Revisiting The Life And Legacy Of A Pioneering Filipino Author -- Seattle Is Where The Activist-Author Began His American Life - And Where He Died In Obscurity -- `He Was An Integral Part Of Seattle . . . And Of The Filipino Community'

The brown, doleful eyes that writer Carlos Bulosan once lovingly described as "wise Indian eyes full of silences and wisdom" are failing now.

At 82, Josephine Patrick is almost blind. Nearly everything in the Leschi home she once shared with Bulosan, the most important Filipino author this country has produced, is reduced to blurs and shadows. But her memories of events nearly a half-century old remain crisp.

She remembers Bulosan greeting her with deliciously ingenious dinners, ingredients freshly foraged from nearby woods.

She recalls the exuberant poems to her about love and the struggles they waged for social justice that flowed effortlessly from pen to paper.

Then there were the long, melancholy nights when he had drunk too much wine, engulfed in the sadness of lost youth and his earlier promise. She held his head in her hands, calming his fears of death.

And the saddest memory of all. Her voice slowing and dipping to near-whisper, betraying a hurt that still stings after four decades, she recalls how, in the midst of a creative rebirth, their life together came to an abrupt end.

Bulosan, whose works and life would inspire later generations of young Asian Americans rediscovering their heritage and history, died in Seattle forgotten and discarded by an America that had briefly embraced him.

"Those years with Carlos, I think that they were the happiest part of my life," Patrick says. "But you can't have happiness without pain."

A Horatio Alger fable

It was in Seattle, about a quarter-century earlier, that Bulosan began his remarkable American life.

Although he remains little-known to most people, in his day Bulosan was a literary phenomenon. His life was the stuff of Horatio Alger fables: Poor young immigrant, through pluck and perseverance, finds success beyond his dreams in the New World.

His first book of fiction, "The Laughter of My Father," a collection of short stories inspired by Philippine folk tales, became a surprise wartime bestseller and was translated into several foreign languages; The New Yorker and Harper's published more of his stories and essays. Critics hailed him as a welcome new voice.

He counted as his friends the writers Carl Sandburg and William Saroyan. And he was handpicked by President Franklin Roosevelt to write one of the four essays in "The Four Freedoms," a popular wartime collection that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post.

All this from an impoverished and sickly youth who barely had an education and spoke little English when he came to the U.S. in 1930.

That he was a Filipino writing about the hardships and prejudice experienced by his countrymen in their adopted country made his success even more unlikely. Bulosan became a poster boy for all the promises of America while chronicling the ways America breaks those very same promises.

But Bulosan's fame was fleeting.

In 1946 came his partly autobiographical masterpiece, "America Is in the Heart," which gave an unflinching account of the oppressive poverty that drove him from his homeland and the brutality of life on the fringes of American society.

The book was critically acclaimed. "People interested in driving from America the scourge of intolerance should read Mr. Bulosan's autobiography," said a writer for the prestigious Saturday Review of Literature. "America," however, proved to be his swan song. Bulosan soon vanished from the spotlight.

But in his last decade, much of it spent in Seattle, Bulosan continued to struggle for the American ideals that, despite the hardships and racism he encountered, he continued to believe in.

The personal recollections of those who knew Bulosan during his last years, and the papers and correspondence he left behind - much of which is archived at the University of Washington - paint a picture of a man who kept America in his heart, even as America turned away.

`Everything seemed promising'

Bulosan was born in Binalonan, a small rural village in northern Philippines; different birth dates have been reported, but his baptismal record says 1911. At 18 he came to the U.S., following the footsteps of two elder brothers who had earlier fled the poverty of their homeland.

The Philippines was then a colony of the United States, ceded by Spain after its defeat in the Spanish-American War. By 1929, there were 75,000 Filipinos in the U.S.

Bulosan paid $75 for passage in the steerage of the Dollar Line. On July 22, 1930, the ship reached Seattle, docking in Magnolia at what is now Pier 91. The country was then in the depths of the Great Depression, and immigrants who once were welcome had become economic threats. But Bulosan was full of hope.

"My first sight of the approaching land was an exhilarating experience," Bulosan wrote in "America Is in the Heart." "Everything seemed native and promising to me. It was like coming home after a long voyage, although as yet I had no home in this city. Everything seemed familiar and kind - the white faces of the buildings melting in the soft afternoon sun, the gray contours of the surrounding valleys that seemed to vanish in the last periphery of light. With a sudden surge of joy, I knew that I must find a home in this new land."

Bulosan joined the mass of men who traveled up and down the coast from California to Alaska. In the summer, they worked the fish canneries in Alaska; in the fall they picked fruits and vegetables in California.

In his 1942 essay "In Search of America," Bulosan wrote of his first time in the fields of Eastern Washington: "I stood at the back of the truck and watched Seattle fade away. Toward midnight the sweet smell of ripe apples in Wenatchee was great consolation. I can still remember my reaction. The valley was at that hour like a huge palm that engulfed us with a wonderful sensation. The faraway ocean that came to us in the night was like music.

"When we arrived in Sunnyside the fragrant cantaloupe greeted us. The truck stopped behind a bunkhouse. I was assigned to a hard and narrow bed. I worked for three months picking apples in Sunnyside. Toward the end of the season the contractor ran away with the payroll. I moved to another town and worked again."

His experiences as a farm worker led Bulosan to become active organizing farm workers into unions. But the hardships of life as an itinerant worker took its toll. In 1936 Bulosan was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he spent the next two years at Los Angeles County Hospital. He eventually had several lung operations, lost the ribs on his right side and was given five years to live by his doctors. It was during this time that he began to read voraciously, educating himself and gradually becoming a writer.

Bulosan's literary triumphs a few years later were partly due to good timing.

While in the hospital, he made friends who guided his self-education and readings, including a few with influential contacts in the publishing world.

Bulosan also benefited from the subtle shift in the attitude toward Filipinos that occurred during World War II. In California and much of the West Coast, before the war it wasn't unusual to see signs that read "Dogs and Filipinos positively not allowed."

When Japan invaded the Philippines, Filipinos fought side-by-side with Americans. In 1942, Bulosan published two volumes of poetry, "Letter from America" and "Chorus from America," and the next year, "The Voice of Bataan," in honor of the men who died there. His poems struck a chord with a receptive American public. With his bestseller "The Laughter of My Father," he cemented his reputation as a rising young writer.

But during the postwar years, the mood of the country again shifted: The enemy wasn't fascism but communism. Bulosan found himself on the wrong side of the ideological divide.

Although he was never a communist, as an outspoken critic of those who exploited workers and the poor, Bulosan was associated with leftist and socialist causes. Along with novelist Howard Fast and educator W.E.B DuBois, he supported an effort to publish the autobiography of Luis Taruc, leader of a 1950s communist rebellion in the Philippines.

Bulosan soon found himself ostracized by his East Coast publishing friends. Despite his Hollywood contacts, he was never able to get work writing for the motion-picture industry, an apparent victim of the blacklist. Like other Filipino labor activists suspected by the government of communist leanings, he lived under constant threat of deportation; he may have been saved only because he wrote "Freedom from Want" for Roosevelt.

In 1950, Bulosan accepted an invitation from his old friend Chris Mensalvas to come to Seattle to edit a union yearbook. A year earlier, Mensalvas had become president of Local 37 of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), which represented the cannery workers and was the first union to be organized by Filipino workers.

Bulosan, who had been active in the farm workers' strike in Stockton, Calif., in 1948 and 1949, wrote Mensalvas that he wanted to come to Seattle for his health.

At a party given for Bulosan shortly after he arrived, he met Josephine Patrick, a member of the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, a group that fought the deportation of union leaders. Patrick was a longtime activist for farm workers who'd met many of the young leaders of Local 37 while organizing farms near her Yakima hometown.

Patrick, then 33, was separated from her husband and raising two young boys. As a communist, she was blacklisted and unable to find work in teaching and worked instead in factories and sweatshops. She was instantly drawn to Bulosan, then about 39.

"He was very beautiful," Patrick says, adding that at about 5 feet 4 inches and 96 pounds, she and Bulosan were about the same size. "He was small and delicate and he had a very soft voice. He danced even with his stiff leg, and he was funny; he had a marvelous sense of humor."

In Patrick, Bulosan found a ideological kindred spirit. She was also an admirer of his work. The day after they met, Bulosan visited Patrick at her Leschi home, and their relationship blossomed into romance.

But Bulosan's health interfered. He had to have a cancerous kidney removed, then, laid low with tuberculosis, was sent to Firland sanitarium in North Seattle for a year.

After his release from Firland in August 1953, Bulosan began living with Patrick, retreating to his downtown apartment to write.

The couple settled into a domestic routine. He helped with the boys and household chores and took frequent strolls in the woods near her Leschi home, the subject of numerous poems.

"I'd come home from work and dinner would be ready," she recalls. "He didn't eat much, but he was a wonderful cook. He'd go to the woods and get dandelion greens and pick berries and he had a garden in front. He taught us a lot of things about living off the land."

But Bulosan was also prone to fits of melancholy, and he liked to drink. Patrick described him as a "gentle drunk" who, when inebriated, often fell asleep.

He was depressed about not being able to work, Patrick says. "His East Coast friends dropped him, which was a terrible shock to him," she adds. "I tried to get him to stop drinking, but it was a lost battle. He was so depressed and unhappy."

Bulosan, who had developed a strong drinking habit during his years as a migrant worker, did make some attempts at quitting, but they never lasted.

His relationship with Patrick - of French-Indian background - also posed problems. Patrick's friends and neighbors criticized her relationship with a Filipino man, and her communist comrades threatened to expel her because she was involved with someone who wasn't a communist - and therefore untrustworthy.

"The country was so racist in those days," says Patrick. "It was such a crime for a white woman to be with a Filipino man."

A writer for a Manila newspaper recounted several encounters with Bulosan in 1954. "In the union hall in Seattle he was often seen stretched on his stomach on a chesterfield, thoroughly soused, but none of the union members every complained against him. They knew that he had been hospitalized for extended periods a number of times and was none too well after his latest release from the hospital, and their general attitude was one of tolerance and kindliness toward him."

But by the last year of his life, Bulosan appeared to emerge from the darkness, and he poured his energies into his work with renewed vigor, Patrick said.

The national mood also had begun to improve; the worst of the McCarthy-era communist witchhunts had passed.

In early 1956, Bulosan wrote to old friends in California and expressed optimism about his life. According to his papers, he was at work on various projects, including a novel about Seattle's Skid Road, a play about Philippine national hero Jose Rizal and a multi-volume work of fiction tracing the history of Filipinos in the U.S. That year Bulosan also received a Carnegie Foundation fellowship, which helped ease his financial worries.

Sanora Babb, a writer who helped guide Bulosan's self-education in California and wife of pioneering Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe, congratulated Bulosan on the turnaround.

In a February 1956 letter she wrote: "Your letter brought back into my mind a sense of the young Carlos so many years ago burning with new ideas, poetic feelings that must be put into words. I am very happy that you have searched to find a new theme for your work, a new `singing idea' for your life! . . . We have thought a lot about you and you must know now that some of those thoughts were sad with the waste of your good qualities, your good talents. To have changed, to be inspired again in living and in work, is the best news that your old friends could hear."

Bulosan was also being rediscovered locally. In early September 1956, he was interviewed by a Seattle Times reporter. Bulosan told her that he was at work on a sequel to "America Is in the Heart," which he tentatively titled "My Letter to the World," and a rough draft of a children's book.

"I want to interpret the soul of the Filipinos in this country," he told her. "What really compelled me to write was to try to understand this country, to find a place in it not only for myself but for my people."

About a week later, Bulosan passed out on the lawn of the King County Courthouse after drinking with a friend. He was taken to Harborview and diagnosed with pneumonia.

Patrick believes Bulosan received substandard care, and that he was dismissed as another drunk drifter.

Bulosan died on Sept. 11, 1956. He was 44. An autopsy revealed that he died of pneumonia, which was severe and far advanced. Tuberculosis didn't appear to be a factor.

His funeral was held four days later, on a Saturday afternoon, at the Cannery Workers' Union Hall. Most of those in attendance were Filipino cannery workers who had come to pay their last respects.

Patrick grieved alone near the back of the hall. After the service, Bulosan's body was brought to Mount Pleasant Cemetery for burial. The small cemetery in Queen Anne is where many of the city's early Asian residents were buried, as well as many prominent labor figures.

In the rush to get to the cemetery, no one offered to give Patrick a ride. She took a bus and arrived as the final rites were concluding.

For years after his death, Patrick made an annual trek to Bulosan's grave. As she had promised, she poured a bottle of his, and his fellow migrant workers', favorite libation: cheap red wine.

"I loved him dearly," Patrick says, her voice drifting. "He was the love of my life."

Millions of unpublished words

Later, there were attempts by Bulosan's friends to get his works published posthumously. Bulosan himself estimated that he had a million words that remained unpublished. But nothing came of the effort. Bulosan's New York publisher was uninterested and for years his works were out of print until they were rediscovered by another generation of young Asian Americans.

In his obituary for his friend, Chris Mensalvas wrote: "Carlos Bulosan died 11 September 1956, Seattle. Birthplace: Philippines; Address: Unknown; Occupation: Writer; Hobby: Famous for his jungle salad served during Foreign-Born Committee dinners. Estate: One typewriter, a twenty-year-old suit, unfinished manuscripts, worn-out socks; Finances: Zero. Beneficiary: His people."