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.When Osong protests that Father has ruined his career, Simeon repliesto his son that he bought him a plot of tobacco land with the money he stole,ironically adding, There is nothing better than honest work (44).As in the other stories of the collection, Father is represented here as anenterprising, clever man more than capable of playing the game of capitalism; Carlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Market 135his peasant ethos, however, prevents him from using this talent for anythingmore than happiness for himself and, sometimes, his family.American massculture, it should be added, is similarly mastered and rejected.In My Mother sBoarders, the men of the family learn to dance quite well to some jazz musicbrought to their village by loose women and played on a phonograph from the city ; yet the narrator labels the music goofy, and while he and his parentshold no great love for the tunes, they use them to make money selling alcohol.This short-lived venture dies as soon as the women are expelled from town,leaving the family in their same nonthreatening state as before their skillfulmanipulation of American pop culture (17 19).For Bulosan, masculinity also mediates the relationship between Philip-pines and modernity, and it too is an important basis for his interpolation ofU.S.readers.Viet Thanh Nguyen has argued that in both America and in theposthumously published Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan fashioned a preYellow Power Asian American masculinity designed to keep emasculation andfeminization at bay (63).Moreover, according to Nguyen, America was anattempt to recuperate the wounded bodies of Asian American men, speak-ing to American society in terms that it could understand. (62).Laugh-ter can also be seen as a struggle to recuperate Asian American masculinity,one that presents them to U.S.audiences as men based on a template theyunderstand.Bulosan tries to bridge the distance between Filipinos and their Ameri-can readers with a family frame of male bonding, one that shows the men ofLuzon evading modern discipline, yet evading it in a way that makes them leg-ible within the terms of American masculinity.For instance, the plot of MyFather Had a Father is centered around Father, Grandfather, and the narrator(as a boy) getting drunk around a fire together.Late in the night, Grandfathersays to his son, It is good to be a man, Simeon.You can stand by a fire atnight and drink wine with a little boy.You can talk all night with another manwhose likes and dislikes are similar to yours, while a little boy sits and drinkswith you all night long (54).At the end of the story, after Grandfather hasreminisced about his own father s way with women, has outlasted Father intheir all-night, drinking bout, and has even carried Father to bed, the narratorconcludes: Then I knew why my brothers admired Grandfather.He was a manto the last ounce of his strength (59).Though in the U.S.experience, drinkingto excess has been viewed as a breach of capitalist discipline since the mid-nineteenth century, American masculinity has, as often as not, been exercisedin opposition to capitalist forms of discipline as well.17 The idealized space ofthe fraternal campfire in My Father Had a Father would have been familiar 136 Carlos Bulosan, H.T.Tsiang, and U.S.Literary Marketto Americans by the 1940s, serving to bridge a cultural (and racial) divide bypositing a universal form of male release.In general, the men of the narrator s extended family are consistently showngambling, drinking, and womanizing, often to excess (a recurring image in thestories is that of Father or another male relative passed-out drunk with flies buzz-ing around their mouths).And in the stories where Father does all these things,a great deal of his ingenuity is used hiding his illicit activities from Mother.Thenarrator, more often than not, is his coconspirator, and their mutual conceal-ment of reckless activities from the more practically minded Mother cementstheir father-son bond.The fact that all the gambling, drinking, and womanizingin the collection goes on without genuinely tragic consequences would make itrelatively easy for American men to affirmatively identify with its characters frominside the bounds of American masculinity a rough rather than respectable American masculinity to be sure, but masculinity nonetheless (perhaps this waswhy the U.S.military broadcast the story via radio to its troops).18Yet, while the characteristically male evasions of discipline in Laughter mayhave endeared its figures to some American readers, and the playful Filipinorejection of modernity that Bulosan constructs may have made its culture lessthreatening, these representational moves simultaneously foreclosed a serious reading of the Philippines in the U.S.Bulosan s ludic peasants in Laughter couldnot be taken seriously because they could not be fit into honorific narrativesof the folk that had already been established in the minds of American read-ers neither Jeffersonian agrarianism nor its 1930s oppositional variant, theDecline and Fall of the Lincoln Republic, as Michael Denning calls it.Whatever its intentions, Laughter does not convey the fundamental senseof tragedy and loss that animates the Lincoln Republic narrative.The family sseverance from the land and subsequent migrancy do not come across as tragic;indeed, in the first story, which emphasizes the family s unshakable happiness,the author reveals that they had lost their farm prior to the narrative and werenow living in a town (1)
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