Being Here [Paperback]

Jaime P. Espiritu (Author), Jaime Espiritu (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1997

A novel about coming to America, alienation, assimilation and the process of becoming an American.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

At twelve years old, Nicholas Gabriel came to the U.S. with his family. He learned what was fact and fable about America, and then some. A black man, a well-educated fellow engineer, tells him: "I do not believe in integration, because it is unnatural, and wrong." At a park bench, he tells a homeless man who was once a member of the middle-class and who, through circumstances, became an acquaintance: "You were born and raised here. Many people throughout the world could only wish that had happened to them. What happened to you?"

"Everybody has a different story," the bum tells him. "You have an America to go to. I don't. I'm already here!" A natural-born American of Japanese descent confessed to him: "I'm going back to Japan. I am not accepted in the American society as it is now. I do not belong here. I must therefore go to where I belong." After twenty years, these, along with a stunning discovery about his family's coming to America posed a daunting challenge to what Nicholas has affirmed in himself about what America stands for, and to the questions "What is an American? Who is an American? and What makes an American?"

Here is a book about us all in America, a book that every American and would-be American must read, if for nothing more than a chance to respond, let alone find an answer to those questions in the quiet of one's thoughts.

About the Author

Jaime Espiritu is a naturalized American citizen from the Philippines. He came to America in the sixties after graduating from the Architecture and Engineering college of the National University of Manila. Currently, he works for the U.S. government in Washington, D.C. as a computer specialist and lives in Northern Virginia.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Petradome Enterprises; 1 edition (February 1997)
• ISBN-10: 1570872902
• ISBN-13: 978-1570872907
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,135,835 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jaime Espiritu was born in the Philippines, the youngest of eight children, eleven months before the Japanese invaded the country December 8, 1941 hours after Pearl Harbor. He survived the war and lived there till the age of twenty-four. In July 1965, two weeks after college with a B.Sc. degree in Architecture, he ventured on a journey to America with a six-month tourist visa and two hundred dollars in his pocket.
The next 45 years, he had much to tell of life in America and Canada. From the point of view of an innocent young man fully soaked in the Hollywood and media stereotypes of Western society and way of life, to that of an assimilated, sometimes alienated, adult citizen.
Architecture didn't turn out to be his divining rod for a stable work career. So he went back to school and trained in the computer field.
Jaime is now a U.S. Federal government retiree with 26 years of service as an IT specialist. In that period, he had persevered in pursuing his lifelong desire to write and had produced several work of fiction and a memoir in the form of an autobiographical novel (coming out this year) telling of the 45 years since he ventured on that journey and the time before then.
Learn more about Jaime at www.americanfiction.com .

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A book filled with many underlying substance and meaning., August 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Being Here (Paperback)

After I read this novel, I could only wish there were more of its kind to be found among a mountain of mediocre works in print nowadays out there. There is so much this book tells which make me stop and think and appreciate who I am, and even what little I have in life. Just for being an American, and just for being here, in America. I am re-reading some of the chapters and will probably end up re-reading the whole book, for wanting to get more of a fill of the good scenes and passages.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A book of many revelations about being an American., August 14, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Being Here (Paperback)

I'm glad I found this book. I will treasure it for as long as I live, and for as long as I am an American. As early as a quarter of the way, around page 85 in Chapter 5, I just had to keep reading this very touching novel. Once it got to me, it wouldn't let go. Or I wouldn't let go. The story appears run-of-the-mill at first for a material of this type -- socio-cultural-ideological; immigrant Americans alongside mainstream society. But when Mr. Espiritu started looking into the hearts and minds of some of these American characters: the economic underclass, the homeless, the confused youth, the broken families of middle America, it began to hit home. It was all of hurting, painful, angering, and yet touching and so very gratifying in that it made me appreciate my being an American, and being in America. If you're feeling down and out and need a lift, read this novel!

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars This is a book rich with underlying substance and meaning., August 23, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Being Here (Paperback)

After I read this novel, I could only wish there were more of its kind to be found among a mountain of mediocre works in print nowadays out there. There is so much this book tells which make me stop and think and appreciate who I am and what little I have. Just for being an American. Just for being here, in America. I am re-reading some of the chapters and will probably end up re-reading the whole book, for wanting to get more of a fill of the good scenes and passages.