On Becoming Filipino

• Publication History Acknowledgments Introduction Stories 1. Passage into Life 2. The Story of a Letter 3. Be American 4. The Soldier 5. As Long as the Grass Shall Grow 6. Life and Death of a Filipino in America 7. Homecoming 8. The Thief 9. The End of the War Essays 10. How My Stories Were Written 11. The Growth of Philippine Culture 12. My Education 13. Freedom from Want 14. Filipino Writers in a Changing World 15. I Am Not a Laughing Man 16. The Writer As Worker Poems 17. Biography 18. Surely the Living Departed 19. The Manifesto of Human Events 20. Blood Music, 1939 21. The Shadow of a Tear 22. Death and Transfiguration 23. Waking in the 20th Century 24. Letter in Exile 25. Portrait with Cities Falling 26. For a Child Dying in a Tenement 27. The Foreigners 28. Needing No Time 29. Hymn to a Man Who Failed 30. Factory Town 31. Meeting with a Discoverer 32. Biography Between Wars 33. If You Want to Know What We Are 34. To My Countrymen Correspondence 35. Letters (1937-55) 36. Letters to an American Woman 37. Letter to a Filipino Woman Autobiographical Sketch Selected Writings by and about Carlos Bulosan Criticism and Commentary on Bulosan About the Editor

"[P]resents an excellent selection of the work of this 20th-century Filipino writer... Editor San Juan has provided an erudite 42-page discussion of Bulosan's work and life as well as a history of Filipinos in America." --Library Journal "Though written in the 1940s and 1950s, Bulosan's work has particular relevance in today's racially charged political debates." --Asian Week "On Becoming Filipino marks a decisive moment in our estimation of Carlos Bulosan's inexhaustible legacy for Asian American and twentieth-century U.S. literatures. This anthology amply captures the startling contemporaneity and political resonance of Bulosan's achievement, and dares us to push the exhausted debates over literary ethnicity and multiculturalism beyond their impoverished terms of bourgeois identity, cultural nationalism, and pluralist representation. This is a remarkably accomplished effort to frame and allegorize Bulosan's writing in terms of a Filipino nomadism ('becoming') and its uneasy displacements across the terrains of U.S.-Philippine colonial and postcolonial relations." --Oscar V. Campomanes, University of California, Berkeley "In this book, Bulosan's political views--Marxist, anticapitalist, antiracist, and anticolonialist--are explored as they evolve, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s... On Becoming Filipino is often a stark testimony to the lives of Filipino migrants: 'I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit,' Bulosan writes. 'And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America.' Bulosan's letters and essays reveal that...America would always be in his heart--as dream, as ideal, as object of a double-edged love which hurt as it both soothed and savaged." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, A.MAGAZINE