In the country
By Mia Alvar
Knopf, 347 pages
Available at National Book Store
A character in Fil-Am author Mia Alvar’s debut short story collection, In the Country, describes writing about the Philippines as “chop suey.” It takes time abroad, perhaps, to figure out how to see your own country. James Joyce knew something about that. For youngish Alvar, living in New York City, time away from the home country seems to have sharpened her vision. The Harvard and Columbia graduate received praise from New York Times Book Review, O: The Oprah Magazine and Kirkus Reviews for her debut collection, In the Country, wherein Alvar takes on chimera-like viewpoints of characters split from their homeland, or stuck in a version of home that only creates tension and regret.
There’s a hospital worker called back to Manila to deal with a dying bully of a father in opening story “The Kontrabida,” his mother —beaten by her husband most of her life — possessing more strength than the son (Steve) can even imagine. There’s a special needs therapist called to care for an autistic girl in Bahrain in “The Miracle Worker,” her skills used instead to manage the expectations of the girl’s unrealistic mother. Moving from the Middle East to Manhattan, we encounter a cleaning lady who hustles between jobs on the eve of Sept. 11, 2001 (“Esmerelda”); and the novella-length title story, which covers the days of martial law to EDSA through the eyes of a couple who may or may not be a mirror image of Ninoy and Cory Aquino.
For a collection by a Fil-Am called In the Country, not many of these nine tales take place in the Philippines. (The cover photo — a random shot of a 1960s Pinay leaning against a Baguio tree — was apparently sourced from Getty Images.) For Alvar, born in Manila but living in New York City since 1989, Manila seems like an aggregation of images and sensations — sharply drawn, if not conjured from thin air. The book is bracketed by stories that feast on Manila’s details, its smells and tastes, its oddities. “The Kontrabida” is about a kept-down mother and her OFW son, but it’s those details — ruminating on death, the transition between this world and another — that make it shine. (Describing the typical bag-o-softdrink dispensed at a sari-sari store: “The liquid bag I’d hand over made me think not of my childhood but some dark, alien version of the waste pouches and IV fluids I’d see at the hospital.” Or Steve describing his father’s physical decline: “In fact he no longer resembled anyone in the family; he belonged now to that transnational tribe of the sick and the dying. Without the dentures he wore most of his life, my father’s mouth was a pit, a wrinkled open wound below the nose.”)
Several stories take place in Bahrain, where Alvar lived for four years before studying in the US. One story, “Shadow Families,” paints a picture of an ad hoc community of Pinoys abroad and their instinct for punishing social climbers. With the arrival of Baby, a leggy, aloof Pinay who refuses all offers of food or companionship with her fellow Filipinos (“Thanks-no”), the gaggle of Pinays — who tend home while their engineer husbands work out in the Bahrain oil fields (or are they out fooling around?) — are left with little else to do but watch as their new addition self-destructs.
In such stories, we become closely acquainted with a generation of Pinoys accustomed to life abroad — it’s a restless existence, almost like life during wartime. (“We moved into apartments whose leaks and leases we would have to handle on our own; we lay awake in single beds, sensing that we’d snipped a cord not just from home but from the law of gravity itself, and if we tumbled off the planet altogether, no one, for a while, might know.”)
Alvar is by no means an experimental writer — these stories echo the conventional masters of quotidian life, writers like Henry James or Alice Munro. But she possesses a talent for keeping several story lines going at once with comfortable ease. While Alvar’s plots sometimes seem like just that — plots, such as the romantic pairing of a cleaning lady and a Manhattan exec with a dying wife at home in “Esmerelda,” or the ghostly encounter twist ending in “Legends of the White Lady” — there’s no mistaking that this writer has settled on a voice she can call her own: from it, she draws insights about the Filipino experience that even the most settled Manilan will recognize and connect with.