Week 5

This week we read Dark Blue Suit, a collection of short stories that share a single narrator, a Filipino-American character. These stories are related sometimes directly with shared characters and sometimes more loosely with shared themes. Some of the main themes of the book were fighting, boxing, Filipino-American culture, sexuality and misogyny, race-relations, hope and hopelessness, and war. The book was written by Peter Bacho, himself a Filipino-American and currently a professor at the University of Washington. One interesting theme in this book was how the narrator talked about the bond between Filipino-Americans and African-Americans due to similar socioeconomic situations. This stuck out to me because growing up I attended a Catholic church with a large population of wealthy Filipino-Americans whose circumstances and experiences were very different than the ones described in this book, and who seemed to associate more with white people than black people (although many of the teenagers listened to hip-hop and enjoyed black culture). Therefore my image of Filipino-Americans was somewhat skewed from my limited experience with them, and now I realize that many Filipino-Americans were and still are less privileged. The story that hit me the hardest was that of Rico, the young boxer who was told by his counselor that he had two options for his future: the military or jail. Despite Rico’s aggressive hyper-masculinity and off-putting misogynistic language, I still felt for him and his internalized hopelessness for a real future. As the narrator points out, Rico “died” in Vietnam. He later died again, physically, in a fire in California, bringing his tragic story to an end. By the end of the book I was left wondering how much, if any, of the book is autobiographical, given that the book is written in a first-person perspective and the narrator is only referred to as “Buddy.” Regardless, this book was an interesting look at the lives of Filipino-Americans in the latter half of the 20th century.