Strangers in Strange Lands
/Book Review: Beverly Parayno’s story collection Wildflowers (PAWA Press, 2023)
“Wildflowers” by Beverly Parayno
Born in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised in east San José by immigrant parents from the Philippines, Parayno has created stories that traverse physical, geographical, spiritual, and metaphorical boundaries, forcing us to stretch how we imagine and define ourselves despite what others think.
The opening story of Wildflowers, “Savior” grapples with blooming adolescence through the eyes of a Filipina American girl who is forced to bridge her father’s immigrant experience with the U.S. culture she’s growing into as she comes into her own. The main character must navigate across cultures and generations as she struggles with questions of identity and sexuality.
The story “Housecleaning” takes readers to the Philippines, where we walk in the footsteps of a rural house cleaner coerced into leaving her birthplace and making a new life in Manila. These two opening stories both contrast and complement each other beautifully. They invite us to explore womanhood and selfhood from starkly different stages of life; how two very different characters separated by age and an ocean share similarities in their struggle for connection and belonging.
What I love about Parayno’s writing is her emphasis on place, and how each of these stories reveal the idiosyncrasies of individual cities, regions, and islands. We get an immersive experience in a very particular space through a unique set of eyes. In the eponymous story, “Wildflowers,” Parayno develops a wonderfully singular perspective on the Bay Area, specifically San Francisco, through the eyes of a lonely former tech worker, relieved not to have to spend the holidays with her family but still seeking connection by volunteering for Hugs for the Elderly during Christmas time. The main character finds herself in an SRO in the Financial District, delivering a meal to a seemingly bitter woman long past her prime, who after downing some champagne recounts her life as a painter. The woman once rubbed elbows with the likes of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and used to devote her days to making art in New Mexico.
Beverly Parayno
The women in this collection are strong, resilient, scattered, and hardy souls, each blossoming wherever life happens to land them. As with many contemporary fictional narratives, loneliness lies at the center of these stories.
“We are all strangers in a strange land, even among our closest friends, our loved ones, in the bodies we’re been born into, in the places we’ve come to call home.”
Parayno embraces this modern affliction with an unflinching eye in one of my favorite stories, “Dilation.” Two young professional and urbane couples are brought together in a mini-reunion when the main character, Gen, meets her boyfriend Winston’s grad-school friend Charles and his pregnant wife, Janie. The couples spend the night in Winston’s apartment after indulging in too much drink over dinner, and Gen finds her world turned inside out. Fast approaching mid-life, Gen can’t help but compare her life and background to Janie’s. Both raised in the Bay Area and of Asian descent, but the similarities stop there. In a series of beautifully executed scenes, Parayno mirrors and refracts the lives of two very different yet seemingly similar women, showing how lives diverge, coalesce, branch out, and contrast. Through one acutely revealing scene in Winston’s spotless bathroom, Gen faces the choices she has made, and we come to understand how life is both what we make of it and what forces beyond our control can ultimately determine. In this piece, Parayno’s storytelling is both seductively sensual and vertigo-inducing.
The final story, “Balikbayan,” is a riff on similar themes of vertigo, estrangement, and loneliness. Without giving too much away, another main character, a U.S.-born Filipina caught between two cultures, is a newly divorced mother who returns to her parents’ home in the Philippines to help her aging father settle his estate. Parayno deftly leaves both the protagonist and readers suspended between two worlds, with questions about self, family, identity, legacy, community, and belonging.
We are all strangers in a strange land, even among our closest friends, our loved ones, in the bodies we’re been born into, in the places we’ve come to call home, often, in our ancestral lands. Parayno acutely maps the distance between the many different facets of the self, love, the distances spanned by those with whom we are bound by blood or law, forcing us to see both the familiar and the unfamiliar through unexpected and surprising angles.
In these stories Parayno asks eternal questions such as how do we navigate from one terrain to another? How do we come to know ourselves through place, and how does place shape who we are? How are we both agents and casualties in our closest, most intimate relationships? Wildflowers ultimately depicts how we come to thrive amid uncertainty.
Parayno’s prose is concise and has an internal rhythm and clarity. From one story to the next, the themes of estrangement, displacement, loneliness, belonging, and community coalesce into a prismatic view of what it means to be a woman in the world today.
Rashaan Alexis Meneses is a recent Albertina Tholakele Dube Scholar for the 2023 Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and has received a Parent-Writer residency with Mineral School, an Ancinas Scholarship from the Community of Writers, a fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing along with residencies from Seventh Wave Magazine, MacDowell, and The International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, UK. She teaches in the Collegiate Seminar Program at Saint Mary’s College of California, and her fiction and non-fiction have been featured in LitHub, Kartika Review, Puerto Del Sol, New Letters, as well as the anthology Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults.
