Resumen de Flipping across the ocean: nostalgia, matchmaking and displacement in Filipino american narrative
The article addresses the nomadic nature of Filipino American social reality and howthat is conveyed through a literature imbued with a peculiarly Filipino “exilicsensibility”. The literary texts chosen to illustrate this hypothesis are BienvenidoSantos’s What The Hell For You Left Your Heart In San Francisco (1987), as well asseveral short stories: N.V.M. González’s “The Tomato Game” (1993), BienvenidoSantos’s “Immigration Blues” (1979), Linda Ty-Casper’s “Hills, Sky, Longing”(1990), and Jessica Hagedorn’s “The Blossoming of Bong Bong” (1990). The fictionof Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. González, and Ty-Casper, portray the nostalgia for anidealized homeland, especially through the oldtimers’ and old people’s perspective.Both Santos and González also tackle the question of green-card marriages betweenyoung Filipinas and oldtimers. On the other hand, Hagedorn’s story and Santos’s novel choose a young immigrant as the focal point who does not echo the elders’ feeling of homesickness, displacement and exile.
