Colonial Mentality and Asian-American Experience

 

   Lysley Tenorio is a Filipino-American short story writer who is a Whiting Award winner along with many other prominent awards. Monstress is one of his stories in the collection that was published in 2012, which generally portrays the Filipino-American cultural clash that most Asians experience while striving to achieve the Asian American dream.

    Tenorio utilized his main characters, the monstress, Reva Gogo, who works as an actress, and her boyfriend, Checkers Rosario, who works as a director to view the Filipino-American experience from two different standpoints with a hint of a post-colonial tone. The story begins with the obsession with Hollywood movies that swept the Philippines in the 1960s, that there were even English-only movie theaters that began to spread all over Manila, pointing out the American hegemony over the cultural and social life in the Philippines, specifically in the way it shapes people’s opinions towards their national media that only “imported Hollywood romance was what Manila moviegoers were paying to see” (Tenorio 6). With all this public fascination with American silver screen alongside the substandard filming equipment and deteriorated economic conditions, the Filipino film industry had a tough time struggling to keep up with the flow, and Reva and Checkers were amid of this chaos. Trying to revive their missing dream of being famous and successful, they accepted the offer of Gaz Gazman, an American director, to splice their movies with his, which was a decision they regretted afterwards. The American guest appears to be a pushy foreigner who impose himself on them in a forceful manner, from the minor act of him wiping his feet on their doormat as though they had already welcomed him, although they hadn’t; even the way he dressed seems so fake and pretentious, the stereotypical safari hat and colorful shorts and shirt. The inferiority of the Filipino side shows again when Checkers says to Gaz that “There is corruption and dishonesty in the movie business here in Manila. It’s not like in Hollywood” (Tenorio 8), showing a great deal of a colonial mentality that believes in the colonizer’s superiority in all aspects, even the moral ones.

    As the story progresses, we see how the feelings of immigrants are diverse and changing through the reactions of Reva and Checkers, who were on opposite sides, Reva completely refused to assimilate at first and was angry and resentful of everything she sees, while Checkers was impressed and immediately assimilated to the new environment with a sense of nostalgia for the homeland and fantasies of what would have been their situation if their homeland had allowed them to Achieve their dreams, “if we’d had something like this to work with, life back home would still be good” (Tenorio 13). Ambivalence is strongly present in the relationship between Checkers and Gazman; from a colonized mindset, Checkers doesn’t hesitate to take Gazman’s opportunity with joyous and disbelief, yet he disdains and even belittles the American director’s script at the end saying “all that corny talk. All that overacting the American is making you do” (Tenorio 21). As if he is stating that he still has his proud, independent, separate identity from his colonizer that he will never let go of for the sake of assimilating with his enemy’s way of doing everything even if it seems to be a trivial matter. Tenorio could have furthered more in the ways in which Asians struggle to fit in or settle down among a diverse society that doesn’t fully support multiculturism.