Dark blue suit and other stories
By: Peter Bacho.
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 1997
Place of publication: Seattle
Language: eng
Number of pages: 149
Subjects: Filipinos -- United States -- Fiction; Filipino Americans -- Fiction; Alien labor -- Fiction; Seattle (Wash.) -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Description: Set in Seattle from the 1950s to the present, Dark Blue Suit depicts the lives of two groups: Filipino immigrant pioneers, the Manong generation who arrived on the Pacific Coast during the 1920s and 1930s, and their American-born children. Although narrated as fiction, the stories - their landmarks, activities, settings, and events - are grounded in historical fact.

The book opens with the annual spring dispatch, by the Seattle-based Filipino union, of thousands of Filipino workers to the Alaska salmon canneries. We meet characters who reappear throughout the stories: Vince, the tough but charming union foreman, his American-born son Buddy, and many others who age and change in ironic counterpoint to persistent themes of loyalty, fierce ethnic pride, and a willingness to struggle against hostile forces in society.

We encounter the inevitable aging and passing of the Manong generation, but we sense as well the arrival of its vision. Babies are born. The migrant fisheries worker gets a nine-to-five job, and his children go to college. The conclusion builds to a quiet power that is essentially elegiac; an era closes, but the voices of the older generation are shouldered by the younger, to keep the history, to retell the stories, and to pay homage.
Table of contents: title: Dark blue suit; title: Rico; title: The second room; title: August 1968; title: Home; title: A life well lived; title: The wedding; title: A Manong's heart; title: Stephie; title: A matter of faith; title: Dancer; title: A family gathering.