Explaining the Nature of Asian American Identity

Bulosan refers to America as organism in the hearts of those who die for freedom and in the eyeball of those who build a unsanded world (xxiv), and over close to long time that became his experience of America. But the journey was non easy. Bulosan describes how undoable it was for his family to build a full and prosperous feel in a peasant village. The saddest part of his description of village life is the fate of Bulosan's father, who declined from a prosperous peasant farmer who owned some land to a tenant farmer owning no land and constantly worried about how to feed the family. Bulosan's buddy had fought in World War I in atomic number 63 and seen the world. later the war he returned to the village, married, and immediately started a family--only to sorrowfulness falling into the peasant-village trap forever. He urged Bulosan to escape. All of these things together endure an important economic motive for Asian peasants to leave the villages and go to America. Bulosan worked his way over on a ship winning migrant workers to Seattle.

But the golden promise of America was not necessarily its reality. This refers to another factor of Asian identity element, the fact that new immigrant dig upers who were young and inexperienced and who did not know English or anything about how things worked in the U.S. before arrival. This made them vulnerable. New immigrants could be exploited--usually by corrupt fellow countrymen ("oldtimers") who could profit by fetching or controlling their money. Bulosan was among a group of

There were two identity-related aspects to Bulosan's finding injustice in the U.S. The first aspect came about when Bulosan traveled from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet his brother, who had emigrated years before. But his brother had become a small-time reprehensible who lived in both moral and physical decadence " obligate by a society alien to our character and drop " (Bulosan 135). Meanwhile, Filipinos could be casually assaulted and killed by policemen or refused service in restaurants for racial reasons (144-5). Bulosan describes many episodes in which Filipinos lived on the edge of madness and hatred, making them "brutal yet tender" (152) when all they valued was to get a break and make a neat life for themselves.

new immigrants who were "sold" by a labor broker to canning factory jobs in Alaska (104-6). Most of their fair requital was "deducted" for expenses on payday. This suggests an absence not only of Asian identity but also of human identity.

The second aspect was more far reaching because it helped Bulosan understand the brutality of Filipino immigrant experience. This was his connector a short-lived magazine and joining with other Filipino immigrants to organize Filipino farm workers into labor actions--some successful and some not. Gradually Bulosan began to read and then to write poetry as well as journalistic stories for labor publications. He flirted with communistic labor organizers, but his main life purpose became luck Pinoys. This put him in conflict with what he calls the fascist forces in California that controlled agriculture and labor policy. Nevertheless, he preferred American, not communist, political ideals, and resolved to remain in the good affair for those ideals through union organizing. There was also conflict in his personal life. Family relationships were strained with two brothers who had immigrated to the U.S. and found limited opportunity. Bulosan himself had TB. After Pearl Harbor, he worked with other Filipinos to ask the
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