America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo - 9780735222427 - PenguinRandomHouse - Com - Books

9/18/2020 America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: 9780735222427 | PenguinRandomHouse.
com: Books
FREE GROUND SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $20

BEFORE YOU GO...
Check Out
The Bestselling Books of All Time

SEE THE LIST
America Is Not the Heart

A NOVEL
By Elaine Castillo
ABOUT AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
Named one of the best books of 2018 by NPR, Real Simple, Lit Hub, The Boston Globe,
San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, and The New York Public
Library
“A saga rich with origin myths, national and personal . . . Castillo is part of a younger
generation of American writers instilling literature with a layered sense of identity.” —
Vogue
How many lives t in a lifetime?
When Hero De Vera arrives in America–haunted by the political upheaval in the

Philippines and disowned by her parents–she’s already on her third. Her uncle gives
her a fresh start in the Bay Area, and he doesn’t ask about her past. His younger wife
knows enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head 0
down. But their daughter–the rst American-born daughter in the family–can’t resist
asking Hero about her damaged hands.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549486/america-is-not-the-heart-by-elaine-castillo/ 1/11
9/18/2020 America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: 9780735222427 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books
An increasingly relevant story told with startling

BEFORE lucidity, humor, and an uncanny ear
YOU GO...
for the intimacies and shorthand of family ritual, America Is Not the Heart is a
Check Out
sprawling, soulful debut about three generations of women in one family struggling to
balance the promise of the American dream and the unshakeable grip of history. With
exuberance, grit, and sly tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance;
a narrative of two nations and the people whoLIST
SEE THE leave one home to grasp at another.
Reading Guide
LISTEN TO A SAMPLE FROM AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART
PRAISE
Featured in * New York Magazine * Paris Review * Entertainment Weekly * Vogue * Elle
* NPR * Marie Claire * Lit Hub * Shondaland * The Millions * Bust * Time Out * The
Boston Globe * The New York Post * Vulture * Real Simple * PopSugar * Cosmopolitan *
Southern Living * Buzzfeed * Renery29 * The Rumpus * Mother Jones

“Hungrily ambitious in sweep and documentary in detail, and reads like a
seismograph of the aftershocks from trading one life for another . . . Like Bulosan,
[Castillo] channels a righteous anger, revisiting America’s historical crimes.”
The New York Times Book Review
“[A] powerful debut.”

Elle
“An impossible-to-put-down, multi-generational family epic.”

Southern Living
“A lively, often hilarious family epic stretching from the villages of the Philippines to
Northern California . . . A erce, deeply affecting story of immigrant life in America.”
—Marie Claire 0
“One of the best debut novels (and novels, period) of recent years.”
Elle UK
BEFORE YOU GO...
“A stunning, powerful look at the American Dream; at family; at all the past lives we
Check Out
can’t escape, no matter how far away we are from home. It’s tender, touching, and
impossible to put down.”
Shondaland
SEE THE LIST
“This extraordinary debut novel follows Filipino immigrants as they settle into the Bay
Area. . . . The writing in America Is Not the Heart is tremendous, the descriptions
evocative, and the characters will stay with you.”
—Vulture
“Elaine Castillo’s blazing debut America Is Not The Heart springs alive from the rst
page. Her characters Filipina and Filipina American women living in San Francisco’s
South Bay—are Technicolor-vivid, awed and heroic, and her prose is as good as it
gets. Castillo’s food writing will make your mouth water, and her love scenes will make
your heart pound. Ambitious, sexy, sprawling and open-armed, America Is Not the
Heart is the start of a phenomenal career.”
NPR
“[America Is Not the Heart] is lled to the brim with history and wit, and it’s hard to
shake the sense that by the time you turn the last page, the women have become your
family, too.”
PopSugar
“First-time novelist Elaine Castillo interweaves English and Filipino dialects and
moves across time to explore how hard it is to truly escape the past.”
—Real Simple
“Castillo emerges as one of 2018’s boldest new voices with this debut. In exquisite
prose and with transporting sweep, she tells the story of three generations of Filipino
immigrants making their way in the Bay Area while trying to preserve their family’s
complicated legacy.”
Entertainment Weekly
“A love story, a multi-generational family epic, and a deeply personal, lavishly painted
portrait of lives in revision . . .With a sophistication rare in a rst novel, Castillo
recognizes a larger network of suffering—an understanding that trauma is, along with
our mutual need for love, food, sex, and a coherent sense of self, one of humanity’s
least exclusive clubs . . . [America Is Not the Heart] has an offhand vitality that startles
on every page with its compassion and humor.” 0
Megan O’Grady, Vogue
“I’ve been saying to everyone who will listen that this book is the next big thing—you
heard it here rst. My new favorite book, and maybe yours, too . . . This is Castillo’s rst
novel, and it is masterful. It has drama and YOU
BEFORE tragedy
GO... in spades, but it also has so much
love of every kind spilling out of its pages that I closed it each night with a huge, warm
Check Out
smile. I might go home and read it again.”
Eleanor Pritchett, The Paris Review
“Flipping forward and back through time, Castillo challenges notions of home,
SEE THE LIST
critiquing class structures, exploring generational relationships, and examining
cultural divides within the Filipino community, both overseas and in Milpitas,
California. . . . This book has everything—war, love, family, displacement, and, of
course, a Hero.”
Mother Jones
“Devastating and tender . . . [a] startlingly lovely rst novel.”

Chicago Tribune
“This surging epic about three generations of Filipina women in the Bay Area conjures
all the secret and not-so-secret wounds they carry into being Americans in a tale full
of joy, anguish, and some of the best intimate scenes written in any genre all year.”
—The Boston Globe
“This family epic spanning from the Philippines to Milpitas, Calif., reads like a literary
telenovela. It features a mysterious heroine, political upheaval and a sweeping
romance. I couldn’t put it down.”
The New York Post
“Quite simply one of the best rst novels I’ve ever read. Not since Junot Diaz rst
emerged 20 years ago have I seen a writer shufe so condently between codes and
languages as she builds a world, one full of love and heartache. Like Diaz’s stories and
rst novel, Castillo’s is a story of immigration and its costs, a meditation on brutality
and where trauma goes, a love story, a friendship story, a family story, and its also a
deeply funny story in moments. Laugh aloud funny, not book snort-through-your-
nose-in-a-barely-audible-way funny. It’s astonishing she ts it all in. I’ve watched
friends who got this galley walk around in the days after reading it as if clubbed on the
head, as in, how I’m supposed to read something new after this? For a while, you
won’t.”
Lit Hub
“Part love story, part multigenerational family tale, and part exploration of intersecting
identities in the late-20th-century Bay Area, America Is Not the Heart is certainly not
the rst family saga to suggest that home is more than a place. The book’s dynamic 0
characters and beautiful, nuanced relationships, though, give the adage weight.”
Bust
“A really rich multigenerational story . . . it’s about the self and family ties and feeling
that pull back to where you came from and YOU
BEFORE alsoGO...
exploring new things.”
Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed
Check Out

“Beautiful, original, and heartbreaking.”
The Millions
SEE THE LIST
“[An] important, engrossing novel.”
Bitch Magazine
“America Is Not the Heart is the sprawling, multi-generational family epic about
immigration, national identity, and generational divides you need in your life . . . You
won’t want to miss out.”
Renery29
“We haven’t been this excited about a debut in a while. Especially one as timely as
Elaine Castillo’s. America Is Not the Heart is a beautiful and heartbreaking debut
about love, family, identity, and the Filipino experience.”
HelloGiggles
“A recent turning point for me was listening to Filipino American author Elaine
Castillo at a reading. The immediacy of her prose held the room in a captivated
silence. She reopened wounds for us by telling stories about rst- and second-
generation Filipino immigrant women, straight and queer. Hers is literature that
speaks to our historical moment while it searches for a clearer retelling of the past.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“My reading year has been characterized by sudden explosions in the midst of long

dry spells. Without question the most powerful of these was Elaine Castillo’s America
Is Not the Heart—a gorgeous and gratifyingly huge novel about home and nding a
home, replete with food and music and spiky tenderness.”
The White Review
“Castillo strikes a balance between humor and revelation: as Hero has it, America Is
Not the Heart is ‘funny, in that way of things being funny right before they dug deep,
wrenched, and tore.’”
THE Magazine
“Captivating . . . The novel is both a sweeping family saga, and a fervent reection of
the Filipinx American borderlands. . . . Castillo uses ction to reveal the inuence of
the past on the present and the role silence plays within our communities, creating a 0
blueprint for seeing the complexities present in the intimacies of our daily lives.”
The Rumpus

“Hero is no ordinary heroine, and Castillo’s novel is no simple story of self-discovery;

instead, it’s meditative, gorgeous, and surprising.”
BEFORE YOU GO...
Read It Forward
Check Out

“[The book] follows three generations of women from a family that immigrated from
the Philippines to San Francisco, and it’s a testament to the sacrices we make for our
loved ones.” SEE THE LIST
BookRiot
“South Bay author Elaine Castillo makes an impressive debut with this novel of race,
gender and immigration.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“The creative accomplishments of this story are incredible: this unexpected family,
this history, this embrace of the sacred and the profane, this easy humor, this deeply
felt human-ness, this messy, perfect love story. Elaine Castillo is a masterful, heartfelt
writer.”
Jade Chang

“Elaine Castillo’s entrancing and magnicent debut is set to be a standout work of
literature. Don’t say you were not told. What a dazzling book!”
NoViolet Bulawayo

“This glorious novel is a sharp, bracing, often hilarious family epic about a young
woman tormented by the relentless ghosts of her past while in search of an American
Dream that is not always available to those who seek it.”
Samantha Irby

“With the sheer propulsive power of her voice, Elaine Castillo blasts readers into her
story.”
John Freeman

“Castillo’s debut novel is particularly relevant in today’s toxic political climate. A rich,
challenging read.”
—Library Journal

“Castillo’s debut, a contemporary saga of an extended Filipino family, is a wonderful,
nonpareil novel . . . a remarkable feat . . . a brilliant and intensely moving immigrant
tale.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
0
“Castillo is a vivid writer, and she has a real voice: vernacular and uid, with a take-no-
prisoners edge. At the same time, she complicates her narrative by breaking out of it in
a variety of places—both by deftly incorporating languages such as Tagalog and
Ilocano and through the use of ashback or backstory . . . Beautifully written,

emotionally complex, and deeply moving, BEFORECastillo’s
YOU GO... novel reminds us both that stories
may be all we have to save us and also that this may never be enough.”
Check Out
—Kirkus (starred review)

“[A] raw and lyrical debut novel . . . Castillo’s direct and urgent voice propels the
sprawling epic with impressive skill. ThisSEEunforgettable
THE LIST family saga is not to be
missed.”
Booklist
AUTHOR Q&A
This novel is a beautiful example of how the personal is political, and that for many,
politics can’t be unraveled from intimate, everyday life. Did you set out to write a
political book, or is it the nature of the narrative?
Yeah, I’m one of those cats that believes all art is political, even (or especially) the art
that insists on political neutrality or claims to transcend politics altogether.
I’ve written a book that’s in part about a former New People’s Army rebel, a book about
people who’ve survived the Marcos dictatorship, about queer immigrant women, so
it’s relatively easy to point and say: Such and such things are the political aspects of
the book. But I don’t really subscribe to that idea. The book is in part a portrait of a
former Communist insurgent, and as such there are things in the book that fall in line
with that genre we call political art: social history, reections on power, discussion of
geopolitical landscapes. But what I’m even more interested in is the textured, daily
minutia of the years she lives out in the book’s present as an exile in America. The
things Hero experiences as a newcomer to the Bay Area—taking a cousin to school,
cleaning a house, working at a restaurant, falling in love—provide no less vital (or
political) examples of the kind of radical community-building and cooperative
principles that shaped her life in the NPA.
When it comes to political art as genre and aesthetic, I’m always conscious of the
narrow, gendered assumption that “serious” political content is about war, empire, and
history. There is no lack of war or colonial history in the book. But it’s equally
important to me that a young, queer, Bay Area Pinay’s relationship to makeup artistry,
or a former NPA insurgent’s feelings about romance manga, could also bear
signicant political resonance—which is to say, could also be as alive to our civic
selves as to our private souls.
Your characters often have to make hard decisions that wealthier, more privileged
0
citizens might not have to. How does immigration status create a ripple effect around
the tragedies these characters encounter?
My parents were immigrants, and there were close members of my family who were
undocumented in the seventies andBEFORE eighties.
YOUI was
GO... always struck by the normalcy. I
think there’s a tendency to dramatize and catastrophize when we talk about

Check Out
immigration, and there is absolutely no doubt that immigration-related catastrophes
struck my family again and again and again—yet, for every story about a terried
person going into hiding from immigration authorities (becoming a TNT, short for
“tago ng tago,” Tagalog slang for undocumented
SEE THE LIST immigrant), for every story about a
person who moved to America and never, ever set foot in the Philippines again, there
is also a story about being a taxi driver in Queens, falling in love with a young woman,
and scavenging mussels on Long Island where nobody but immigrants would go to
gather them.
Some of the most widespread American myths around immigration have to do with
upward mobility, the idea that immigration—and the hard work that awaits immigrants
in their new country—will catapult people out of their class, relieve them at last of their
scarcity trauma.
Contrary to that myth, what I’ve witnessed and lived much more often resembles
jagged spurts of security: maybe ten or so years of being fragilely middle class, if that.
But one death, one terminal illness, one deportation, one 2008 nancial crisis, one kid
going to jail—and you start again from zero. This is magnied by the fact that the
nuclear family simply didn’t exist in my world growing up; people thrive together, or
don’t thrive at all. We bailed out and were ourselves bailed out many, many times by
people within the extended family and community. When you’re an immigrant,
especially when you’re supporting not just your “immediate” family, but your extended
family, your family back in the origin country, and other loved ones throughout the
diaspora, it means that what meager wealth you might accumulate from years of
backbreaking labor, even in middle-class jobs (my mother regularly worked at least
two, often three, nursing jobs, usually for sixteen hours a day) is spread thin, thin, thin.
Generational wealth, which is to say, sustainable wealth, the kind of material security
that won’t end with your lifetime, often remains unattainable.
Despite (or maybe because of) all that, I have a healthy amount of suspicion and
exasperation around the positive language of hard work and sacrice that often
accompanies narratives around immigration. Sometimes it feels like much of that
mostly well-meaning discourse amounts to a kind of instrumentalizing; i.e.,
immigrants are worthy of being treated as humans because of how much thankless
work they perform. Or: if we just work ourselves to the bone, safety and succor will
await us on the other side. Some of that exasperation is personal; growing up I was a
sickly kid who has retained a fairly weak physical constitution, and that’s meant my
ability to work has been compromised throughout the years, so the idea of equating
work with self-value is a troubled one for me. But I also know that there are plenty of
people—predominantly women—in my family who’ve destroyed themselves with work,
fully invested in the belief that their labor would translate to forward progression, if 0
not in their lives, than in the lives of their children. And the heartbreaking truth is that
often this isn’t true at all.
Much of the book also deals with questions of physical health and healing; Hero has
grave thumb injuries, and Roni dealsBEFORE
with severe eczema that neither conventional
YOU GO...
medicine nor folk treatments seem to be able to really address. Why was it important
Check Out
to depict bodily pain or illness in the book?
Like most Filipino people I knew, I had pretty severe eczema growing up, and, like
Roni, I spent most of my life until about my
SEE mid
THE to late twenties undergoing various
LIST
treatments for it, from faith healing and exorcisms, to the mildest topical steroids, to
hardcore oral immunosuppressive drugs. Even just given how many people in my
family and community had eczema, it would have seemed absolutely bizarre to me to
portray a Filipino or Filipino American family that didn’t depict anyone dealing with it.
For me, it’s simply part of the landscape.
There are also questions of health in the book that touch on corporate—what some
might call neocolonial—history. In the book, Roni makes mention of the rst few years
of her life, in which she was only fed Nestlé formula. Something fairly similar
happened to me growing up: I was fed, I believe, almost uniquely on Nestlé formula,
from birth to about four or ve years old. Like Roni and Hero, I nd the experience
difcult to parse. I only know that it happened, that when my family tried to wean me
off the formula, I refused to eat. The story ended with my hospitalization, at which
point I was fed intravenously and then gradually introduced to solid foods.
I can’t say for sure why I was fed on Nestlé formula for so long; certainly everyone
around me was working themselves to the bone, not everyone was documented; they
were undeniably years of hardship and distraction. But I also sometimes surmise that
the faithfulness to Nestlé formula may have some relation to the campaign Nestlé
notoriously orchestrated in many third world countries—it was very present during my
mother’s youth in the Philippines—in which young mothers were aggressively
encouraged to choose formula over breast milk as being superior for their newborn’s
health—notwithstanding the fact that many poorer young mothers had limited access
to potable water and would thus be feeding their babies contaminated formula.
Part of this book is loosely based off your own experience as a child being kidnapped
by your father and taken back to the Philippines. What do you remember about that
time, and how has it affected your life and your writing?
I have the somewhat bland oblivion of most kids who’ve experienced something that
other people read as traumatic, but who have lived with it for so long as something
just wrapped up in their personal history without much dramatic affect. What struck
me more was growing up and meeting other people who’d been similarly kidnapped in
childhood, and for similar reasons: an immigrant parent who found themselves
alienated in their new country and who made the decision to leave, often leaving
behind spouses, perhaps even other children. It happens. Compared to some of the 0
stories I’ve heard, mine was a kidnapping on a comparatively smaller scale, a matter of
a few months—though obviously an eternity to anyone who wanted me back home.
I think that, rather than affecting my life or writing, thinking about the kidnapping as
an adult helps to illuminate and contextualize some of the power dynamics in my

family and in my community, especially around
BEFORE gender and class—who had the right
YOU GO...
to act with impunity, and who had to endure. Who felt they deserved what. But the
Check Out
most obvious effect that the eventually retracted kidnapping has had on my life and
writing is that I was, in the end, raised in America—a Californian kid, a Bay Area kid—
who wouldn’t have been able to write this very Californian, very Bay Area book had my
life turned out otherwise. SEE THE LIST
Stories about LGBTQ characters often center on questioning or discovering one’s

sexuality. While both Hero and Rosalyn are continually coming out in the novel,
neither of them have doubts about who they are. Why did you choose to write
characters whose main conicts were not to decipher their own sexuality?
I was talking about something related to this to another queer friend recently; we were
talking about the whole myth of coming out, as if it happens only once. For some, it
does, and that’s wonderful. But for many of us I would say this especially as a bi
woman—coming out isn’t one discrete period in a life, but an ongoing process. If
you’re bi, the gender of your current partner is typically viewed as denitive of your
sexuality. I remember once reading the back of a nonction author’s book in which
she was identied by the jacket as lesbian, and yet within the rst lines of the book the
author self-identied as a bisexual woman who was in a long-term relationship with
another woman.
I suppose I wasn’t interested in Hero or Rosalyn’s sexuality-qua-sexuality as a Very
Special Episode. That doesn’t mean that these characters don’t encounter
discrimination, or don’t experience a certain amount of internalized homophobia—my
intention isn’t to blot over the harsher realities of a queer woman of color’s life. It’s
only that my approach is one in which sexuality is, again, a formative but not denitive
part of someone’s character. Treating LGBTQ characters like their sexuality is
inherently something to be deciphered is part of heteronormativity, right?—because
we aren’t generally expected to read books by straight writers, about straight
characters, and wonder why these straight characters never wrestle with or decipher
their own sexuality. (Though we should.)
How does community affect personal identity? Are these effects visible in the novel?
I have to wonder: how often is this question posed in this way to white authors? In a
basic sense, yes, of course—it’s obvious that the contexts in which we are raised
inform who we are as people, and those effects shine out of us: visible, palpable,
livable. That said, I rarely see white authors being asked to speak to the ways in which
community affects their personal identity, and whether or not those effects are visible
in their novels—and yet when I read the work of such authors, it isn’t difcult to see the 0
ways in which community values, particularly around whiteness and class, impinge
upon their characters’ lives on every page. But there’s often a kind of silent coding
around words like community, as if community is a particularly racialized space that
only applies to immigrant communities, or communities of color, etc.

But yes, communities are formative.BEFORE
There can be no doubt about that. They form us in
YOU GO...
ways we acknowledge; they form us in ways we never name; they form us even as we
Check Out
repel them; they form us even as we are repelled by them. Hero is born a privileged
young Ilocana, and despite the profound decisions she’s taken to live otherwise, there
are aspects of her upbringing that she simply can’t shake. And although she’s often
openly critical of it, Rosalyn is deeply defensive of her particular South Bay milieu, and
SEE THE LIST
because of that loyalty she’s navigated her life and sexuality in ways that perhaps
other young queer women in a different situation wouldn’t. And, of course, the
formative power of a particular community is exponentially magnied when the
community itself is marginalized in some way, when people feel they have to stick
together. I’m a Filipina American writer; I’m from the Bay; those things saturate every
cell of me. What’s helpful to remember when thinking about community and its
relationship to identity is that plenty of things can be profoundly formative, without
necessarily being denitive.

America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo - 9780735222427 - PenguinRandomHouse - Com - Books

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

America Is Not The Heart by Elaine Castillo - 9780735222427 - PenguinRandomHouse - Com - Books

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

9/18/2020 America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo: 9780735222427 | PenguinRandomHouse.

FREE GROUND SHIPPING ON ORDERS OVER $20

The Bestselling Books of All Time

America Is Not the Heart

ABOUT AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART

How many lives t in a lifetime?

When Hero De Vera arrives in America–haunted by the political upheaval in the

An increasingly relevant story told with startling

LISTEN TO A SAMPLE FROM AMERICA IS NOT THE HEART

“[A] powerful debut.”

“An impossible-to-put-down, multi-generational family epic.”

“Devastating and tender . . . [a] startlingly lovely rst novel.”

The Bestselling Books of All Time

“My reading year has been characterized by sudden explosions in the midst of long

“Hero is no ordinary heroine, and Castillo’s novel is no simple story of self-discovery;

The Bestselling Books of All Time

Ilocano and through the use of ashback or backstory . . . Beautifully written,

think there’s a tendency to dramatize and catastrophize when we talk about

an adult helps to illuminate and contextualize some of the power dynamics in my

Stories about LGBTQ characters often center on questioning or discovering one’s

only applies to immigrant communities, or communities of color, etc.

You might also like