America Is in the Heart

Republished by Penguin this week alongside three other mostly neglected classics of Asian American literature (John Okada's No-No Boy, Younghill Kang's East Goes West, and H.T. Tsiang's The Hanging on Union Square), Bulosan's 1946 book is a tender and bitter memoir of his life of labor and poverty in the Philippines and the western United States, with crucial scenes in Seattle, where Bulosan first arrived in the U.S. and where he later died in 1956 at the age of 42, though most of the action, after his youth in the Philippines, follows the harvests up and down the West Coast, where Bulosan became a labor activist, and where his brutal experiences drove him to become a writer and tell the story of an immigrant's America, "so kind and yet so cruel."