"America is Not the Heart," by Elaine Castillo

There is a fairly large body of Filipino-American literature, but it doesn’t seem to be as well-known as other Asian-American literature, such as Japanese-American and Chinese-American fiction. And many of the Filipino/a authors have only become published and somewhat well-known in the past couple of decades. I remember that in the early 1990s when I taught a class titled “Contemporary Fiction by Nonwestern Women” (now I would probably not use the Western-centric term “Nonwestern”), I taught a novel by one of the rare (in the U.S.) well-known Filipina writers at the time, “Dogeaters,” by Jessica Hagedorn, who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and was also a performance artist at the time. I have just read an intense, vivid, bursting-with-life novel by the born-and-raised San Francisco Bay Area writer Elaine Castillo: “America is Not the Heart” (Penguin, 2018; paperback 2019). This is the author’s first novel, but you wouldn’t know it: it is a take-no-prisoners tour de force. It is over 400 pages long, but the reader is swept into and out of it with the author in complete control. The novel is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in particular in the suburb of Milpitas, where many Filipino-Americans live. The main character is a woman named Hero, who has recently arrived in the U.S., after starting life as part of a prestigious and wealthy family, then joining the rebels living mostly in jungles for ten years; she has been imprisoned and tortured. We also learn about her extended family, both in the Philippines and in California, as well as the community of friends in which she is caught up. She falls in love with a woman, takes care of and dearly loves a younger relative, and is constantly caught up in the conflict between her past and present lives. One realistic aspect that I appreciated was the characters' easily going back and forth among Filipino English, Tagalog, and other Filipino languages, as well as “standard” American English. There is little in the way of explaining words or terms; the author trusts readers to figure them out for themselves if they don’t already know. The novel is crammed full of intrigue, violence, love, sex, caring, friendship, work, and just plain getting on with life and dealing with what has to be dealt with. Highly recommended.