Girl Interrupted
/Book Review: My Heart Underwater by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
Quill Tree Books, Harper Collins Publishers, 2020, 320 pages, Audience: Ages 14 and up
My Heart Underwater by Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
The book follows three storylines: the gender issue of Corazon Tagubio; her father’s accident; and her exile to the Philippines.
Cory and her parents live in a townhouse in Southern California, where her mother works as a coder and her father as a painter/handyman. Her parents are hardworking people who value good education and they make sacrifices to send Cory to tuition-high Saint Agatha’s school. They also support Cory’s half-brother in the Philippines who, because of immigrations issues, cannot join them in America.
As first-generation immigrants, Cory’s parents blend Filipino and American cultures in their household so that Cory grows up bilingual, English and Tagalog. Cory knows all about pancit, adobo, siopao, spaghetti with banana ketchup and sliced hotdogs, among other Filipino dishes. Like most other Filipino Americans, they have Skype sessions with loved-ones back “home” and have Philippine-bound mail-boxes that are constantly being filled with canned and discounted goods. Cory knows snippets of her parents’ past: her father grew up poor; her mother came from a wealthy family but is estranged from her father.
Cory’s parents and extended family are loving and supportive, and Cory’s angst has little to do with her identity as a Filipino American. Her conflict is gender-related; Cory is in love with her female history teacher. She realizes she is different from most of the girls at Saint Agatha who look forward to traditional marriage and children. She struggles with the morality of the matter. She imagines the statue of Mary scolding her about her crush on the teacher: “Don’t think about her! Don’t you dare! Fight your thoughts!”
Laurel Flores Fantuazzo (Photo by Hannah Reyes Morales)
But Cory does obsess over her 27-year-old teacher. Dreamily, Cory jots down what she knows about Ms. Holden; she draws Ms. Holden’s hand, the back of her neck; she is fascinated with the tattoo on Ms. Holden’s arm. Cory revels at the teacher’s praise and attention. Ms. Holden takes an interest in Cory; in fact Ms. Holden flirts with Cory. The teacher spends time with Cory, tutoring her, teaching her surfing.
While all this is going on, Cory’s father has a work-related accident and ends up comatose in the hospital. Her mother has her hands full dealing with the father and the mounting bills, but when she catches Cory kissing her teacher, she immediately sends the teenager to the Philippines to spend two months with her half-brother.
At this point, we come to the third storyline of the book – Cory’s Philippine experience – which to me is the more interesting part of the book. The first part of the book overwhelms with Cory’s feelings for Ms. Holden; the second part has a different tone and is more vibrant. We are in another setting, Metro Manila with its new scents, sounds, sites, and people – a different world from Southern California.
Cory meets people whom she had just heard about: her mother’s wealthy father for instance. Her unpleasant encounter with the grandfather (who is pleased that her father is in the hospital), leads Cory to understand that her mother and grandfather never got along, that her mother had chosen to live in America to be away from him, and that her mother had been disinherited by the grandfather for marrying her father.
Cory sees the diverse worlds where her parents’ came from: the wealthy Philippines of her mother, and the poor Philippines of her father. She understands the complex family situations of her parents. She learns that her father had a first wife, the mother of her half-brother, Jun, but they were separated for financial reasons and the two eventually found other partners.
Jun lived alone with a maid who took care of him. Jun was the recipient of those boxes with corned beef and discount clothes from her parents. Cory sees those same clothes on her brother’s back; she sees him savor the Graham crackers from America.
Cory forges new relationships with Jun’s friends, while keeping track of the health progress of her father. Cory discovers that this culture does not make a big deal about gender matters. In an important scene, Cory opens up to her new friends about Ms. Holden who, by this time, has pulled away from Cory.
Her friends condemn Cory’s relationship with the teacher. One of Cory’s friends says: “She colonized you … She took you over. You were vulnerable. You had something she wanted and she took it.”
When Cory protests that Ms. Holden had also been good, the friend insists, “People say that about colonizers, too. Sure, we wrecked your lands and left you destroyed, but look at the sanitation system and all the English dictionaries we brought!”
The friend sums up the situation by saying, “Teachers use their power, feeding off the attention of students in a wrong way. But that’s not what a teacher should do. A teacher should teach.”
The burden of blame is lifted from Cory’s shoulders. Cory’s act of telling her story, of finding friends and of their welcoming acceptance of her, help Cory heal. It is more than that, in fact: Cory’s knowledge of where her parents came from, the understanding of their stories strengthens her sense of self and gives her courage to move forward with her own story.
Laurel Flores Fantuazzo who also wrote The First Impulse, a nonfiction love story and mystery, gives us authentic descriptions and details about the Filipino American and Filipino experiences. She refreshingly uses Taglish and Tagalog words without laborious translations. Her characters and situations are realistic. The story of Jun touches me in particular because, indeed, many Filipino children are left with their relatives while their parents work overseas for better wages. There is much in the book to stimulate discussion of immigrant and gender themes.
Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard’s official website is <https://ceciliabrainard.com> Cecilia is the award-winning author and editor of over 20 books. Her recent books include US paperback editions of her story collections (Woman with Horns and Other Stories, Magdalena, and Fiction by Filipinos in America), which are available from Amazon.
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