The Laughter of My Father
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The Bulosans lived in Binalonan, in the Philippine province of Pangasinan. But the episodes of Father's history that his son Carlos retells belong to universal and timeless comedy. No one can remain unmoved by Father's excursions into politics, cock-fighting, violin-playing, or the concoction of love-potions. Twenty-four such stories make up the rich and funny collection called The Laughter of My Father.
"In the winter of 1939, when I was out of work, I went to San Pedro, California, and stood in the rain for hours with hundreds of men and women hoping to get a place at the fish canneries. To forget the monotony of waiting, I started to write the title story. It was finished when I reached the gate, but the cold hours that followed made me forget many things.
"In November, 1942, when there was too much pain and tragedy in the world, I found the story in my hat. I sent it to The New Yorker, a magazine I had not read before, and in three weeks a letter came. 'Tell us some more about the Filipinos,' it said. I said, 'Yes, sir.'
"I wrote about everything that I could remember about my town Binalonan, in the province of Pangasinan. I received letters from my countrymen telling me that I wrote about them and their towns. It came to me that in writing the story of my town, I was actually depicting the life of the peasantry in the Philippines.
"These stories and 18 others are now gathered in this volume. For the first time the Filipino people are depicted as human beings. I hope you will enjoy reading about them."—Carlos Bulosan
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О аутору
Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (1911-1956) was an English-language Filipino novelist and poet who immigrated to America in 1930. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want.
Born to Ilocano parents in the Philippines in Binalonan, Pangasinan, Bulosan spent most of his youth in the countryside as a farmer. During his youth he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would become one of the main themes of his writing.
Following the pattern of many Filipinos during the American colonial period, he left for America in 1930 at age 17, in the hope of finding salvation from the economic depression of his home. He never again saw his Philippine homeland. Upon arriving in Seattle, he began working low paying jobs. In 1936, Bulosan suffered from tuberculosis, underwent three operations, and spent two years mostly in the convalescent ward. During his long stay in the hospital, he spent his time reading and writing.
Following the release of America is in the Heart in 1946, he was celebrated for giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor movement in America, and for telling the experience of Filipinos working in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1970s, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Islander American activism, his unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to posthumous releases of several unfinished works and anthologies of his poetry.
One of his most famous essays, published in March 1943, was chosen by The Saturday Evening Post to accompany its publication of the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom from Want, part of a series based on Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech.
Bulosan died in Seattle on September 11, 1956, aged 42. He is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
