Secrets, guilt in a Filipino family

In the United States we tend to think that money can solve just about anything. But in Han Ong’s novel, “The Disinherited,” we see it’s not always the salvation one might hope for. His first novel, “Fixer Chao,” won critical acclaim upon its release in 2001, and Ong, a Filipino American writer who immigrated to the U.S. at age 16 and went on to be named one of the youngest MacArthur Fellows in 1997 for his playwriting, now gives us a book pitting First World money and ennui against Third World poverty and blind hope.

His protagonist, Roger Caracera, is the 44-year-old son of a Filipino sugar magnate who left his wife and immigrated with his three children to the Bay Area while Roger was a teenager. Not long after arriving in San Francisco, Roger breaks with his family, thinking them manipulative. When his dishonest yet charming father, Jesus, is lying on his deathbed, however, Roger, now a creative writing instructor at Columbia, comes to say goodbye and ends up accompanying his father’s body to Manila for burial. There, thanks in part to his father’s will, which leaves him a small fortune, he is drawn into a disturbing fixation with the land of his youth and his ancestors.

Roger’s Spanish-born mother, Teresa, who had settled in Manila after working for the Peace Corps, has been, he learns, living out her years in a mental institution there. Roger’s family believes that Teresa’s plight is the lasting lesson of her attempts to offer goodness to the world: “Trying to improve the lives of others, she could only ruin her own.”

While in the Philippines, Roger decides to give away the inheritance, believing it tainted by his family’s subjugation of the Filipino workforce, and undertakes a kind of “vengeful philanthropy.” He looks for worthy candidates, but with so many suffering, how can one decide? He learns more about his family’s secrets, uncovering stories about Uncle Eustacio, who’d been estranged from the clan for decades before his death. Feeling a sense of solidarity with his uncle, Roger feels obligated to help a young boy, Pitik Sindit, whom Eustacio had named as a beneficiary in his will. (The family had given the money, however, to Roger.)

Pitik lives in abject poverty but is able to earn enough for himself and his mother by working as a male prostitute and striptease dancer, entertaining foreigners who come to the Philippines for sexual license.

Readers follow along as Roger insinuates himself in Pitik’s life, as well as in the life of another poor Filipino, Donny Osmond Magulay, whom Roger meets at the family’s country club assisting members’ warm-up for their tennis matches. By giving these boys money and attention, it is unclear whether Roger is helping or hurting their already meager circumstances.

Throughout the book, Ong pits one element of the story against another: There’s the wealth of the U.S. against the want of the Philippines; the intensely devout Catholicism of the islands against the vibrant sex trade thriving there; the upright appearances of his family against the decaying lives that comprise it; the cultural mobility of the U.S. against the rigid class system of the archipelago nation. At times the writing is beautiful and lyric, but the plot seems to meander with Roger leading the way. He is so utterly disaffected, so oblique in his thoughts and actions, that readers have a hard time understanding his motivations. It is unclear if he really wants to help the poor or if he is just looking for revenge on his family. Likewise, his dislike of the Philippines raises the question in the reader’s mind as to why he persists in staying.

The insight Ong provides into Manila is fascinating, as are his depictions of Filipino life, lived always, it seems, in the shadow of the U.S. Still, with Roger as our bitter, sad and passionless guide, it’s hard to be enthralled by his tale.

Bernadette Murphy is a regular contributor to Book Review.