ONE TRIBE

A teacher in a tough Filipino community reconnects with her ethnic identity in a politically pertinent debut novel from Galang (Her Wild American Self, 1996).

Isabel Manalo is the new drama teacher at a Virginia Beach school whose teens form violent gangs, drop out and speak in a street slang they call Pinglish (Pinoy English). Herself the daughter of a more affluent Filipino immigrant, Isabel never learned Tagalog while growing up during the 1970s in upper middle-class Evanston, Ill., “a brown seed in a white landscape.” She took the East Coast job after a traumatic breakup with her boyfriend Mark following the miscarriage of their baby. In Virginia Beach, Isabel galvanizes the drifting teens with reenactments of the Filipino myth of creation and other empowering stories of ethnic identity. Yet she is criticized in the community for her “white” ways and for engendering what the parents see as disrespect for authority; they insist she stage a traditional beauty pageant instead. Her attempts to befriend the vapid, in-fighting teenage girls show her that their lives are circumscribed by tsismis (literally, a dangerous monsoon rain; figuratively, gossip) and hiya (a hot flower in bloom, metaphor for the shame of speaking up). Gradually, Isabel begins to transform herself into a “fighting Filipina” with the help of a fellow teacher’s aggressive political preaching and through an autobiographical photography project that forces her to examine her own life. (Journal entries are scattered throughout the narrative.) Along the way, Isabel exchanges white boyfriend Elliot for a homeboy, JoJo.

An edifying but overlong work, more sad than triumphant, that shows two cultures unable to harmoniously exist.