I picked up this book about an immigrant, with interest, hoping to learn about the Philippines, why so many women leave, and what they do in more developed countries. LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU is told from the point of view of teenage Queenie, who arrives with her brother and father in New York. They are ostensibly tourists visiting Queenie’s mother, a hard-working nurse. But they don’t intend to go home.
This story of a Filipina-Chinese girl may not mirror the life of every immigrant, but I could see comparisons with the Irish in New York. In general, Irish men went, worked and sent money home to help the women travel. Here, Queenie’s Ma, only called by her name Mel at the end of the story, took the traditional nursing route and saved and borrowed for five years until she could bring her husband and children. The semi-legal family needs to get jobs quickly to help repay the debt and provide food while renting a one-bedroom apartment. Queenie, hoping to go to college, is obliged to be a home healthcare giver to an elderly lady. This is necessary work, but it doesn’t pay well.
I’m sure every industry has at some time been guilty of exploiting the young; their willingness to work for little pay or no pay, their naïve acceptance of subliminal or actual abuses. The young woman is constantly told that in America if you don’t work, you don’t eat. Poverty and squalor are all around her. This still doesn’t answer my puzzlement as to why she only seeks the most traditionally exploitative jobs, rather than better employment, especially once she manages to enter college.
The constant arguments between Queenie’s Filipina mother and Chinese father over the cost of living in Brooklyn, how the family should be raised and even how they used to live in the Philippines, are difficult to read. While the people came here for a better life, they seem not to want to learn how to live a better life every day. Friction is upsetting for the boy Junior as well, and he doesn’t know which tradition to follow. Some phrases are in Tagalog for verisimilitude, not enough to confuse. Mel had a traumatic young life, and the generational cycle of trauma coupled with the uncertainty over immigration makes Queenie’s story a challenging one. Despite constant warnings, the characters, oddly, tend towards sexual behaviour, so this is a New Adult story. Certainly, I came away with a better understanding of the situation from reading Cherry Lou Sy’s LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU. She shows that people arrive in the United States expecting their lives to instantly improve – and in many ways they do, but not in all.
A beautiful, tender yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own burning desires
Love Can't Feed You is a stunning, heartbreaking, and compressed look at coming of age, shifting notions of home, and the disintegration of the American dream. It asks us: What does it mean to be of multiple cultures without a road map for how to belong?
After a harrowing flight, Queenie, her younger brother, and their elderly Chinese father arrive in the United States from the Philippines. They’re here to finally reunite with Queenie’s Filipina mother, who has been working as a nurse in Brooklyn for the past few years—building a life that everyone hopes will set them up for better prospects. But her mother is not the same woman she was in the Philippines: Something in her face is different, almost hardened, and she seems so American already.
Queenie, on the cusp of adulthood, has big dreams of attending college, of spending her days immersed in the pages of books. But there is not enough money for her and her brother to both be in school, so first she must work. Queenie rotates through jobs and settles, tentatively, into her new life, but her brother begins to withdraw and act out, and her father’s anger swells. As the pressures of assimilation compound, and the fissures within her family deepen into fractures, Queenie is left suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents.
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