Dark Blue Suit: And Other Stories [Paperback]

Peter Bacho (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1997

"'Just remember, Buddy, ' said my father, 'you got family, you got friends. Back home in Cebu, but 'specially here, where you got nothin'.'" So begins this beguiling strut into true riches, recounted in twelve powerful stories by award-winning novelist Peter Bacho. Set in Seattle from the 1950s to the present, Dark Blue Suit depicts the lives of two groups: Filipino immigrant pioneers, the Manong generation who arrived on the Pacific Coast during the 1920s and 1930s, and their American-born children. Although narrated as fiction, the stories -- their landmarks, activities, settings, and events -- are grounded in historical fact.

The book opens with the annual spring dispatch, by the Seattle-based Filipino union, of thousands of Filipino workers to the Alaska salmon canneries. We meet characters who reappear throughout the stories: Vince, the tough but charming union foreman and "big shot" father to Buddy, our American-born narrator; Chris, the battle-scarred union president targeted by McCarthyism; Rico, the spirited young king of the neighborhood who will fall victim to Vietnam; Stephanie, the beautiful mestiza who marries up; and many others who age and change in ironic counterpoint to persistent themes of loyalty, fierce ethnic pride, and a willingness to struggle against hostile forces in society. There are wry twists of humor and surprising turns of plot; a long-lost love is renewed; a long-hidden family secret is revealed.

We encounter the inevitable aging and passing of the Manong generation, but we sense as well the arrival of its vision. Babies are born. The migrant fisheries worker gets a nine-to-five job, and his children go to college. The conclusion builds to a quietpower that is essentially elegiac; an era closes, but the voices of the older generation are shouldered by the younger, to keep the history, to retell the stories, and to pay homage.

"These tales, so disarming in their sense of humanity, so lovingly and engagingly narrated in a style which appears effortless, deal with the shadows the massive facts of emigration and identity cast over the lives of Filipino Americans -- a literary turf Bacho has made particularly his own. Here he moves with an inveigling confidence amongst lives caught between the raucous demands of modern America and the potent ghosts of ethnicity. It is a superb performance". -- Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List

"Bacho has a vital, deeply felt subject -- the lives of a group of Filipino immigrant men and the growing up of their often mixed-race children. This book sparked the desire to know even more intimately about these people, this very American enclave in time and space". -- Judith Grossman, University of Iowa

"Peter Bacho's latest collection pays homage inform and content to the earlier generation of Filipino writers -- Bulosan, Santos, Gonzalez. But Bacho's stories provide a transition from that bachelor generation to the generation of Filipino families. His stories are a perfect contrast to Santos's Scent of Apples and an important link for teaching Asian American literature". -- Shawn Wong, University of Washington

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This series of tightly knit tales, which reads remarkably like a novel, is rooted firmly in the Filipino community of Seattle. The stories introduce readers to the community's beginnings in the 1920s and 1930s and traces its struggles through the present. Bacho's tales are connected by the narration of Buddy, the American-born son of a Filipino who labored in asparagus fields and Alaskan canneries. Although Buddy is not immune to the hardships of migrant poverty, prejudice, and disease, he is safeguarded because of his strong ties to the "Community." As Buddy's father, Vince, succinctly says: "Just remember, Buddy, you got family, you got friends." This attachment to an extended family and beyond becomes the book's central theme, even as Buddy watches the members of his family age and pass on. Bacho's earlier novel, Cebu (Univ. of Washington, 1991), won the American Book Award of the Before Columbus Foundation. Recommended for both public and academic libraries.?Faye A. Chadwell, Univ. of Oregon, Eugene
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A modest collection by Filipino novelist Bacho (Cebu, 1991) that gathers momentum as it proceeds, adding up, in the end, to a good deal more than the sum of its parts. More of a discursive novel that an anthology of tales, the book narrates the experience of several generations of Filipinos who settle on the West Coast before WW II and raise children who eventually move deeper into the US--both psychically and geographically. Buddy, who tells the tale, is a schoolteacher whose easy authority over his students conceals a deep ambivalence about his own identity and ambitions. Buddy's father Vince was part of the great wave of Filipinos who emigrated back and forth during the 1920s and '30s according to the rhythms and needs of the fisheries and canneries of the Pacific Northwest. In the best second- generation style, Buddy gets an education and settles himself in the suburban middle-class that his father had always held out to him as his goal and station in life. But the introspective Buddy keeps looking over his shoulder and wondering what might have happened to him had he taken one different turn or another along the way. In ``Rico'' and ``Home,'' he describes the tragedy of a working-class friend from high school who, lacking Buddy's college exemption, is drafted, goes to Vietnam, and never recovers. ``Stephie'' recounts a meeting between Buddy and an old flame who dumped him years before for a white law student, while ``Dancer'' is an account of Buddy's meeting with his grown half-sister, abandoned by their father, who refused publicly to acknowledge that he had kept a mistress in the States. Though bound together with the same characters and similar settings, the stories manage to provide a broad and very rich portrait of life among immigrants, exiles, and more-or-less happily settled newcomers from the Philippines. A skillfully drawn first collection, with a quiet intensity that captures the imagination and stirs the heart. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: University of Washington Press (October 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0295976373
• ISBN-13: 978-0295976372
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #718,876 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Evocative and Intelligent, April 9, 2005

By 

D. Recio, SJ (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Blue Suit: And Other Stories (Paperback)

Peter Bacho's Dark Blue Suit (1997) offers readers a book of short stories which reflect the struggles of a young Filipino-American boy whose father once labored in Alaskan canneries, "Dark Blue Suit". It is in this first short story, we see Buddy as a five-year old, watching his gruff but protective father, Vince, negotiate a complex world in which men fear, respect, and dislike Vince for an authority he carries with considerable strength. Buddy learns quickly how to read his father's "look" when he risks misbehaving but also recalls his father's gait before imitating him with pride.

Dark Blue Suit depicts the difficulty of being Filipino-American at a time in which US culture was ambivalent if not hostile to the presence of Filipinos. Bacho writes a poignant but sad tale in "August 1968" which chronicles Buddy's adolescent friendship with an African-American boy, Aaron, who eventually leaves for college only to return to the rising tensions which characterized the Civil Rights Movement. If Buddy's friendship collapses under the weight of cultural history, it is because Bacho argues that cultural appropriation of another culture has its limits and its consequences. "August 1968" offers an honest portrait of Buddy's affiliation with an African-American and the problems which occur when one assumes cultural privilege while performing his friend's race identity. Can one "act Black" and expect long-term affiliation? At what cost to one's own sense of self does appropriation take place? Given the pervasive influence of hip-hop culture among Filipino-American youth, Bacho's story offers a response to a question which persists even today.

The rest of the stories focus on Buddy's various relationships including friends and family. Buddy's history shapes him and the choices he makes. When he drives home to see a dying relative in "A Matter of Faith", Buddy relies not on his own faith which flickers against his ongoing doubts but on the faith of his uncle who believed deeply and lived out of his beliefs. When Buddy prays at the conclusion of the story, he does so not only out of respect for his uncle, but also as a means of engaging in a cultural memory which includes his uncle. His characters may struggle with religion and its attendant beliefs but he writes his characters with enough sophistication to provide them with a cultural history that does not deny Catholicism its rightful place in the lives of Filipino-Americans.

Dark Blue Suit is a powerful and beautiful work. Bacho's tight, precise style, reminiscent of Hemingway's masculine prose, never risks excessive description or wordy dialogue. He relies on what is said and the silences to carry the narrative through. As stories, Dark Blue Suit is not merely a set of impressionistic portraits, but a series of black and white photographs which gain force as one reads through to the end. One might recall the work of Sherwood Anderson or Sarah Orne Jewett as a means of comparison.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peter Bacho is the literary Martin Scorsese of our time., February 8, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Dark Blue Suit: And Other Stories (Paperback)

If you've ever wondered what the daily lives of the early Philipino immigrants to Seattle were like. Read this book. In vivid flowing prose Bacho captures the look and feel of Philipino life and culture in Seattle in the old days.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As a filipino-american...., May 7, 1998

By 

F. Tomas "Ferdinand" (Irvine, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dark Blue Suit: And Other Stories (Paperback)

I liked the stories in the book alot. I could understand what several of the characters were going thru almost like a slice of my own life. I highly recommend it for filipino-americans becoming of age and who see a need to understand the boundard between american and filipino cultures.