Young Hands, Young Face
Young Hands, Young Face
Summers ago, after picking plums, my father drove
the pickup on the orchard’s dirt road
raising dust clouds that floated
And resettled on the fruit trees’ leaves.
Sitting in the front cab
pressed between my parents,
sweat mingled with dust -
at age seven I thought rain
was the maid in God’s house.
The family headed home, towards town,
and my father talked about the row
of trees we must pick the next day.
My mother’s answer was to scold him,
saying “It’s finished!”
meaning work was over and the boy
no longer wanted to hear about it.
I twisted around on the seat
and made faces at my brothers and sisters
crouched low or lying against the floor
of the flatbed. My older brother
sat proud, exposed, and scowled
at the strangers or rich school chums
caught behind our slow truck.
Reaching home, we children pushed out
like soldiers hitting a beachhead,
shouting out numbers for who
got to shower first, then next.
My mother wearily entered her house
and sat at the kitchen table.
She pulled off the cotton gardener gloves
and untied the dirty ribbon
that wrapped the straw hat.
Next she took off her work blouse:
she held up her light-colored
arms and hands to show us.
We groaned, unimpressed,
as with a bad magician’s magic,
and turned our attention back
to the commercial on television
promising how youthful soap
can keep your hands, your face.
This poem by Kenneth Zamora Damacion was first published in “The False Angel,” A limited edition booklet from Pegasus Bookstore, 1998.
….
Disenfranchised and disillusioned, Filipino Americans endured an enforced menial existence in hopes of eventually finding entry points into substantial living. Filipinas/os had been lured into servicing America with little to no reward for their contributions, much like other foreign (and notably Asian immigrant) populations before them. Of the overwhelming dexterity of their labor, Filipinos and previous Asian immigrant populations were seen as both necessities and threats by a capitalist society that benefited from Filipina/o output and simultaneously feared any inklings of Filipina/o prosperity as a danger to the establishment of white supremacy. As Filipinas/os were further enticed into America and became more plentiful there, their influence in America, particularly in California, became unavoidable. By 1930 there were more than 30,000 Filipinas/os living in California, giving rise to anti-Filipino attitudes intent on extinguishing growing Filipino influence. Mabalon writes that:
One of the first politicians to jump on the bandwagon of anti-Filipina/o sentiment was a Republican congressman, Richard Welch of San Jose. Beginning in 1928, he proposed a series of bills that would have changed the status of Filipinas/os from national to alien. As aliens, Welch argued, they would then be subject to exclusion by the 1924 Immigration Act, which prohibited the entry of aliens ineligible for citizenship. Filipinas/os in the United States, including the resident commissioners, appointed officials who represented Filipinos as non-voting members of the House of Representatives, protested every exclusion attempt in Congress. They argued that exclusion would be a grave injustice, as well as illegal and immoral if full independence was not also simultaneously given to the Philippines. In 1929 the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco brought together so-called experts and scientists who proffered their judgment: the Filipinas/os, like the Chinese and Japanese before them, must go. They argued that Filipinas/os lowered wages and displaced white workers, as well as having an inferior racial character and a penchant for white women and being unassimilable.
In response to heated arguments against the incorporation of Filipinos into America, the Tydings-McDuffie Act remade Philippine national status into “alien.” The continuous undermining of their treatment had the dual effect of disheartening members of the elder manong (manong means eldest brother in the Ilocano dialect of the Philippines, and the term became associated with the early bachelor generation of immigrants to America) generation, while also emboldening those who were more energized to seek confrontation. Mabalon shares that “As early as the mid-1920s, they began to form labor unions that engaged in some of the most militant and radical labor organizing that the San Joaquin Delta, if not the entire West Coast, had ever witnessed, laying the groundwork for the farmworkers’ movement of the 1960s.”
Despite anti-Asian and particularly anti-Filipino sentiment, waves of Filipino immigrants continued to come to America in search of economic security. Immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after the late 19th century/early 20th-century manongs and before WWII were known as the “Bridge Generation.” This contingent also included first and second-generation Filipinas/os of that era. Combined, these newer and younger Filipinas/os in America held a slightly more fertile position for advancement. The bridge generation undoubtedly suffered alongside their parents and forebears in a pre-civil rights America, but this cohort was advantaged as the beneficiaries of their parent’s and predecessors’ blood, sweat, and tears. The new Filipinas/os in America were largely fluent in English and therefore slightly more empowered with personal agency. They were also raised by American customs in America unlike their elders; meaning they were accustomed to the reality of America’s practices as opposed to the colonial propaganda that was promoted in the Philippines. Familiar with the plain face of America’s racism, the bridge generation was slightly less subject to the same generous expectations as the manongs, and therefore ever less subject to trickery and disappointment at the hands of the American government. With the faintest of advantages, this newer class of Filipinas/os crept closer to the American dream, but they faced unique ostracism as an entire niche set of individuals with no concrete cultural, ethnic, or political ties in America or the Philippines.
As young people Pinoys and Pinays were forced into experiences and concerns beyond their years yet there is little evidence of their experiences, specifically because they were children, mostly unable to appreciate or foresee the significance of recording their stories and sharing the wisdom from their unique experiences. In “Young Hands, Young Face” Papa invites us into the world of Filipino America from the view of its children. Reaching back to his childhood, he can describe the physical and emotional landscape of oppression from the viewpoint of an innocent child. From that perspective, we can experience the same wonderment of the world that is special to the naivete of youth while feeling the simultaneous confusion that a child new to this world would have when faced with disturbing concerns that seem isolated to themselves, and particularly not toward classmates, friends, and others. Through this poem, we experience oppression in a way that is both honest and disarming, which is perhaps the only way that Papa could reinhabit the trauma of his youth.
In reading from the vantage point of childhood, the circumstances of oppression, depression, suffering, hope, escape, and inspiration, become especially compelling. As tourists in Damacion’s memories, readers are compelled to feel the drudgery and dread associated with a young life overwhelmed by pressure and uncertainty. As the associate of a child laborer, we are also meant to understand the hopelessness that would infect a young person’s understanding of the world and their existence, given both the current terms of their childhood and also the expectations for their futures modeled in the outcomes of both parents.
The unmistakable sensation of feeling trapped is present from the very outset of the poem. The first line begins with the end of a day’s work. The speaker (who I imagine in this and all the poems, is Papa) remembers heading for home at age 7, “pressed” between his parents, as he looked out the window to contemplate “the rising dust clouds that floated and resettled on the fruit trees’ leaves,” perhaps longingly hoping to imitate their flight. Instead of rising, settling, and floating as the air does, he feels fixed. He’s pressed by his parents, unable to avoid even in his daydreams the smell and feel of “sweat mingled with dust.” Before they’ve even made it home to wash off the remains of the day Grandpa crowds their freedom with talk of “the row of trees [they] must pick the next day.” It’s summer and the children want to focus on anything else, prompting Grandma to respond “‘It’s finished!’ meaning work was over and the boy no longer wanted to hear about it.” Afraid to say so himself, Papa busies himself with making faces at his siblings who lie hiding on the floor of the flatbed to avoid the shame of comparison to “strangers or rich school chums caught behind [their] slow truck.” From the orchard to home and everywhere in between, there is no space where he can avoid unattractive feelings.
For all of the disappointment he harbored within himself, Grandpa was able to succeed in providing his family with luxuries that he never had as a child: a house to call their own and formal education. Yet in the 50s and early 60s, America wouldn’t allow him to provide much more. His accomplishments were frustrated by the barriers placed on their future as a Filipino family. Instead of classrooms and play, Grandpa had to send his children to work. Our family could not afford time or space to relax and reflect, and therefore they could not afford the same sort of development as other “rich school chums.” The necessity of their shared struggles, especially the share of labor that the children had to provide, prevented Papa and his siblings from feeling optimistic about their futures. In many ways, the worst possible outcome was a continuation of the childhood experiences they related to their parents.
In All About Love, bell hooks offer the insight that “Many jobs undermine self-love because they require that workers constantly prove their worth. Individuals who are dissatisfied and miserable on the job bring this negative energy home. Much of the violence in domestic life, both physical and verbal abuse, is linked to job misery.” Considering the extent to which job misery infected each member of the family over sustained periods, starting at a foundational age, it can be concluded that misery had thoroughly invaded the Damacion household. Similarly, misery would then be likely to have invaded the lives and households of other Filipino Americans laboring and living just as my family did. From an aerial perspective, the assumption would be that the demeaning labor relegated to generations of Filipino Americans had distracted the community from the freedom to cultivate love and intellect. Instead, a subconscious acceptance of dominant power that allowed for love and intellect to advance only in strict relationship with its tenets (whiteness, lightness, materialism, pedigree) had cornered Filipino America into self-hatred. By enacting self-hatred and modeling it within our families and thus the greater community, we’ve allowed ourselves to be further dominated, as opposed to embodying genuine acceptance and humanity.
For their inability to circumnavigate their oppression, a quiet reproach for Grandpa and Grandma can be read in the interactions in “Young Hands Young Face.” Though they share in the misery of grueling field work, for the time being, a lifetime of dirt, sweat, and “stoop labor” is unimaginable to the children. In his detailed description of Grandma’s end-of-day ritual, Papa reveals the undertones at work in her performance. The number of layers she applies and removes is exemplary of the distance she attempted to place between herself and the degradations of her reality. Underneath her dirty exterior Grandma is able to reveal a purer version of herself:
My mother wearily entered her house
and sat at the kitchen table.
She pulled off the cotton gardener gloves
and untied the dirty ribbon
that wrapped the straw hat.
Next she took off her work blouse:
she held up her light-colored arms and hands to show us.
Weary of her life, she is still able to take pride in her “light-colored” skin that has been historically associated with the non-labor classes unexposed to the elements. Her feat is rejected by her children, who respond to her light-colored arms and hands with groans, “unimpressed as if with a bad magician’s music.” For Grandma’s American children, the class and colorist values that she continues to uphold in her new surroundings are irrelevant. Light skin, family lineage, and class distinctions from the Philippines do not matter in America. In America, all Filipinos -high-born and impoverished- suffer the same indignity as brown-skinned immigrants from a colonized territory. Grandma’s stubborn hold on the last vestments of her relatively comfortable upbringing acts as a further reminder to both her and her children that their life in Fairfield is undesirable, yet inescapable.
To distance themselves from Grandma’s foolhardy perspective the children turn to other models for inspiration. As Filipino Americans Papa and his siblings are somewhat aware of their unique status. Like their parents, they are trapped by their Filipino heritage in a white supremacist country, yet they are also more savvy at navigating and understanding the systems put in place as natural Americans. While Grandpa contemplates his marching orders for the next day and as Grandma marvels at the light skin that no longer holds influence, the kids turn their attention to the television. With the television, they can reclaim small pieces of the American dream: pleasure, enjoyment, and popular culture. Through this small slice of access, coupled with their dimmed but still promising futures, they can imagine more for themselves. Like the people in the television commercials advertising products for youthful soap and other amenities, they too might hold the power to make their own choices and cultivate small luxuries. Though the people they see on screen are notably never Filipino, Filipinos and Filipino Americans are invited to identify with them and their desires. As a new generation of Filipino Americans, the children have already adapted to the latest methods and culture, whereas Grandma continues to attempt similar goals through extraneous means. The shift between the two generations is representative of the gradual shift in mobility for Filipino America, which has slowly but surely enhanced through even the smallest glimmers of hope.