Title: Dark blue suit and other stories
First published: 1997
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.
Subjects: Fiction, Filipinos, Social life and customs, Alien labor, Filipino Americans, Families, Migrant labor, Fiction, short stories (single author), Washington (state), fiction, Seattle (wash.), fiction, Foreign workers, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, general
Places: United States, Seattle (Wash.)
LC classification: PS3552.A2573 D3 1997