THE SON OF GOOD FORTUNE / POTIKI: Fighting for Home

Season 2, Episode 4 Transcript

(Check out our list of other books by Pasifika authors on The Lift Up’s shop on bookshop.org. Following this transcript is a list of books we also recommend that currently aren’t available on Bookshop.*)

V: Happy Wednesday! I’m Vina Orden, here with Tamara Crawford. And this is The Lift Up podcast — inviting you to discover empowering reads by marginalized writers. In this Episode 4 of Season 2, celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we discuss two books, Potiki by the Māori writer Patricia Grace, and The Son of Good Fortune by Pilipino writer Lysley Tenorio.

In 1975, Patricia Grace was the first Māori woman to publish a book of short stories in New Zealand. Potiki, originally published in 1986, won the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction in 1987, and placed third in the other major New Zealand literary awards, the Goodman Fielder Wattie Book of The Year Awards. Potiki has been translated into several languages and in 1994 won the LiBeraturpreis in Frankfurt, Germany. Potiki was republished as a Penguin Classic in the UK in 2020.

The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio, also was published in 2020. It won The New American Voices Award and is a finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. It’s been listed as a Recommended Book by USA Today, The Chicago Tribune, Book Riot, Refinery 29, InStyle, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Publishers Weekly, Baltimore Outloud, Omnivoracious, Lambda Literary, Goodreads, Lit Hub and The Millions. Harvard Radcliffe Institute also recently announced that Tenorio was just awarded a fellowship for 2021–2022 — congratulations, Lysley!

So, without further ado, let’s get right to it …

V: Hi, Tamara! I really want to thank our listeners for patiently waiting an extra week to listen to this episode, but I promise it’ll be well worth it! You know, it’s been another roller-coaster of a month — for me, with the passing of my father-in-law from Covid. And I do think it’s worth reminding everyone — especially in these challenging times — that it’s okay and actually really important to take time to care for ourselves and kind of let go of all of these expectations we place on ourselves about being productive, creative, and just “on” all the time.

All that said, I did want to ask since it’s been a while, how are you doing, Tamara?

T: Hey, Vina. You know, I’m alright. But I seriously can’t believe we are in May already! It’s nuts how time has just been blowing past. But before I start, again, I just want to give you and A my deepest condolences.

V: Oh, thank you.

T: Even though we’ve talked offline, just to let you know you’re both surrounded by love during this difficult time. And it’s just terrible to see how Covid continues to rip through families and communities on a global scale. So, folks that are out there, please stay safe and responsible.

So yeah, this month, we’re talking about two amazing books again, right? We’re talking about Potiki by Patricia Grace — and this one’s been on my bookshelf for a while. I’ve been wanting to talk about this book, so I’m glad we have this opportunity to do so. And also The Son of Good Fortune by Lysley Tenorio that you sent me. Thank you so much, lovely. I love it!

V: I’m so glad!

T: You know, I’ve kept that postcard you sent me with the book, and I’ve been using it as my bookmark because I was just like, it came from you and I wanted to keep it close.

V: Awww. I have to say, it’s so awesome. I do want to give a shoutout to the author of The Son of Good Fortune, Lysley Tenorio, because he actually left a note for our listeners on our Instagram account.

T: Wow!

V: I know! And he says that he hopes that all of you who’ve been reading the book The Son of Good Fortune, that you all enjoyed it. I mean, I know I did, and it sounds like you did too, Tamara. And also, our original release date, which as our listeners will know was May 5th, was especially significant as it would have been his dad’s 95th birthday. So, belated happy birthday po — this is also for you!

T: Happy belated birthday!

V: So, I wanted to begin our conversation by first recognizing that I do have conflicting feelings — and I’m sure other people do too — around this concept of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. I mean, that in itself is a mouthful to say. First, like every other monthly celebration, we should be celebrating our various heritages year-round. But also, when you think about AAPI and who AAPI heritage is supposed to encompass, it’s really, really broad.

And on the one hand, I respect the call by some Native Hawaiians and Indigenous Pacific Islanders to drop themselves from this term that, for the most part, doesn’t really benefit them because people kind of forget that they’re part of this month’s celebration too and actually, in many ways, harms them by erasing their indigenous identities. And then on the other hand, I totally understand South Asians who also feel invisibilized and prefer another term, Asian Pacific Islander Desi American or APIDA. I think that’s a newer term, and you see it a lot in academic circles and universities — they’ve started to adopt this term. So, it’s not in common reference yet, I don’t think, but I have been seeing this term more.

But then with all that said, this past year of violence against Asians in the US and also in other parts of the world, and the collective activism against hate, reminds me about the political origins of the term “Asian American.” It’s really an organizing term that grew out of the 1968 Third World Liberation Front, essentially demanding ethnic studies on college campuses — so Native American, African American, Latino American, and Asian American studies.

And I wish I could say we no longer need these terms, but as you and I know — and as part of the reason for why we started this podcast — we are still invisible, and our stories are still unknown, and we’re still going up against a dominant culture that doesn’t want us to have representation or access to the same kinds of opportunities, right?

So, I don’t think we can say that we’re a post-racial or multi-cultural society here in the US without first acknowledging the racist history of this country. And even as many, many different cultures have come to settle here, many of us still don’t know Indigenous histories. We still don’t see or support the struggles of Native peoples today who are fighting for access to land and water to literally survive.

Instead, much like in one of the books we read, Potiki, people are saying that, for instance, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe are “killing jobs” by blocking the Dakota Access pipeline. Or that Native Hawaiians were “anti-science” for blocking a 30-meter telescope from being installed on top of Mauna Kea, when they were actually protecting an aquifer and an ecosystem there. Or that the Sioux Nation was being foolish for not accepting what’s grown to now over $1 billion in a trust in exchange for the Black Hills, where Mount Rushmore now stands. And, which the Supreme Court actually agreed in 1980, was stolen by the Federal government. We don’t know this story, which is why people didn’t understand the anger of Indigenous protesters when, if you recall, last year Trump gave an Independence Day speech from Mount Rushmore and joked that he wanted his face carved on the side of the mountain too … Well, I’m glad we can put that behind!

T: For now.

V: For now … But, you know, what’s happening with the Sioux Nation and the Black Hills land claim reminds me of the scene in Potiki where the developer Dolman, whom the Māori call “Dollarman,” gets frustrated because he can’t convince the Māori to sell their land or to understand what his own vision of so-called “progress” looks like.

So, Dolman says: “… Why the concern with what’s gone? It’s all done with.”

And Stan, who speaks for the Māori people replies:

What we value doesn’t change just because we look at ourselves and at the future. What we came from doesn’t change. It’s your jumping off place that tells you where you’ll land. The past is the future.

And this really resonated with me, along with another section later on where the father in the book, Hemi, recites this Māori proverb. And bear with me, everyone. I’m gonna try to pronounce it, and I apologize because I’m surely going to mangle it, but here goes …

He aha te mea nui o te ao

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

So this essentially means:

What is the most important thing in the world?

It is the people, it is the people, it is the people.

I just love that! And then, his activist daughter Tangimoana responds, “People? … Yes, but some people aren’t people. They’ve forgotten how.” Which is also such a powerful response.

I found it interesting that both Patricia Grace and Lysley Tenorio were compelled to become writers, and they say it in separate interviews, because they didn’t see themselves in books or popular culture, especially growing up in formerly colonized countries where they were made to read primarily Western texts.

So, a funny at the same time sad anecdote … In an interview Tenorio did for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, he tells this story that the first time he heard Tagalog spoken in a movie theater was in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi … And of course, you and I know the Ewoks speak Tagalog from our interview with Gina Apostol about her book Insurrecto! And yes, Star Wars and Gina Apostol references will, I think inevitably come up on this show …

T: Indeed!

V: Anyway, reading Potiki and The Son of Good Fortune side by side, I do think that both these books explore some similar themes around who gets to live on the land and who is human and who isn’t, and both of these topics are obviously still very relevant today. But, they are very different books as well, and I think deserve their own space in this episode. So, what do you think about starting off with Potiki, Tamara, since I did start there?

T: Yeah, sure. And before we do, just to go back a little bit, thanks so much to Lysley Tenorio for his note! We definitely appreciate it and appreciated your book. And I love a Gina Apostol reference! So, for everybody, obviously we’re a week late, but a belated “May the Fourth be with you all!”

V: And since we’re Catholic …

V & T: … And also with you! (Laughter.)

T: I just want to kind of go back, actually, to a couple of the points that you mentioned, because there’s some really interesting stuff and interesting conversations that you brought up. And I think this conversation about the concept of the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month and the thoughts on representation is so important. This conversation obviously hasn’t made its way across the pond to the UK, which is quite interesting because when we think about a lot of the countries that have colonized in the Pacific, they’re European as well as American.

But, I’ve been trying to keep track as best as I can and support organizations back in New York. And there’s one organization that I follow, which is on Instagram @sendchinatownlove, and this was started to help businesses in Chinatown stay afloat during the pandemic. They made a really helpful post highlighting this and lending their support to this issue, specifically to make clear that (and I quote their post) “as a result of colonialism, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders have long been disproportionately burdened politically, economically & socially,” and they go on to highlight the disparities the Pacific Islander communities face from the pandemic, that they face from a representation perspective, that they face from accurate data gathering, and climate change — and that’s a big one. And this post also highlights some resources for further education and assistance, so people can understand the issues here and understand the arguments.

And you know, I think some of the points that you mentioned linking what’s happening with the Sioux Nation and the Black Hills lands to Potiki are so astute. As I was reading this book, so many articles popped up regarding the struggle that the Navajo Nation, that they’re fighting across New Mexico against big oil and gas, where in this article they quote that “a lot of these industries that were contaminating, polluting and sacrificing Indigenous frontline communities for profit.” Additionally, we’re seeing in Memphis that Black families are being sued off their own land by big oil companies wanting to seize it to build the Byhalia pipeline, running it through their communities and putting their health at risk; especially if there’s a large oil spill, it’s known that it will contaminate the water for those communities. But they still are trying to sue those families off their land. And one of the things I found just doing our research is that even Patricia Grace is still fighting off an attempt for her land in Hongoeka Bay, and apparently the New Zealand government is still forcibly taking land away from Indigenous communities today.

So, it’s happening. It’s still going on. And even as of this morning, right before recording, it was reported that Elon Musk’s SpaceX is now forcing people out of their homes in Boca Chica, Texas, similarly making it difficult for residents who live there to stay due to multiple road closures, interruptions in services, and forcing them out using actually similar tactics we’re seeing used by the developers in Potiki. So, look how fiction is kind of a mirror to life and vice versa.

And finally, moving off tangent just a bit, I feel like the world still fails to realize that Indigenous and Pacific Island communities are at the brunt of the impact of climate change; and they’re disproportionately impacted by global emissions they’ve not participated in. I quickly want to give a shout out to my second mom here in the UK (mom, don’t be jealous!), Tangy Morgan, for bringing the book All We Can Save edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson to my attention. When we talked about this book, which is a series of essays about the varying impact of “climate trauma” among other topics, and actually written by women from various communities, it helps to give us language we can use to better understand and discuss the impact. You know, Indigenous communities and communities of color have traditionally had a very deep connection to the environment, to land, are at the forefront of preserving, protecting, and nurturing the environment, as we’ve seen in so many countries, with the view that it’s preserved not only for current survival but for future generations.

And if we bring this back to Potiki, what we see is that the connection and safeguarding of the environment is so important to being able to live off the land, where both characters Hemi and Roimata note that “everything we need is here.” And that even when the developers destroy the hills and destroy the ocean impacting their ability to fish, they know the land and the sea so intrinsically, they know what needs to happen to nurture it back, because it’s part of their stories, and as Roimata puts it:

The land and the sea and the shores are a book too, and we found ourselves there. They were our science and our substance. And they are our own universe about which there are stories of great deeds and relationships and magic and imaginings, love and terror, heroes, heroines, villains and fools.

I can talk on and on about these linkages forever, but I’m going to stop here so we can get into some other themes within these books!

V: Oh, I really love that quote that you pulled, and also that book All We Can Save sounds so interesting, and I’ll definitely need to look that one up after this. So, I do think both Potiki and The Son of Good Fortune do a great job of showing us — on a very human, everyday person level — what a nebulous concept like “climate injustice” or “systemic injustice” actually looks like on the ground. In Potiki, for example, there’s this tension the parents have between trusting their own ancestral knowledge — including, as you mentioned, knowing how to sustain themselves off the land — and at the same time wanting their kids to succeed in the dominant culture. And in one of the chapters narrated by the mother Roimata, she struggles about whether to keep her youngest son Manu in school or homeschool him instead. I’m going to read from a few sections in that chapter:

“He says there are cracks in the floor, and the kids fizz like bees. He thinks he’ll disappear.”

[Her husband Hemi replies] “He’d be better here with you. We don’t want to … lose him.”

“He says they’ve got no stories for him …”

“School’s all right for some, but you don’t always find what’s right for you,” Hemi said.

And later on in the scene, she continues:

What would be right for one who didn’t belong in schools, or rather to whom schools did not belong? What was right for one who had a fear of disappearing and who could not find his stories?

Then I knew that nothing need be different. “Everything we need is here. We learn what we need and want to learn, and all of it is here,” I said to Hemi, but he had always known it. We needed to just live our lives, seek out our stories and share them with each other.

Both parents don’t consider themselves political, but I think that taking their kid out of school, which Roimata describes in the first chapter as a place where they “were given holy pictures and toffees to help us do God’s will” … I do think that is an act of resistance.

This comes full circle later on in a chapter narrated by Hemi, who is proud but also fearful for the younger generation. He says:

In his day, they had been expected to hide things, to pretend they weren’t what they were … Funny how you came to see yourself in the mould that others put you in, and how you began not to believe in yourself …

Well their ancestors had been rubbished in schools, and in books, and everywhere. So were their customs, so was their language … And if those things were being rubbished, then it was an attack on you, on a whole people. You could get weak under the attack, then again you could become strong.

The kids these days were strong, well some of them were. Others were lost and without hope. But the strong ones? They were different, tougher than what his lot had been as kids. They didn’t accept some of the messages they were receiving about themselves, couldn’t afford to if they wanted to stay on the face of the earth.

Education was a good thing, he’d always believed that, wanted it for the kids … But the kids wouldn’t take any rubbish, and that made sense.

His own daughter Tangi was like that too, never let anyone put her or her people down. Had such a clear view of what she stood for and nothing got past her … He hoped his daughter wouldn’t suffer too much for the sort of person she was.

T: Wow, yeah. That’s really interesting, his thought process there. I kind of want to also go back a little bit to the passage you mentioned where Hemi notes how the younger generation feels they’re being rubbished in schools and in their books, and it just reminded me of why we started this podcast, why it’s important to tell your own stories. Similar to the way Hemi’s put it, I loved how Roimata puts it earlier in the story, when she celebrates how the children’s desire to stay home from school has actually renewed the need to collect, tell, and recount their history and stories, and how this is an important part of their own collective education:

And so it was because of our little bird that stories became, once more, an important part of all of our lives, the lives of all the whanau. And although the stories all had different voices, and came from different times and places and understandings, though some were shown, enacted or written rather than told, each one was like a puzzle piece which tongued or grooved neatly to another. And this train of stories defined our lives, curving out from points on the spiral in ever-widening circles from which neither beginnings nor endings could be defined.

And later, just bringing this back to the importance of books and the ability to record your histories, she also notes:

We could not afford books so we made our own. In this way we were able to find ourselves in books. It is rare for us to find ourselves in books, but in our own books, we were able to find and define our lives.

And I love that! I love it. It reminds me of a quote that actually most recently has been very frequently used, but for good reason, and it’s by Toni Morrison, where she says: “If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.”

V: I love that quote too!

T: It’s so true, right? And I think by highlighting #OwnStories, we’re starting to see a lot of that, we’re starting to realize the influence of that quote. This also brings me to some of the points around language. I love how both of these books (and a lot of the books we’ve read and talked about previously), incorporate the native languages of the characters. Us as “foreign” readers of these books, we’ve been sold that these are “foreign language/foreign literature,” and that de facto “othering” is othering anything that isn’t centered around English. And in doing research for this podcast, I note an interview with Patricia Grace in The Guardian where she recounts that she received lots of criticism when Potiki was first published in 1986 because she wrote both in te reo Māori and English without providing a glossary. And it’s interesting right, when I first read it and encountered Māori words, the first thing I thought was that it would be great to create a glossary, and then I realized I needed to check myself because that’s exactly what the othering mindset does. Rather, I reminded myself I have the ability to look up and learn these words, and what they mean, and bring them back into the story — which is exactly what I did. And I love what Patricia Grace says about this in an interview for The Guardian. It goes:

Her use of the Māori language, known in New Zealand as te reo Māori, throughout the book had been intended “to alienate the readers”, critics said.

“What I was really trying to do was having my characters speak in the way that was natural to them,” she says. She refused to include a glossary of Māori terms or italicise the book’s Māori words; the year after Potiki’s publication, the Indigenous tongue became an official language of New Zealand.

V: That’s so cool!

T: Guys, that’s 1987!

V: Oh, right.

T: I mean, it’s great, but it’s also 1987. In 1987, Māori became the official language of the country from which it originated — not that long ago, right? And she also says:

“I’d had a glossary in a previous work and then I suddenly thought that a glossary is there for foreign languages, italics are there for foreign languages,” she says. “I didn’t want Māori to be treated as a foreign language in its own country.”

She further notes that by doing this, it freed her to write the way she wanted to write, and also noted that her grandparent’s generation was punished for speaking the Indigenous tongue. So, her parents were not even given the chance to learn, and she further notes in the article her own challenges learning later in life. And there’s a lot of current conversation about the resurgence of Māori in schools and throughout New Zealand culture and ensuring it does not get lost or appropriated. But the reason I bring this up is because I find that it’s such a necessary part of this story to have Māori and English to evoke the feeling and sentiment of the duality of living and preserving Indigenous culture amongst an increasingly imposing Western existence. And I also felt the same with The Son of Good Fortune, that you needed both the Tagalog and English interspersed to fully realize this duality of existence both Maxima and Excel are living in California. And we’ve spoken a bit about duality in some of our past podcasts, haven’t we?

V: Yes, you’re completely right, we have! And this duality shows up in interesting ways in The Son of Good Fortune, where a number of the characters feel like they can’t fully be themselves and have to adapt in creative, but also sometimes destructive ways.

I think a good place to start talking about The Son of Good Fortune is the epigraph at the beginning of the book. It reads, “Dynamite is loyal to the one who lights the fuse.” So, I think Tenorio’s trying to connect dynamite with “TNT” here, which is also shorthand for “Tago ng Tago” or “Hiding and Hiding” in Tagalog. TNT is what we call undocumented Pilipinos in Tagalog because you can’t really reveal who you really are, so you hide. And dynamite does comes up in an important scene in the book, which I’d love to talk about in a bit …

Anyway, when I looked up the quote, it’s actually from this series of dystopian novels called The Great Iron War by Irish writer Dean F. Wilson, about a world where human babies are swapped with demons, so there are no more human births — kind of creepy. But luckily, there’s this Resistance that ends up coming together basically to literally save humanity. And I do think that this is a theme that these two books have in common — the importance of family and community in being able to survive and also fight against injustice and to fight for their dignity as human beings.

And I really love the characters in The Son of Good Fortune. Of course, there’s the son Excel and his mother Maxima. Later on, when they pretend to be “Perfecto and Perfecta Santos” to extort money from Jerry, who’s this middle-aged, white man Maxima meets on this website, “Fil-Am Catholic Hearts Connections,” we learn of a tradition in her family of giving children’s names that suggest good fortune. So, she has these twin cousins called Harvard and MIT … It’s a very funny book, for a book that deals with serious issues.

And by the way, Pilipinos do have idiosyncratic names — partly it’s a product of colonization too. For example, my maternal grandmother Milagros (which means miracle in Spanish). She was part of a generation named after their saint’s day or who have Spanish- or Catholic-derived names. Then there are also these American-inspired names — I mean I have an aunt named Marilyn, after Marilyn Monroe, an Uncle Ike after the president, and I don’t know a Harvard or MIT, but do know a Stanford. There are also Bambis, and Barbies, and Winnies! [Laughter.]

I do love Maxima’s backstory as a B-movie action star in the Philippines. I went off the track a little bit there, but to go back to this theme of family and community in the book, we learn that it was her escrima martial arts instructor, Grandmaster Joker, who bought a pregnant Maxima a plane ticket from the Philippines to California and ends up becoming a father figure to her and a grandfatherly figure to Excel. Then there’s also Roxy, a Pilipina trans woman and friend of Maxima whom she hires to type up her research on the men she extorts. And I love this relationship too between Excel and his 70-year-old Serbian immigrant co-worker, Z, at The Pie Who Loved Me pizza parlor — so Z (short for Zivko), whom Excel helps with learning English. And of course there’s Excel’s girlfriend Sab, who’s essentially orphaned. I mean, with the exception of Excel and Maxima, all of these people who aren’t related by blood kind of become their own version of family. So, they do these really big things for each other — whether it’s Maxima extorting men so Excel can pay a $10,000 debt, or Excel using some of that money to buy Z a plane ticket back to Serbia after he’s fired for stealing money from their abusive boss Gunter, who also happens to be Z’s grandson (yeah, he was like the jerk in the book).

And we see that they really don’t have a choice but to rely on each other because they’re all working class immigrants just trying to scrape things together to survive. In a way, it’s what we’re seeing in this pandemic with mutual aid happening in communities of color. So, there are all these food pantries or refrigerators where people can either donate food or take what they need. And it’s similar to the way the Māori community comes together in Potiki. And it’s so interesting what you say about Indigenous cultures having this different kind of relationship between them and their environment and them and the people around them. Pilipinos also have similar indigenous values and practices, where we believe that everyone is kapwa — so we believe that everyone is interrelated and interdependent with each other — and that we must practice bayanihan, which is essentially community support, in this belief that we rise and fall together as a society.

T: Oh, wow, that’s really interesting. I think this thread of community and survival is just so strong in both books, even though they manifest in different ways. And kind of brings us to a point of intersection with these two books, even though I know we wanted to hold space individually for each story. As you mentioned previously, in Potiki, after the developers constantly find ways to destroy Hemi and Roimata’s home and their way of life, we see these various villages, and especially the people of Te Ope who had been through this before, pull together to help them get back on their feet. Because they all know that the survival of who they are is dependent on pulling together as a community. We see that there’s a point where Hemi struggles with this, almost like there’s a little bit of guilt here, when everybody, young and old, pulls together to help them rebuild, where he notes:

But he didn’t want to see these young ones breaking their backs, even though it was for… survival, getting enough food and a bit of money to keep them all. Then again if you looked at the other side of it, at least they could say they’d seen the fruits of their work, and that the fruit they got was their own. Different from working for a boss where you stayed poor anyway, stayed poor and made someone else rich… It had nearly busted them getting things going again after all that water. That was a hard one. But they’d had good help. People always turned up when you needed them most.

I think it was this importance of the lessons learned and the sense of community that’s prevalent when things go wrong that ensures their survival; that keeps them going as they continue to fight for their survival.

And if I continue on the theme of survival, similarly with The Son of Good Fortune, that thread I think is so strong throughout the book; I think the core of this book is about survival, along with community and family. If we just consider the initial premise of Maxima coming to the US, and being undocumented, and trying to earn her way in that situation to care for herself and Excel. And through that she finds herself working this scam to help make ends meet. There’s this point where she explains this to Excel when he comes back from the desert:

She stepped back, took a breath. “Ano ba? Why should I defend myself? Why should I explain?” But with no prompting from Excel, she told him about OK Filipinas, A Kiss across the Ocean, Pacific Catholic Romance, websites where men — most of them middle-aged and American — searched through profiles of women from Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, the Philippines. “They want the perfect Asian wife. And you know what ‘perfect’ means. Hardworking. Housecleaning. Loyal. A maid in the day, a whore in the night. These men, that’s the kind of thing they say, believe me.” The men assumed she was in the Philippines, someone looking for a way to America, via marriage … “I only take what I need,” she said. “Enough to make rent, pay the bills. Anyway, it’s my business, nobody else. You don’t have to like it, but you have to live with it.”

There is another point that stood out for me, where Maxima is telling Excel why she isn’t worried about him being on his own, where she knows he can do what he needs to do to survive:

“When you were gone, I was so pissed at you for leaving, talaga. But then I know you were okay, that you could take care of yourself. You moved to the desert. Then you kicked that Jun-Jun asshole’s butt. You convinced a man you were a fourteen-year-old boy who builds that shipping-a-bottle thing. You even tricked me with that stupid professor story and your ‘important discoveries.’ You can get by, Excel. You know how to survive.”

V: Omigod! Can I just say, I love this woman so much — she’s just one of my favorite characters in this book. And yeah, I do love that take Maxima has on Excel. I find it so touching that in the same way she tries to protect him, he kind of does the same thing by choosing not to tell her about certain things, like the time that he came close to getting a “dream job” at a magic shop but then not getting it because he didn’t have a social security number; or the time he lost a spelling bee on purpose because he was afraid of getting in the papers and being exposed as a TNT (I mean, he does eventually tell her that story). But you know, obviously he clearly knows how to survive just like his mom, but there is a cost to that.

There’s this section in the book where Excel recalls a self-reflection writing assignment that he got in 10th grade where he was supposed to answer the question Who are you? to uncover why he sees the world the way he does. And I’m just going to read a bit from this section:

Part one of the assignment was a worksheet, a fill-in-the-blank family tree that stretched back five generations … If he filled it out honestly, Excels worksheet would have two names only: his own and Maxima’s. Excel never knew his grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ names, and whatever stories Maxima told about her own upbringing rarely included them. Sometimes, his entire family history seemed nonexistent, a blank that spanned generations. As if history began only with Maxima.

Lying would be easier …

Part two of the assignment would be a more involved lie, but he knew how it would go; he’d simply follow everybody else’s Filipino American story. There were plenty of Filipino kids at his school, their origins nearly identical …

Excel took these details, plugged them into a rough outline, but when he finished, he felt a pang of jealousy and resentment at how easy and familiar that story was. Nothing like his own.

Who are you?

He wrote “TNT.” Then he wrote, “TNT American.”

Who are you?

He wrote “Dynamite,” then, “Dynamite American.” It sounded like a new identity beyond ethnicity or nationality, and he liked the sound of it, the image it conjured up: an American flag with fifty tiny sticks of dynamite, no stars.

And many of the characters in this book immigrated to the US with their own version of the American dream. There’s of course Maxima who wanted a better life for her and Excel; and then Roxy, who couldn’t get a nursing job with her degree from the Philippines, but managed to get gender-affirming surgery she needed in the US; and even Excel’s abusive boss Gunter who owns a pizza shop still dreams:

“Here I am … surrounded by booms. Internet boom. Dot-com boom. Even this bullshit slow food boom. But what about me? Where’s the Gunter boom, huh? What is it with people like us?”

And as Gunter’s grandfather Z, says “America good, America bad … The life is like that.” I mean, these all are issues that have come up in books by immigrant writers that we’ve read before on this podcast — it came up in the novel Patsy and also in a number of essays in The Good Immigrant.

T: Yes, it’s so true. I love how we can reference back to books we’ve read and featured in previous episodes! I’m also loving “Dynamite American” — that sounds like an amazing description.

But once again Vina, two amazing books that we’ve covered this month in Potiki and the Son of Good Fortune. So, I hope you guys out there really have enjoyed it and have enjoyed reading along with us. And I just also want to highlight for our readers that there is an interesting discussion on the challenge of literary canon and highlighting the Māori cannon, and definitely encourage you to read an essay by Alice Te Punga Sommerville on this topic. So, we’ll add a link in our transcript, so you can have access to it. But we’ll also feature a book list with a number of works from various Pacific Islander authors, so that readers can continue their journey in discovering for themselves these stories.

V: Yay! I just love these two books that we just read. It’s exactly what we needed to read — I mean, they’re about difficult topics but then there’s also a sense of wonder and hope about them, which I feel like is sort of where we are in this pandemic too. And to close out, I am also excited about what we plan to read in June. So it’s a very, very different kind of a book. We’re reading The Seep by Chana Porter, so it’s going to be a little bit of the sci-fi realm once again for those of you who enjoyed our sci-fi podcast episode. Feel free to send us questions or suggestions through our Instagram page, again @theliftuppod, and of course thank you so much again for listening to us here at The Lift Up Podcast.

*Books we also recommend that currently aren’t available on Bookshop:

• Black Ice Matter by Gina Colie
• Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport
• The Girl in The Moon Circle by Sia Figiel
• Black Marks on the White Page by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti
• Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera
• Where the Rekohu Bone Sings by Tina Makereti
• Afakasi Woman by Lani Wendt Young

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