Filipino and American Relations in The Gangster of Love
Filipino and American Relations in "The Gangster of Love"
Have you ever heard of an Asian American? What about a Filipino American to be more precise? To get a better understanding of the term, you need to hear from an actual Filipino American to get a sense of what a Filipino American feels, says, and acts in everyday life. A great example is a Filipino American author by the name of Jessica Hagedorn. She wrote a book (very similar to Hagedorn’s life) that describes almost to the last detail of how one goes from being a full-blooded Filipino to a Filipino American, just as Hagedorn did. Jessica Hagedorn, a Filipino American author, illustrates the impact that cultural heritage assimilation between the Philippines and America has on a person and what they become as an end result in her novel, The Gangster of Love.
To get a better understanding of this thesis statement, you need some background information on her novel, The Gangster of Love. In fact, the main character Raquel’s (a.k.a. Rocky) life is very similar to Jessica Hagedorn’s life. Voices from the Gaps agree very much by stating that, “The Gangster of Love parallels many of the events in Hagedorn’s life” (Miles). The Voices from the Gaps also describe the book by saying, “ The Gangster of Love is more like a tenement lover in that is concentrates on the impact of leaving ones home country and adapting to a new one” (Miles). That’s exactly what becoming a Filipino American is.
First and foremost is the big leap that Rocky, a teenager at the time, and her family, her mother Milagros and her brother Voltaire, take from the Philippines to San Francisco. Jessica Hagedorn, as a teenager also, took this big leap from the Philippines to America with her family too. This is a huge transition from one world to another. Here Hagedorn describes her shift from the Philippines to America, “It took a turn for the better when I realized that one of the positive things about is was that as a female person, I suddenly had a sense of freedom that I never had growing up in Manila in that over-protected colonial environment--- the girl with her chaperones and everything that still goes on, that kind of Tradition. And even though...