By Frankie Martinez
I’m one of three children of immigrants from the Philippines. My mother and father came to the United States with their respective families in the ’60s and ’70s and met in Southern California shortly after. Growing up, we lived a bit further away from my grandparents and aunties and uncles, but my parents would take me and my brothers on long drives to attend family parties for any and all occasions—birthdays, baptisms, graduations, weddings.
Reading E.P. Tuazon’s new short story collection, A Professional Lola, felt like being welcomed into the same family party I’ve attended hundreds of times. I know the trays of lumpia and the spoonfuls of halo-halo, the strings of Tagalog of which I can only understand a few words. I know the wacky uncle, the gentle lola, that friend of lolo’s who isn’t related but is always there, the cousin who feels more like a sibling than your own—these characters shine especially brightly in each of Tuazon’s stories. In combination with speculative elements that delighted and shocked me, I found the stories in Professional Lola to be a poignant reflection on the playful highs and somber lows of modern Filipino American culture.
One very clear theme woven throughout the stories in A Professional Lola is loss. The collection is bookended with two stories that include the loss of a grandparent. In “Professional Lola,” the narrator’s mother hires an actress to impersonate a beloved, deceased lola at a party, and in “Carabao,” the narrator has to come to terms with their lolo’s transition to a lola. As someone who is lucky enough to know my lolos and lolas, the different types of “transformation” in both stories—the magic of a near-perfect lola impersonator knowing the exact right thing to say in contrast with the comforting similarities between a now-dead lolo and a new lola—were especially impactful.
There are also other kinds of “deaths” woven through some stories—the death of a marriage, of a dream, of a connection to home. There is grief and bitterness in these losses, but Tuazon infuses a certain type of wonder into these particularly melancholy episodes by introducing elements of surrealism. A Filipina wife brews a magic spell in order for her husband to fall back in love with her in “Blood Magic;” estranged siblings bond over their deceased father’s obsession with what we come to learn is a real-life Bigfoot in “After Bigfoot;” the child of a disappeared arcade owner visits their ancestral village in the Philippines to discover fish people in “Far From Home.” I wouldn’t call the collection “optimistic” by any means, but there is something optimistic and also humorous about the strange occurrences in the stories—rather than falling into despair, characters are free to dream, play, and hope within the frame of the surreal.
One of my favorite stories in the collection definitely lends itself to the more playful side of the collection. In “The Second Panaderya Attack,” a husband speculates with his wife about the time he’d robbed his favorite childhood pandesal bakery and been cursed by the owner, only for the two of them to hastily plan a second robbery at a nearby shop to break the curse. The story is quite impactful in its reflection on the inevitability of cravings and the strange comfort only certain foods and social cues can provide, but it is also highly ridiculous and dreamlike in its depiction of the married couple’s robbery, so much so that I can only come to the conclusion that the robbery itself is a surrealist element in the story.
While I found these bizarre story elements to be highly gripping, A Professional Lola is extremely grounded by Tuazon’s curious characters. Stories have mostly unnamed narrators, who are most interesting in relation to their supporting cast—there’s Boss in “Barong,” who lends his formal barongs to the narrator; Delia in “Promise Me More,” Noni’s hoarder mother who can’t seem to find anything in her house; the spontaneous dancer in “Tiny Dancer” who disappears into the life of his new Filipino girlfriend. Supporting characters like these were quite memorable and polarizing while narrators were inquisitive and relatable, leading me to feel as though I may have been inserting myself into these stories by design.
Whether or not it was intentional, I found myself daydreaming after finishing the last story in this collection—not only about the characters and surreal elements in A Professional Lola, but about the countless Filipino Americans just like me, who could read this book and see something of themselves. For me, I see the stories in my large circle of family and friends, the people that had to meet for me to even become who I currently am, and now, the endlessly bizarre possibilities of my own existence, whether good or bad.
A Professional Lola is available from Blue Cypress Books, Bookshop, Elliott Bay Book Company, Green Apple Books, Skylight Books, and Unabridged Bookstore.
Frankie Martinez is a writer, reader, and editor from Southern California. Her prose has appeared in 3 Moon Magazine, Poetically Magazine, and The Winnow. She is currently a fiction editor at Miniskirt Magazine and has a slice of life column at The Daily Drunk Mag. Find out more at frankiemilktea.carrd.co.