You and your other nursing student friends at the University of Pangasinan stay together through it all, eating all your meals together in the canteen even though some girls have taken to eating alone in their dorm rooms, sometimes playing music if they have a record player, Bread’s “Make It with You” crooning all the way down the dorm corridor. Martial law means curfew at nine o’clock, it means streets empty except for military jeeps, it means classes that once had fifty pupils are now classes that have forty-eight, maybe forty-six. So you stay away.īut there’s no staying away from this: dread’s in every pore, every breath, every blink. But things like old kundiman from the thirties and forties where half the words for love are words you’ve never heard in your life, or the complicated dialogue in some new movie where all the characters except for the yaya come from Manila, things like newspapers-they still send you into dizzy spells. Reading written Tagalog has always been difficult for you, even though you’ve gotten more or less fluent with everyday speech. No one would ever mistake you for an intellectual or an aktibista most of the time, you don’t even really understand what people are saying when they talk about the news.
The fear in you predates Marcos, predates dictatorships-at least, the ones that come in the shape of a single person. But for now, you don’t go to the rallies, you don’t join the student protests you go silent or change the subject when someone at your table in the canteen brings it up. It’ll take you a long time to talk about martial law, and you’ll never talk about it with anyone who lived through it with you. America Is Not the Heart is her first novel. Elaine Castillo is a graduate of University of California, Berkeley. While her aunt and uncle would rather not discuss Hero's dark past, her niece can't help but ask. Leaving behind political upheaval in the Philippines, Hero De Vera starts over in San Francisco Bay Area, working as a nanny for her uncle. The following is from Elaine Castillo's novel, America Is Not the Heart.
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