Through prose and poetry in Leaving Biddle City, Marianne Chan provides a delightful coming-of-age collection focusing on a mythologized city in the Midwest, most likely in Michigan. The sense of belonging — who belongs or doesn’t belong, where they belong, and when they belong — is an underlying theme.
While slim, this volume is bountiful about coming to, living in, and leaving a residence. This growing experience is told from the positions of four women: Chan, Filipina 1, Filipina 2, and Filipina 3, also called “Filipina Universe.” Any Filipina or any woman not originally from Biddle City can relate to at least one of these women. Immigrant Filipina 1 married a good American man with a good salary and benefits but doesn’t like Filipino food. Filipina 2 is a caregiver working with Medicare patients who don’t always want to be treated by a Filipina. Filipina 3 represents the not-uncommon fear of domestic violence of mail-order brides as well as their gratitude if their husbands are not killers. The author plays back and forth between life as a child in the Philippines and her Indigenous roots, and life navigating adolescence and young womanhood in the mainly white Biddle City and the Midwest, where she chooses to be white. She finds herself a circle in a sea of rectangles.
Chan also describes the history of small-town Americana, with original founders from decades past and their descendants’ response to newcomers. For people of the Third World, such as the Philippines, with histories of colonization and then subsequent forced global migration due to capitalism, the idea of who was here first, who was a pioneer, seems moot.
Chan cleverly observes:
When you means I, everything multiplies.
When you means we, the branches grow limes on a Midwestern tree
with surprising ferocity, not limoncitos, but big universes of green.
When we means we, it is both truth and lie. Do we want the same things?
Notice our synchrony.
Juanita/Nita is an activist since the 1968 BSU/TWLF San Francisco State Strike; since the 1970 census advocating for more detailed racial and ethnic data in Washington, DC, and now singing with the Seattle Raging Grannies. Her collection resides in the Manuscript Division, The Library of Congress. Author of Golden Children, Legacy of Ethnic Studies, SF State, Juanita is featured in the documentary, Agents of Change https://www.agentsofchangefilmnational.com/
