervention of the global and the local thus made young Allos baf fl ed, especially from a Christian point of view. On one hand,he is a radical nationalist striving for national liberation and individual freedom. On the other hand, he,like Walt Whitman once did, envisions a vista for America as a newly-born world which transcends the limits of nationalism to embrace cosmopolitanism.

The other effort of his life is claiming authority in the literary circle. His reading ranges from American writers to writers from France, Russia and many other countries. The social movements in 1930s was in full swing and the writer gives us a panorama of it when we can fi nd the Pinoys,the Mexicans, the Japanese and Chinese, all those minorities’ lives and their commitments to their own roots in the book. What confuses the author is the paradox of America: on one hand, it appeals to every immigrant that it’s the hub of glorious American Dream where everyone can work hard to attain what he wants; on the other, the racial discrimination is too thick a wall to break through.The many faces of America baffled many immigrants. David Palumbo-Liu states that it is of vital importance for people to recognize “the presence of a global logic of dominance” and to put forward “a counter-logic” that can critique and unmask “the unilateral and calculated invention of the present and the future.”However, even in contemporary America when the racial issue is not as serious as in the 1930s, the prejudice towards the Pinoys or some other minority groups is still there waiting to be dealt with.

What Bulosan resorts to is imperial cosmopolitanism which is quite similar to the Kantian idea of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. According to Walter Mignolo’s point of view, “Euro-American concepts of cosmopolitanism have the right to exist but have no right to expect to be universal.”Therefore, Mignolo in another essay “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism” puts forward his tentative resolution to the double faces of cosmopolitanism — modernity and coloniality, which is a critical cosmopolitanism from the border thinking to decolonize and deconstruct the very cosmopolitanism in question.

5. No Border-Crossings in Naipaul’s Immigrant Life

More often than not, the small figure Santosh in “One out of Many” finds himself falling into one trap after another, always being anxious and fearful to face the music in his American life like what he confesses in the story “I thought I would vomit with fear.”His falling into the trap of servility seems a vicious circle. For instance, when he runs away from his master, he seems to sense a temporary victory of individual freedom; however, after several weeks working for Priya, he is burdened with his secrets and gets worrisome now and then. During one trip to the movie, he mistakenly calls Priya Sahib indeliberately and from then on, he returns to his old position as a servant. There is no doubt that he forgoes his hope and dream just in the same way he discards his green suits. I want to point out here that the color of the suit, green, is worthy of further discussion. Much like the green light in The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, green in this text may also symbolize Santosh’s hope for a better future(green can symbolize the American buck or maybe the green card) which he does not want to forgo but has to at last. This may well explain why he bought “a green hat, a green suit” only to fi nd that the typical American “suit was always too big for ［him］.”

Once, Santosh was contented with his life in the backwater Bombay, sleeping within his small cupboard and chatting with his pauper peers on the street. Now, contrarily, his enclosure within the apartment displays his claustrophobic feelings and self-imposed alienation after so many humiliations in America. For instance, he was refused to enter a cafe just because he was bare-footed and without decent clothes. At the very end of this story, through the confessional tone of Santosh living a certain few years in America with his hubshi wife, we can catch a glimpse of his disappointing and hopeless feelings. Nevertheless, the cruel reality and social norms in the mainstream society crushes his dream little by little. He finally sees through the glamorous appearance of America, witnesses the darker side of American Dream, and comes to know that “I understood I was a prisoner. I accepted this and adjusted. I learned to live within the apartment,and I was even calm.”In other words, he is fi nally both defeated and destroyed by the reality,without any expectation because his courage fl ows out of him.

Santosh fi nally exchanges his marriage for a green card with a black woman he does not love. At fi rst he declares clearly his opinion about black people: “But in our country we frankly do not care for the hubshi. It is written in our books, both holy and not so holy, that it is indecent and wrong for a man of our blood to embrace the hubshi woman. To be dishonoured in this life, to be born a cat or a monkey or a hubshi in the next!”It is ironic at certain degree that Santosh married the hubshi woman who he always deemed as Kali, the goddess of death and destruction in Hindu culture. This kind of behavior delineates his embrace of fatal destiny of destruction which we can also observe clearly from the closing paragraph:

I am a simple man who decided to act and see for himself, and it is as though I have had several lives. I do not wish to add to these. Some afternoons I walk to the circle with the fountain...I was part of the fl ow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked in the mirror and decided to be free. All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.

Finally, he accepts what reality and destiny have already written for him, being a stranger with a legal presence and a hollow man without any expectations but boredom and everlasting loneliness in America,the alien land rather than the promised one in Bulosan’s imagined cosmopolitan world. What’s more,we cannot help but admit that Santosh is not a unique case but one out of many (emphasis added) being trapped in the plight of alienated and disillusioned immigrants’ American experiences.

6. The Problems of the Dreamed Cosmopolitan World

The class struggles in Bulosan’s book are thrilling and poignant which easily remind readers of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Compared with Naipaul, Bulosan seems to be a leftwing radical in social activity even in the face of ongoing hardships. As one of the leaders of strikes and labor movements, he extends his focus to the whole ethnic group and fi ghts all the way through his life to win the battle. Instead of addressing the heinous racial issues between the white and the brown, Bulosan in his book focuses much on the class struggles and the incongruity in the process of uniting the working Pinoys in west-coast America. The social movements and strikes assume a large part of the whole book which, on one hand, diminishes the importance of racial discrimination and, on the other, accentuates the inequalities between those who haves and those who have-nots, whether they are in America or in Philippines.

The class difference leaves great impression on the narrator even when he was a small child.A case in point was one tour to another town with his mother selling beans for supporting his family. Even though the middle class woman wearing fabulous and fi ne clothes poked fun of them by deliberately toppling down their baskets of beans, his mother acted as nothing had happened and even apologized to the woman by keeping saying “It is all right.” Allos remembered this episode vividly by re fl ecting that “I was one peasant who did not crawl on my knees and say: It is all right. It is all right....”From this we can smell his little annoyance by his mother’s response to this event and his inner appealing for a society of individual equality without class discrimination.The seed of American Dream germinates from his early childhood and since then he always deems America as a place where he can tap his full potentialities for his own people back in Philippines.Many years later, even when he fi nds out that America is far from his childhood imagination, he still cherishes his deep faith in America. That his former education deprives him of a clear vision of the reality of America may account for this. By virtue of the historical reality that Philippines was, at that time, under the control of America, the identity problem of Pinoys was much more complicated than that of other minority groups, say, the Chinese American immigrants. Neither citizens nor total aliens,they are naturals admitted by the American law which, in return, undoubtedly leads to their confusions about identity construction. With the mindset of American cultural imperialism, it is dif fi cult for the author to see through the fact that the dominating American values were imposed on the colonized subjects.

In “The local and the global: globalization and ethnicity,” Stuart Hall sets out to reexamine some of the main questions regarding globalization and its cultural, ethnic and identity issues. Hall fi nds the British identity to be a masculine one. Bulosan’s text is a response to this view since his working class community is exclusive to either white women or Philippine women. Bulosan’s critique of “U.S. racial exclusion and class domination is intimately linked to gender and sexual oppression.”In the oftenquoted paragraph we can even see the gendered language vividly:

It is but fair to say that America is not a land of one race or one class of men. We are all Americans that have toiled and suffered and known oppression and defeat, from the fi rst Indian that offered peace in Manhattan to the last Filipino pea pickers. America is not bound by geographical latitudes. America is not merely a land or an institution.America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world. America is a prophecy of a new society of men: of a system that knows no sorrow or strife or suffering. America is a warning to those who would try to falsify the ideals of free men.

The only few white women appeared in his text are either helpful friends who supported him voluntarily or intellectual mentors like Eileen Odell and her sisters. They are group types without typical characteristics. For Bulosan, there are only two types of white women and the only yardstick is whether they are tolerant with racial issues. According to his opinion, America will have ful fi lled its promise of equality only “when interracial relationships between a Filipino man and a ‘respectable’ white woman are legally possible and socially acceptable.”

He also exposes ruthlessly the old custom of testing virgin in marriage in Philippines. If the bride fails the virgin test, she “would be looked upon with abhorrence and would be ostracized.”Attributing the outdated custom to the hill people, the narrator argues for its extirpation: “it was a fast-dying custom, in line with other backward customs in the Philippines, yielding to the new ways of the younger generation that were shaping out sharply from the growing industrialism.”His mother and the girl his brother married with are also oversimpli fi ed without vivid delineation of their personalities. It seems that except for their maternal caring like his mother’s patience and love for children, female existence can only disturb men in a universal brotherhood. To put in Ponce’s words, Bulosan’s “sexual critiques of U.S. racial and class hierarchies and Philippine radical and social formations would have been thrown in bolder relief.”

Another threat to the seemingly universal cosmopolitanism is that without a unity with a community, individuals like Santosh can barely draw others’ attention. Just as Priya said that people in America just don’t bother to care what you do and “they have a saying here. If you can’t beat them, join them. I joined them. They are still beating me.”His remark is a stark re fl ection of the reality of racial discrimination. The alien immigrants are considered hostile enemies which respond well to Sahib’s warning to Santosh in their very early days in America — “But be careful.We are not among friends, remember.”That’s why Santosh fi nally realized he had never escaped the common destiny for his like, never been free at all: “I was alone. I hadn’t escaped. I had never been free. I had been abandoned. I was like nothing; I had made myself nothing. And I couldn’t turn back.”His ambition of being somebody in America only leads to his fi nal silence and being nobody in the marginalized world.

7. Conclusion

In America is in the Heart, Bulosan articulates the struggles and hopes for equality and justice for Filipinos. He projects a “new world order” liberated from materialist greed, bigoted nativism,racist oppression, and capitalist exploitation. As the editor San Juan explains, Bulosan’s writings help us understand the powerlessness and invisibility of being labeled a Filipino in America. In conclusion, this paper aims to uncover the nature of the sham universal cosmopolitanism and American Dream embraced enthusiastically by Bulosan since it is gendered and cannot resolve the dilemmas confronted by the minority people in a postcolonial world. Becoming a diaspora in the U.S. is not easy. There are many voices and erected walls in America to segregate those minority birds of passage. The immigrants can only live in an area of darkness and feel being prisoned time and again. The hybridity of their cosmopolitan identity embodies well in their dual identities and double consciousness. Simply put, they are rootless and helpless, knowing not where home is. Their struggles in establishing connections between the two sides seem futile in the relentless reality.

What the seeming reconciliation and the doubts of immigrants lurking behind are thus unveiled to us vividly. All in all, the comparison and contrast between the two texts allude to us that the problems confronted by the immigrant diasporas in America cannot be resolved by the seemingly universal cosmopolitanism. Hence it is safe to say that the ideal America the immigrants hold in the heart are out of their cosmopolitan imaginings because it is not easy to be materialized in the real world under the shadow of post-imperialism and American cultural hegemony.