BIENVENIDO Santos was born in the slums of Tondo, Manila, on March 22, 1911. His parents were illiterate peasants. His father, a laborer for the Bureau of Public Works, knew only two words in English: “roads” and “bridges.”
Santos grew up in a household where no English was spoken and no reading materials were available. He began studying when the Philippines was still a colony of the United States and English was the medium of expression. But for him, this turned out to be a mixed blessing, “a tool for expressing our feelings.”
As he read Whittier, Longfellow and Tennyson, he fell in love with the sound of the English language and wrote mostly imitative, musical poems. In his early attempts at creative writing. Santos learned to develop an ear for three kinds of communication: Pampango in the songs his mother sang at home; English in the poems his teacher read in school; and Tagalog in the games he played or fights he survived as a child navigating the rowdy streets of Tondo.
Perhaps this multilingual background provides the answer to the question raised by Maxine Hong Kingston when, years later, she reviewed Santos’ “Scent of Apples” (1980) for a New York Times book review. She asked: How is it possible for Santos to write stories in English that so successfully echo a uniquely Filipino accent?
Expressing admiration for Santos’ handling of the dialogue of ethnic characters who don’t speak English, Kingston wrote: “Mr. Santos is a master at giving the reader a sense of people speaking in many languages and dialects.... All of us for whom English is a second language, and all of us who write in English about people who are not speaking English, must read him and try to figure out how he does it smoothly.”
Santos left for the US in September 1941 as a scholar of the Commonwealth government. He was then 30 years old, and already an established short story writer in English at home. He enrolled in the Master of Arts in English program at the University of Illinois. When war broke out in December, he found himself an exile in the US, cut off from his homeland, his wife and the three daughters he left behind.
The heartbreak of this separation during his first trip to the US is crucial to Santos’ development as a writer. From then on, exile defined the central theme of his fiction. In the summer of 1942, he studied at Columbia University with Whit Burnett, the founder of Story magazine, who published his first fiction in the US.
After studying Basic English with I.A. Richards at Harvard University in 1946, Santos returned home to a country rebuilding from the ruins of war. With his wife and 10-year-old son, he returned to the US in 1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he taught for five years.
His first two novels, “Villa Magdalena” and “The Volcano,” were written under a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim fellowship. They were both published in Manila in 1965, the year Santos won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature.
In 1972, Santos and his wife were en route back to the Philippines “to stay home for good,” when news of the declaration of martial law reached them in San Francisco. The new regime banned “The Praying Man,” his novel about government corruption. He and his wife decided to extend their exile and wait out the regime.
From 1973 to 1982, he was a distinguished writer-in-residence at Wichita State University, and in 1976, after much soul-searching, he became a US citizen. His short story, “Immigration Blues,” won the best fiction award given by the New Letters literary journal in 1977. In 1980, the University of Washington Press published “Scent of Apples,” his first and only book of stories to appear in the US. The next year, it won the American Book Award. Santos died at his home in Albay on Jan. 9, 1996.
Santos’ stories can be grouped into three literary periods that coincide with the comings and goings between his homeland and his adopted country. The stories of the first period, the prewar years in the Philippines (1930-1940) are set in the fictive Sulucan slums of his Tondo childhood, and the rural towns and villages in the foothills of Mayon Volcano in Albay. Santos married his wife in Albay, where he started his family and built his “forever” house. These stories are in the collections called “Dwell in the Wilderness” and “Brother, My Brother.”
Santos exile in the US during the war years produced stories set in Chicago, Washington, New York and other cities where he lectured extensively for the Philippine Commonwealth government in exile. The books “You Lovely People,” “The Day the Dancers Came” and “Scent of Apples” belong to this period.
In the postwar years, Santos set many of his stories in many different places as he commuted between the Philippines and the US. These years mark a period of maturation and experimentation, and a shift away from the short story to the novel form.
From 1970 to 1986, Santos experimented with a narrative form that “from all appearances is a novel but is actually far from novelistic.” This loose narrative cut into segments that are like stories is a technique he used to tell the tale of the life and times of Filipino old-timers and the new breed of young Filipinos in America.
This experimentation with “stories within a novel” technique is found in the novels “The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor” (1983) and “What the Hell For You Left Your Heart in San Francisco” (1987). From 1987 to his death in 1991, Santos worked on remembering his past and revisiting his beginnings. This journey of rediscovery led to the writing of three books of personal history: “Memory’s Fictions” (1983), “Postscript to a Saintly Life” (1984) and “Letters, Book One and Book Two” (1996).
Santos was finally home, in Manila and later in Albay, and in the words he wrote until the day he passed away.
*Details from Leonor Aureus Briscoe, published in The Columbia Companion to the 20th-Century American Short Story, edited by Blanche Gelfiant.