ivy terasaka 2005 short story competition first prize

Judging "Bernie"
By Luisa A. Igloria

I don't quite remember who it was that said brilliant short stories do to prose what the best poems achieve in language—that is, render human experience in that one-two knockout punch way that quickens the reader's recognition and pulse, surprises and invigorates the intellect and engages the senses, no matter that the characters, situations, places and events in the scope of the story are otherwise pedestrian and unextraordinary. I admire short fiction that pays attention to those old-fashioned virtues we call craft and form, and that along the way also keeps an attentive ear to the ground for the story's own inner rhythms and music. I'm not against experimentalism, taking risks and daring to digress from conventional styles or even what our high school literature and composition teachers might have called "subject matter"—but I'm also a firm believer in the old saw that insists a good story must show rather than tell.

That said, "Bernie Aragon, Jr. Looks for Love" is familiar (perhaps especially to Filipino readers) in its exploration of the landscapes of 1927 Filipino America, long before the term Filipino American had even loomed as a possibility on the horizon. This story resurrects the narratives of that era rife with the tensions of racial violence, anti-miscegenation and other discriminatory practices; and dramatizes the situation of Filipino busboys and migrant workers in Watsonville and up and down the west coast—material that early writers like Carlos Bulosan, and more recent ones like Peter Bacho, have virtually canonized in their own work. "Bernie Aragon..." is as earnest in his desire for romance and all that one would imagine comes frothing in its wake, as his literary counterparts (like Bulosan's Magno Rubio). The story is likewise not amiss for the moments during which Bernie ponders the forms of his nostalgia for the old country and the paradox of his employer's benevolent parsimony. We are made to understand that Bernie possesses the gift of double consciousness, which all expatriates and exiles come into; it is what enables him to rename the taxi dance hall girls so that their constrained existence might also be returned to that of their absent counterparts, the Pansings, Natys, and Mariteses embraced in Bernie's insistent recollections. At times Bernie reminds me of Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock, as when he agonizes over seizing the right moment to declare his love, and when his waking daydreams "of all the things his life had not become... [hold] at bay the voices of customers who hissed 'gugu' or 'monkey' while he performed his duties." But I think I like the story best because of its balanced mix of humor, pathos, confident sense of dialogue and place; and not the least for its wise decision, in the end, to abstain from any temptation to deliver Bernie Aragon, Jr. to the proverbial, and expected, happy ending. This was on the whole a well rounded story, and a good read.

© Luisa A. Igloria

| Bernie Aragon Jr. Looks for Love by Veronica Montes |

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