A review by dee2799d
The Mango Bride by Marivi Soliven Blanco

3.0

This novel won the Palanca Award in 2011 (under the title In the Service of Secrets), and was later picked up Penguin. A Filipino translation by Danton Remoto is also available--which I sort of wish is the one I picked up but I'll get back to that later.

The Mango Bride is primarily about two women; Amparo and Beverly and their different experiences leaving behind their own country and living in America. It's also about families, the need to keep up appearances, and the fickleness of fate.

It's not bad. There were moments when I found myself laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation but also being fully aware that it can (and probably does) happen in real life. One of the most memorable scenes for me was
when Dona Concha, bleeding from the wound on her breast, tells her son not to call for an ambulance for fear of scandal. Of course she would. There's something very Filipino about risking death just to keep the neighbours from gossiping, the whole idea of having to keep up appearances, that might sound completely over the top to a foreigner but is just par of course in this country. The mileage may vary of course, but it was certainly true for my family.


The shifts between present time and the past was done well; I never got confused about what was happening. The POV is omniscient, jumping from one character to another as it sees fit. Not my cuppa, but it's not irritating and doesn't take away from the narrative.

It was a bit of a hard read. Not so much the soap opera/telenovela tropes (I'm used to that), but more because of the painful exploration of diaspora. Amparo and Beverly are both living and adjusting to a different country of course, but there is Manong Del and his buddies--Filipino war veterans who don't receive pension from the U.S. government because of the rescission act of 1946 (something I didn't even know about until I read the novel) and there are the Filipino migrants that Amparo talks to for her translation work.

There are two scenes which stood out for me the most:

a) Manong Del getting rushed to the hospital after trying to run after a thief who stole the money he and his friends had pooled together to help another Filipino migrant who'd broken his hip. Amparo finds out that Manong Del and co. get nothing from the U.S. government even though they have fought in a war for the U.S. She asks him why not come back to the Philippines, and he tells her that he cannot have two homes. That he's chosen the U.S. as his home.

b) In direct contrast is a call Amparo receives re: a man who was walking around Golden Gate Park during Thanksgiving, lonely and broken after having been left by his wife. This man is more helpless than Manong Del, who has carved a niche for himself in a foreign country. But in the end there is simply one truth: if you're not rich like Amparo is, diaspora is so much more than melancholy and nostalgia for home, more than not knowing where you belong, more than having to get used to foreign customs and traditions. It's about loneliness and survival and no safety nets. Without money, you get fucked when you get fucked overseas.


So: it's good. Not easy to read personally. Was not a fan of people speaking in Filipino and then going back to translate the whole thing in English. Yes I understand she's writing for an international audience but surely there's a way to get past this. Maybe pull a Jessica Hagedorn and just leave it untranslated? The readers can live without understanding some hysterical person's screaming. The rest of the novel is in English, but the Filipino sentences? Filipino speakers can have those.