PALH, 2020 US Edition, paperback, 160 pages ISBN: 978–1‑95–3716-07–1, $14.95
ISBN for ebook: 978–1‑953716–08‑8
Anvil, 1995, hardcover, 157 pages ISBN 9712704599
Haunting and Enchanting
The 2020 US Edition of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s collection of short fiction, ACAPULCO AT SUNSET AND OTHER STORIES, gathers seventeen enchanting stories grouped into four categories: Long Ago Tales, Stories from the ’60s and ’70s, Stories from the ’90s, and American Tales. In this book, Brainard, a Philippine American author, continues her exploration of her Filipino and Filipino-American immigrant experiences. The collection includes some of her best short stories.This anthology of stories, first published in 1995 in the Philippines, is now presented to an audience familiar with Brainard’s subsequent literary work — the novels she wrote (WHEN THE RAINBOW GODDESS WEPT, MAGDALENA, THE NEWSPAPER WIDOW), the books she edited, including the young adult coming-of-age anthologies GROWING UP FILIPINO: STORIE FOR YOUNG ADULTS and the follow up GROWING UP FILIPINO; and more.. The GROWING UP books are most popular among educators librarians.
Praise
Review in Halo-Halo Reviews
by Herminia Menez Coben, PhD
In her debut collection of short stories, WOMAN WITH HORNS, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard launches her mythical Ubec (Cebu) – a historic, cosmopolitan and vibrant city – the setting of many of her short stories, as well as her most recent novel, THE NEWSPAPER WIDOW.
Ubec is home to the historical figure Lapu-Lapu, portrayed in “1521” not in his role as the legendary defender of the island against Spanish conquistadors but as a new father engulfed with joy at the birth of his first son, only to lose him, soon after, to enemy fire.
In “Black Man in the Forest,” as in “1521,” war serves as the necessary background for highlighting the complex emotional drama that is at the core of the narrative. The Philippine American War situates General Gregorio in a forest, where he has fled with a few of his men to escape the Americans. Confronted by a “black man,” he is wounded in the leg and he fires back, killing the American soldier with his last bullets. In the aftermath, the general reflects on his victim’s death, and with great compassion gives the stranger a river-funeral, saving him from the predation of one of his men, the cannibalistic Liver-Eater.
These and other stories below clearly demonstrate Brainard’s ability to draw the reader into the story by creating characters that are truly believable, whether they are plucked from the pages of history (“1521,” “Chino’s Dream”), drawn from folklore (“Woman with Horns”), or from one’s memory of ordinary people leading ordinary lives. All of them share common human frailties and redeeming virtues, and, always, all are worthy of redemption.
In the title story, Dr. Gerald McCallister, a hollow man, grief-stricken after the death of his beloved wife, assumes the post as Ubec’s American director of a public health program to contain a cholera epidemic. A stranger in a strange land, without any meaningful connection to anyone, he becomes consumed by his work. In the end, an unusually seductive young widow, believed to have been sired by a river spirit, redeems him from a joyless, lonely existence.
In “Woman with Horns,” as well as in other stories in the second collection, beginning with “Acapulco at Sunset,” the characters seem haunted by a sense of displacement, a “feeling of being a stranger” (“Killing Time”), “of not belonging” (“Alaska”) in a country where even the sunsets are never the same as in one’s native land (“Acapulco”). Brainard is a specialist in the psychology of exiles, of alienated immigrants, transplanted to a place they never can quite call home.
Brainard’s prose is lean, sparse, and easy to read, but each story is never simple. If one really pays attention to her storytelling craft, one is rewarded with delightful discoveries, as in “Acapulco.” The opening scene about a spider constantly weaving its web is a recurring metaphor for the heroine herself. “I, too, am creating a web, am I not?” she asks herself. The gossamer web reminds her of her mother’s sinamay weavings and the poverty of her childhood, which she lamentably contrasts with the wealth and comfort her successful husband has given her in her new land. Despite that, she feels “dry and hollow,” like a “floating ghost,” a ghost like Jaime, the love of her life, still hovering in her memory, and resurrected only with the annual letters delivered by the galleon from Manila. At the end, when her husband calls her to join him and their twin daughters, his loud, urgent voice leaves “the spider… cringing in her web.”
A gifted spinner of tales, Brainard can turn a simple event in an ordinary life, like a craving for “Butterscotch Marble Ice Cream” into a heartwarming story about a young wife, pregnant for the first time, contemplating her future in a small rental apartment in San Francisco. Looking out her window, she is perturbed by the scene of a woman hanging out her laundry. Is this what married life is all about, she wonders. Her husband, Mark, a law student, craves for a particular flavor of Swensen’s ice cream and persuades her to go on what turns out to be a quest from one ice cream shoppe to another in the damp and foggy city. Pleased with their success, Mark settles down with the pint of ice cream in front of the television. His wife, by the window, is still thinking of the neighbor and her laundry when the baby gives a kick. Shifting her weight, she catches Mark’s reflection on the glass, happy and content with the butterscotch marble ice cream, and she realizes that “in that reflection (is) my future.”
“Butterscotch” and other stories in these two collections are themselves like reflections on a window pane or like snapshots of a moment in time, which reveal much more than what appears on the surface.
“A Very Short Story” captures a few hours in the life of a married man, on a tryst with a lover at the Hilton. It is very brief, no more than half a page. It is up to the reader to fill in the rest.
Having read most of Brainard’s short fiction, as well as her novels, I think that I can safely say that these stories are some of the best in her extensive repertoire.
(Herminia Menez Coben, a retired Professor of American Multicultural Studies at Cal State, Sonoma, is author of EXPLORATIONS IN PHILIPPINE FOLKLORE and VERBAL ARTS IN PHILIPPINE INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: POETICS, SOCIETY, AND HISTORY.)
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“Although writing from outside the Philippines, Brainard uses the Philippines and Filipinos as ‘either the original or terminal reference point.’ This narrative strategy, which Oscar Campomanes argues characterizes literature written by Filipinos in the U.S. or Filipino Americans, opposed to “ethnic” literature, which addresses immigration and settlement. It is best described, Campomanes suggests, as a literature of “exile and emergence” (Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, ed. Vicente L. Rafael.) Brainard enriches the conventional understanding of exile by applying the concept to Filipino experience in the Philipines. She (Cecilia Brainard) is thereby able to show the cultural and social issues that a Filipino/a faces while in exile are universal Filipino experiences.” (Les Adler for Pilipinas)
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“The stories of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard tell of voyages the heart could have taken, of places haunted by old memories like ghosts lingering under an ancient mango tree, of times seemingly irretrievable but always there at the farthest end of the thread of remembering. Wherever the characters of her tales have wandered, one finds them at some point of their journey redeeming fragments of their lost selves and making sense of the maze through which we all pass.” (Marjorie M. Evasco, Poet)
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“In Brainard’s stories, Acapulco and Intramuros are the same, and at the same time, completely different places. Dead characters and live characters talk to each other nonchalantly. A young poor boy falls in love with an older rich woman, and by loving her, kills her. Filipinos find their identity in, of course, San Francisco, but not so ordinarily, in Alaska. The green card — actually blue — spells the difference between authenticity and an authentic life, between dreaming and the American dream.“In Brainard’s stories, the mind does wondrous things: aside from creating an Evil-Thing that makes one do good things, for instance, it may recreate good people that spell the difference between good and evil. It may make characters live in worlds they themselves create, distinct from — often destructive of — the world that has created them. A young girl, for instance, may live for the handsome object of her adolescent fantasies, then so suddenly recognize these fantasies as mere “silly daydreams.” A very old woman, saving herself for her one and only love, finally surrenders her virtue — and her life — on her death bed, of course to her one and only, now long dead, love.” (Isagani R. Cruz for Starweek)
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Excerpt
https://cbrainard.blogspot.com/2013/06/manila-without-verna-short-story-by.html
Book Reviews
Review by Herminia Menez Coben, The Halo-Halo Review, Nov. 24, 2020
Review by Les Adler for Pilipinas, Michigan State University, No. 26, Spring 1996
Review by Isagani R. Cruz for Starweek, Philippine Star, October 29, 1995