Communicating Distance: A Review of Monica Macansantos’s “Love and Other Rituals”
Love and Other Rituals by Monica Macansantos is a book of short stories that explores the Filipino diaspora. Distance, in all senses of the word, is a defining feature of the collection. A mother lives abroad as an Overseas Filipino Worker, or OFW. A young professor and his handyman lover are divided by class differences. An elderly father recedes into his mental illness. In each of the stories, the characters long for connection, but they struggle to overcome the distances between them.
Communication is our human attempt to bridge gaps both physical and emotional. In one story, a young woman in Wellington stays in touch with her mother in the US through Facebook. In another story, a lonely teenager, wanting to feel safe and loved, asks her older brother if he’d search for her if she ran away. But communication is often imperfect, words a poor substitute for the things we actually want. No one speaks the perfect language to heal our longings, and as such, Macansantos’s stories resist neat resolutions.
It might seem at first like the stories are underbaked. They only hint at endings with no real sense of closure. To be sure, good fiction should leave you wanting more. However, when reading Love and Other Rituals I was initially frustrated by what seemed like a lack of development. I had just started getting into the world of the characters, just barely started exploring their interiority, when suddenly I was met with the white space telling me the story was over. By the third or fourth story, I realized that this was a feature, not a bug. What had seemed like a lack of development was actually a theme: you can’t say everything you need to say. Some interpersonal conflicts are just too complex to be resolved neatly with words.
In Macansantos’s stories, communication and connection happen in fits and starts. In “Stopover,” college friends who followed different life paths reunite for a weekend. It’s obvious how little they have in common, but their words and actions betray a denial of their irreconcilable differences. The story ends in an awkward farewell. This clipped communication resonated with my own experience as a Filipina American who moved between countries, who watched friends and family members relocate from the Philippines to the US, Canada, Europe, Australia. As soon as you feel like you’re starting to make connections, that part of the story is over; it’s time to leave.
Like people, the stories are reticent. The characters protect themselves from getting too close to one another because distance is what they know. Disclosing too much information about one’s inner thoughts, one’s true feelings, seems vulnerable. Oftentimes, the characters are fully aware of the limits of self-expression. In “The Autumn Sun,” a young man moves from Baguio to Manila for school then realizes the futility of trying to explain who he has become to his family back home: “Some lives, it seemed, couldn’t be shared with others. For how could you share the experience of being free with people who had never felt it?”
How to express where you are and who you’ve become to the people you’ve left behind? This is the question that animates Macansantos’s collection.
The characters overcome their longing by accumulating things, and Macansantos fills her stories with poignant descriptions of these transitional objects. A young girl fights to keep her father’s Porsche, even though he’s moved away to be with his mistress. A woman whose daughter died as an infant returns home to shower her niece with gifts. In some stories, food is the object that brings people together. Familiar dishes, like pansit and kaldereta, mentioned in the stories remind us that there is always an opportunity to reconnect, if only because we must eat three times a day. Of course, some Filipinos will say we must eat six times a day, with a dedicated snack in between each of the major meals. In any case, shared meals provide the chance to come back together.
As the title of Macanstantos’s collection suggests, sometimes it’s the simple rituals–like eating or watching an afternoon telenovela–that help us overcome distance. Ritual provides a structured time and space to reconnect. Ritual reminds us that love doesn’t have to be sustained by big gestures, that physical and emotional distance is not always healed by fancy words or shiny things. If love is a ritual, sometimes all you need to do is show up.
Correction: A previous version of this review had mistakenly described one character as living in Australia.
