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THE BREAD OF SALT AND OTHER STORIES by N. V. M. Gonzalez. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993. xix + 201 pages. $30 cloth; $14.95 paper.
The ad copy on the back cover of The Bread of Salt and Other Stories pronounces N. V. M. Gonzalez "the dean of modern Philippine literature." Indeed he deserves this sobriquet, and the same claim may be made vis-a-vis Pilipino American literature: Gonzalez bridges the pioneers, Carlos Bulosan and Bienvenido Santos, with today's trailblazers, Jessica Hagedorn and Ninotchka Rosca. As do these other writers, Gonzalez traces the troubling and troubled web of colonial, postcolonial and neocolonial intersections in the Philippines, a tangled history of invasions and occupations by builders of empire: Chinese, Arabs, British, Japanese, and especially the two most significant colonizers, the Spanish who stayed four centuries and the Americans who dominated most of the twentieth century. Gonzalez's own writerly past, standing athwart an ocean, with one foot on the Philippine archipelago and the other on the American continent, retells this narrative of colonization. "It was in America," Gonzalez writes, "that I began to recognize my involvement in the process of becoming...