I’m one of three children of immigrants from the Philippines. My mother and father came to the United States with their respective families in the ’60s and ’70s and met in Southern California shortly after. Growing up, we lived a bit further away from my grandparents and aunties and uncles, but my parents would take me and my brothers on long drives to attend family parties for any and all occasions—birthdays, baptisms, graduations, weddings.
Reading E.P. Tuazon’s new short story collection, A Professional Lola, felt like being welcomed into the same family party I’ve attended hundreds of times. I know the trays of lumpia and the spoonfuls of halo-halo, the strings of Tagalog of which I can only understand a few words. I know the wacky uncle, the gentle lola, that friend of lolo’s who isn’t related but is always there, the cousin who feels more like a sibling than your own—these characters shine especially brightly in each of Tuazon’s stories. In combination with speculative elements that delighted and shocked me, I found the stories in Professional Lola to be a poignant reflection on the playful highs and somber lows of modern Filipino American culture.
One very clear theme woven throughout the stories in A Professional Lola is loss. The collection is bookended with two stories that include the loss of a grandparent. In “Professional Lola,” the narrator’s mother hires an actress to impersonate a beloved, deceased lola at a party, and in “Carabao,” the narrator has to come to terms with their lolo’s transition to a lola. As someone who is lucky enough to know my lolos and lolas, the different types of “transformation” in both stories—the magic of a near-perfect lola impersonator knowing the exact right thing to say in contrast with the comforting similarities between a now-dead lolo and a new lola—were especially impactful.
There are also other kinds of “deaths” woven through some stories—the death of a marriage, of a dream, of a connection to home. There is grief and bitterness in these losses, but Tuazon infuses a certain type of wonder into these particularly melancholy episodes by introducing elements of surrealism. A Filipina wife brews a magic spell in order for her husband to fall back in love with her in “Blood Magic;” estranged siblings bond over their deceased father’s obsession with what we come to learn is a real-life Bigfoot in “After Bigfoot;” the child of a disappeared arcade owner visits their ancestral village in the Philippines to discover fish people in “Far From Home.” I wouldn’t call the collection “optimistic” by any means, but there is something optimistic and also humorous about the strange occurrences in the stories—rather than falling into despair, characters are free to dream, play, and hope within the frame of the surreal.