Precious Hearts Romance
This is a story about love, and will, and inertia, and destiny. There is a girl, of course. A young, attractive Filipina. She is hardworking, almost to a fault--stays late at the office most nights. She is pious--attends mass, erm, religiously. And she is lonely. Let's call her Graciel.
There is a guy. Older. A world traveler. Confident, capable, assured. Some would say handsome. Let's call him, uh...Mr. Portez.
But rather than going to the trouble of relaying the meet, the first infatuation, the growing admiration, the inevitable misunderstanding, the apparent love triangle, the crisis, climax and denouement, let's just jump to the coda and come up with a nice, spit-in-your- eye-then-kiss-you last line: "In the end, I had to admit to myself that I miss you terribly and that even if I hate you, I ...I still love you." This is a story about love. Endless variations have been played out across the world in bedrooms and brothels and office cubicles and campuses. But this, this is not real life. It is a Precious Hearts Romance, a la the (almost certainly pseudonymous) Laurice Del Rio.
Whoops. Any good story needs a backstory.
So. There's a Peace Corps volunteer. He has a Master's in English and loves language and literary analysis. He's been assigned to the Philippines, and before arrival, he spent time learning Tagalog, the national language, only to find that he would live and work in a region with another dialect. Waray-Waray. No matter. He would start his studies anew. He would not complete Peace Corps service with an internationally useful language under his belt. Any literature in the local dialect would be few and far between. No matter.
Check that. There would be no literature in the local language. Zilch.
After six months' searching for Waray-Waray books, I had accumulated a total of, count 'em: 2 short stories written on an anonymous Wordpress blog and one play composed by a co-teacher of mine. At one point, I heard rumors of a published novel lurking in a local bookstore. I skipped to the bookstore the next available Saturday. No soap. For a Peace Corps volunteer with a literature degree it's a sad Saturday.
But not so sad. Because he's plucky and resourceful. What did he do? What did I do? I went to another bookstore and promptly bought a Precious Hearts Romance.
The Precious Hearts Romance is a novelette series, written in a mixture of Tagalog and English. I'd first seen one being read secretively by one of my students at college. When I asked her what it was, she turned red and silent. I later saw the Precious Hearts Romances in bookstores-- pocket-sized, weighing in at a about 125 pages, lurid covers of pseudo- Eurasian couples locked in blissful gazes, narratives as pulpy and genre-bound as it gets, and costing me a total of 37 pesos—and realized, to my delight, that these were about the closest thing to a contemporary dime novel.
This coming from someone who studied the dime novel and pulp fiction in grad school. I'd read Horatio Alger, Edward Wheeler, Charles W. Chestnutt. I'd read the romance stories of Louisa May Alcott which had been cast by the wayside as too racy when she was deemed worthy of canonization. I'd read practically the entire oeuvre of Philip K. Dick, that towering figure of sci-fi pulp. I'd bought the whole Marxist sociocultural analysis line, the one about reading always already inscribed in a particular place and time, the mediated relationship between reader and writer—all that highfalutin literary junk.
But the Precious Hearts Romances were not in Waray. Instead, curiously, they were in a combination of Tagalog and English, usually with Tagalog grammar peppered heavily with English vocab like a zesty Pinoy creole. The literary scholar in me was fascinated. What did this linguistic ping-pong reveal about the influence of English in Pinoy culture? How did a Filipino romance novel compare to an American one? And most importantly, would Graciel and Mr. Portez live happily ever after?
I had a small, pocket sized Tagalog travel dictionary. As I plodded through the first pages of Nahimbing Na Puso, the title of the novel I'd purchased, I discovered that most of the words I didn't know were also not in the travel dictionary. But curiously, even though my Tagalog vocabulary was very limited and my Waray wasn't much beyond conversational basics, I found I could follow the story. I'd like to say that this was due to my massive linguistic brain, my superior ability to decode meaning based on context, to intuit parts of speech, to find grammatical parallels between Waray and Tagalog.
No, no. It was due to the predictability of the plot and the characters. Which is not, in itself, a bad thing. Historicist literary theory posits that predictable genres reveal cultural obsessions, myths, and aspirations (Why, for instance, was the rags-to-riches story so popular during America's post Civil War boom?).
I didn't care about Graciel and Mr. Portez. But then, who does? We don't read pulp novels for the literary content. We read them because, in them, we find ourselves. What if I were Graciel? thinks my student. What if I were Mr. Portez? thinks me. And we keep reading them, generation after generation because, as incurable narcissists, we can never read enough stories about ourselves.
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