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Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila
Fiction. Asian American Studies. Set in the Philippines, these beautiful and poignant stories reveal characters trapped in extremity in urban violence or the crushing poverty of the provinces. The reader comes away with new insights into human nature and the valor and courage of the Philippine people.
- GenresShort StoriesFiction
120 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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109 people want to read
About the author
Marianne Villanueva
12 books17 followersMarianne Villanueva, a former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, has been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino Americans since the mid 1980s. Her critically acclaimed first collection of short fiction, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books 1991) was shortlisted for the Philippines National Book Award. Her work has been widely anthologized. Her story, Silence, first published in the Three Penny Review, was shortlisted for the 2000 O. Henry Literature Prize, and The Hand was awarded first prize in Jukeds 2007 fiction contest. She has edited an anthology of Filipina womens writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. She currently teaches writing and literature at Foothill College and Notre Dame de Namur University. Born and raised in Manila, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You may view her blog at http://anthropologist.wordpress.com/.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 29, 2023
4.5
So good!!! Marianne Villanueva's prose is so enjoyable and poetic to read.
So good!!! Marianne Villanueva's prose is so enjoyable and poetic to read.
March 28, 2009
I’ve just finished reading Marianne Villanueva’s debut collection of short stories, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books, 1993). There. I’ve said it. I’ve just read this book 16 years too late, and I’ve read Villanueva’s second book, Mayor of the Roses (Miami University Press, 2005), prior to reading this one.
I am tempted to say that I enjoyed this book a bit more that her second, but that’s not exactly a fair thing to say, as the two books are rather different projects. I find I am more interested in Philippines-based stories than Filipino American, most likely because deep probing into Philippine-based lives as products of history is unfamiliar enough to me; whereas a healthy section of Mayor of the Roses is set in the USA, Ginseng, is set in the Philippines, in both Manila and the provinces or countryside, and these stories are set during the brutality of Martial Law. So the characters in these stories are surviving or succumbing to that period’s violence, suppression, disappearances, and economic ruin. Characters here are on the brink of making very difficult choices.
Think of the daughter Nina in “Opportunity”; she is the daughter of poor chicken farmers, and she is equipped with a college education. Her only sister has left them for her abusive husband. The first half of “Opportunity,” centers around Nina’s growing disconnect with her family and this terrible, terrible tension between her and her mother. Nina has had to decide whether to leave them to live and work elsewhere. This way, she reasons, she will be able to provide for her aging parents. Moreover, she has found a man, and he loves her. That’s where she’s going; to be with him. The turning point of the story is that elsewhere with her man: San Bruno, California, where this older American man lives. He is 60, many years older than she, a divorced father of three. He has found her via a mail order bride service.
And so these stories go, as though Villanueva has taken portraits of these Filipino families, and excavated quite deeply to expose to the reader how the political and economic state of the nation has weighted the people down so unrelentingly, broken up their families and familiar social structures, and cast them into such isolation. She writes in the book’s preface that upon returning to the Philippines after a period of absence, in which she studied abroad in California, so much had changed in her home country. She returned to witness the wreck that Martial Law had brought upon its people, what I know as today’s extremely polluted Manila air and streets, filled with so many beggars and child prostitutes.
In “Overseas,” Villanueva show us the disrupted families of the OFW’s, here primarily men, who have left their Manila slums for construction jobs in Saudi Arabia. Their intent of course is to better their families’ situations by sending their earnings to their families back home, given so little opportunity in Manila. But the story here, in “Overseas,” is what is left behind, the jeepney driver father who is never around, and the little sister, Sepa, twelve years old and dropped out of school, with no guidance of any kind, no reason to think about her future, already having sex in movie theaters and cheap hotels with random men, maybe for a little money, maybe just because no one is there to tell her otherwise. She invariably gets knocked up and seems to have no concept of that means.
In the book’s introduction, Virginia Cerenio references “the timelessness of the [Philippine:] countryside,” in Villanueva’s stories, and I am inclined to disagree with Cerenio. The countryside which Villanueva portrays, its people, are forever changed. In the story, “Siko,” we see a broken family of poor rice farmers. The old woman Aling Saturnina’s husband and many children have one by one left home for the city, and have never returned. One son, Siko, ends up a thief, one daughter renames herself “Pepsi,” becomes a prostitute in Olongapo, and the mistress of a powerful colonel.
There are ghosts still in this countryside, and while we can attribute this to the people’s superstitions or old beliefs, think about this blue jeans wearing, bullet-ridden ghost of Aling Saturnina’s son Siko, murdered by the military, because he tried to murder the colonel, because he was trying to save his sister. Not long after, Aling Saturnina and her remaining daughter are taken by the military and are never heard from again. The remaining son in law gradually falls into a state of resignation and futility. The people of this countryside appear broken, hopeless.
Whatever kind of enchantment or romance there may have once been in Villanueva’s memories of the Philippines, as we see in the point of view of the narrator Cecilia, in final story, “Island,” we see that as she examines her memories more deeply, there is an undercurrent of socioeconomic disparity and its consequences rising to the surface of her narrative. Cecilia is an expatriate, a Filipino American, and we can see her as representing Villanueva’s own position. Her husband calls her on her idyllic memories of Bacolod, and soon we begin to see the bourgeois position of Cecilia’s family, surrounded by those with much less means.
I am thinking about the allegorical component to these stories, or tales. While I have been reading them quite literally, and finding in this literal reading much political commentary being made, I suspect there is much more being said about the dictator, a nation in a state of disrepair, a pervasive lack of safety feeling throughout the collection. Think of these old, once lush gardens now barren and neglected. Think of these once powerful men now reduced to cripple and hallucinating invalids.
In the Manila noir-ish story, “Memorial,” the political (anti-dictatorship) graffiti artist, Fajardo, witnesses the aftermaths of the killings, dead bodies rotting in the streets, during his walks this now unfamiliar city that is his home, chalk scrawling political and poetic lines on the walls of the city to whomever cares to read them. Fajardo is a memorialist, and this is important, because when so many people go missing, the circumstances surrounded their disappearances are covered up, and they are forgotten. This is how their city ceases to be familiar to them, and ceases to be theirs. In “Memorial,” Villanueva asks who memorializes the memorialist when he goes missing.
Again, the theme of remembering amidst a dictatorship that is rewriting the nation’s history is seen most strongly in “The Special Research Project,” in which the building of the National Archives is leveled to dust. Housed in this building were the original writings of Jose Rizal, MH del Pilar, Francisco Balagtas, et al, the nation’s thinkers and intellectuals. Forgotten inside the building is Nicanor, the ghost writer of the President’s Special Research Project, a rewriter of the president’s biography and the nation’s history. It’s through his eyes that we see the crumbling of this dictatorship, the once grand presidential palace growing more empty, rat-infested and cavernous, the dictator himself growing more wan and exhausted and irrelevant to an exhausted and apathetic people. With so much revisioning, he has also lost his grip on his personal identity and the nation’s identity. Indeed, losing one’s control over the Master Narrative is to lose one’s control over the nation and its constituents.
Needless to say there is so much going on in this text, on many levels. Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila has been described by reviewers are subtle and elusive, but I wonder really how subtle and elusive it really is. It certainly is a dense text that is highly literal and symbolic narrative. It is intensely political. Now, as I’ve begun this write-up differentiating between Ginseng and Villanueva’s second collection, Mayor of the Roses, I will end by saying that Ginseng’s final story, “Island,” is an apt segue into Mayor of the Roses, as it is told from that expatriate point of view, the Filipino immigrant living in North America, and her memories of the homeland. She is prime for a return, and as well, we are ready to know the effect of American life on her Philippine memories, and on her Filipinoness.
I am tempted to say that I enjoyed this book a bit more that her second, but that’s not exactly a fair thing to say, as the two books are rather different projects. I find I am more interested in Philippines-based stories than Filipino American, most likely because deep probing into Philippine-based lives as products of history is unfamiliar enough to me; whereas a healthy section of Mayor of the Roses is set in the USA, Ginseng, is set in the Philippines, in both Manila and the provinces or countryside, and these stories are set during the brutality of Martial Law. So the characters in these stories are surviving or succumbing to that period’s violence, suppression, disappearances, and economic ruin. Characters here are on the brink of making very difficult choices.
Think of the daughter Nina in “Opportunity”; she is the daughter of poor chicken farmers, and she is equipped with a college education. Her only sister has left them for her abusive husband. The first half of “Opportunity,” centers around Nina’s growing disconnect with her family and this terrible, terrible tension between her and her mother. Nina has had to decide whether to leave them to live and work elsewhere. This way, she reasons, she will be able to provide for her aging parents. Moreover, she has found a man, and he loves her. That’s where she’s going; to be with him. The turning point of the story is that elsewhere with her man: San Bruno, California, where this older American man lives. He is 60, many years older than she, a divorced father of three. He has found her via a mail order bride service.
And so these stories go, as though Villanueva has taken portraits of these Filipino families, and excavated quite deeply to expose to the reader how the political and economic state of the nation has weighted the people down so unrelentingly, broken up their families and familiar social structures, and cast them into such isolation. She writes in the book’s preface that upon returning to the Philippines after a period of absence, in which she studied abroad in California, so much had changed in her home country. She returned to witness the wreck that Martial Law had brought upon its people, what I know as today’s extremely polluted Manila air and streets, filled with so many beggars and child prostitutes.
In “Overseas,” Villanueva show us the disrupted families of the OFW’s, here primarily men, who have left their Manila slums for construction jobs in Saudi Arabia. Their intent of course is to better their families’ situations by sending their earnings to their families back home, given so little opportunity in Manila. But the story here, in “Overseas,” is what is left behind, the jeepney driver father who is never around, and the little sister, Sepa, twelve years old and dropped out of school, with no guidance of any kind, no reason to think about her future, already having sex in movie theaters and cheap hotels with random men, maybe for a little money, maybe just because no one is there to tell her otherwise. She invariably gets knocked up and seems to have no concept of that means.
In the book’s introduction, Virginia Cerenio references “the timelessness of the [Philippine:] countryside,” in Villanueva’s stories, and I am inclined to disagree with Cerenio. The countryside which Villanueva portrays, its people, are forever changed. In the story, “Siko,” we see a broken family of poor rice farmers. The old woman Aling Saturnina’s husband and many children have one by one left home for the city, and have never returned. One son, Siko, ends up a thief, one daughter renames herself “Pepsi,” becomes a prostitute in Olongapo, and the mistress of a powerful colonel.
There are ghosts still in this countryside, and while we can attribute this to the people’s superstitions or old beliefs, think about this blue jeans wearing, bullet-ridden ghost of Aling Saturnina’s son Siko, murdered by the military, because he tried to murder the colonel, because he was trying to save his sister. Not long after, Aling Saturnina and her remaining daughter are taken by the military and are never heard from again. The remaining son in law gradually falls into a state of resignation and futility. The people of this countryside appear broken, hopeless.
Whatever kind of enchantment or romance there may have once been in Villanueva’s memories of the Philippines, as we see in the point of view of the narrator Cecilia, in final story, “Island,” we see that as she examines her memories more deeply, there is an undercurrent of socioeconomic disparity and its consequences rising to the surface of her narrative. Cecilia is an expatriate, a Filipino American, and we can see her as representing Villanueva’s own position. Her husband calls her on her idyllic memories of Bacolod, and soon we begin to see the bourgeois position of Cecilia’s family, surrounded by those with much less means.
I am thinking about the allegorical component to these stories, or tales. While I have been reading them quite literally, and finding in this literal reading much political commentary being made, I suspect there is much more being said about the dictator, a nation in a state of disrepair, a pervasive lack of safety feeling throughout the collection. Think of these old, once lush gardens now barren and neglected. Think of these once powerful men now reduced to cripple and hallucinating invalids.
In the Manila noir-ish story, “Memorial,” the political (anti-dictatorship) graffiti artist, Fajardo, witnesses the aftermaths of the killings, dead bodies rotting in the streets, during his walks this now unfamiliar city that is his home, chalk scrawling political and poetic lines on the walls of the city to whomever cares to read them. Fajardo is a memorialist, and this is important, because when so many people go missing, the circumstances surrounded their disappearances are covered up, and they are forgotten. This is how their city ceases to be familiar to them, and ceases to be theirs. In “Memorial,” Villanueva asks who memorializes the memorialist when he goes missing.
Again, the theme of remembering amidst a dictatorship that is rewriting the nation’s history is seen most strongly in “The Special Research Project,” in which the building of the National Archives is leveled to dust. Housed in this building were the original writings of Jose Rizal, MH del Pilar, Francisco Balagtas, et al, the nation’s thinkers and intellectuals. Forgotten inside the building is Nicanor, the ghost writer of the President’s Special Research Project, a rewriter of the president’s biography and the nation’s history. It’s through his eyes that we see the crumbling of this dictatorship, the once grand presidential palace growing more empty, rat-infested and cavernous, the dictator himself growing more wan and exhausted and irrelevant to an exhausted and apathetic people. With so much revisioning, he has also lost his grip on his personal identity and the nation’s identity. Indeed, losing one’s control over the Master Narrative is to lose one’s control over the nation and its constituents.
Needless to say there is so much going on in this text, on many levels. Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila has been described by reviewers are subtle and elusive, but I wonder really how subtle and elusive it really is. It certainly is a dense text that is highly literal and symbolic narrative. It is intensely political. Now, as I’ve begun this write-up differentiating between Ginseng and Villanueva’s second collection, Mayor of the Roses, I will end by saying that Ginseng’s final story, “Island,” is an apt segue into Mayor of the Roses, as it is told from that expatriate point of view, the Filipino immigrant living in North America, and her memories of the homeland. She is prime for a return, and as well, we are ready to know the effect of American life on her Philippine memories, and on her Filipinoness.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 19, 2024
Marianne's writing is beautiful and lyrical. The stories, at times gothic, were very atmospheric with so many deep symbolisms nodding to Philippine culture, people, place, history, anxieties. I don't often read short story anthologies, but I really liked this one. I feel it would be a good book to cover in Filipino universities.
March 17, 2019
Beautiful and lyrically written, I felt the magic and sadness of each story. Villanueva is a wonderful storyteller, and this is coming from someone that hates reading short stories. I would gladly read more of her work.
February 28, 2018
Favourites:
Lizard
Memorial
Opportunity
Island
Special research project
Lizard
Memorial
Opportunity
Island
Special research project
November 23, 2023
Wonderful collection of stories! Compelling characters, plots, situations, conflicts, such rich and visceral feelings of place—the Philippines. Phenomenal book—highly recommend!
March 17, 2011
When I first read Villanueva back in college she was the only Filipino author I knew who would use supernatural elements to convey the plight of the poor in the Philippines. "Siko" is the best example of this -- thoroughly spooky and atmospheric but grounded in the realities of poverty and military repression.
October 12, 2020
A sweet story about a little girl trying to find her purpose. Love that it takes place in the Pacific NW. The illustrations are lovely and the subject is inspirational. I just wish there had been a little more to the ending, but even without that, it’s a lovely book that was easy to enjoy.
October 11, 2020
Inspiring and engaging. It was a joy to read, and beautifully illustrated.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews