The promise of a good life moves people in sure yet complicated ways. Among the people caught in this flow are transnational migrants who navigate the nexus of economic, political, and cultural realities of living elsewhere, where the durability of possibility is tested. But what happens when the certainty of a promise wears away? Here, I briefly ruminate on the emotional lives of the migrant in Fatima Lim-Wilson’s poetry from three collections, namely, Crossing the Snowbridge (CS), From the Hothouse (FH), and Wandering Roots (WR), a body of texts that follow diasporic itineraries between the Philippines and America and a history of cruel desires that map the migrant’s comings and goings, even as they sometimes exceed these affective structures.

The conditions that sustain, accelerate, or impede one’s movement towards a promise, an object of desire, is complicated. The attachment to this promise is what Lauren Berlant calls cruel optimism. Cruel optimism ‘moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring closer the satisfying something that you cannot generate on your own but sense in the wake of a person, a way of life, an object, project, concept, or scene’ (2). In this sense, all attachments, Berlant explains, are optimistic, insofar as optimism is an impetus for movement, even though it may not feel optimistic (2, emphasis in original). It is cruel when ‘the very vitalizing or animating potency of an object/scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place’ (2). In the contemporary moment, cruel optimism characterizes the affect of attachment to the neoliberal fantasy of a ‘good’ life that is actually ‘a landfill for overwhelming and impending crises of life-building and expectation whose sheer volume so threatens what it has meant to ‘have a life’ that adjustment seems like an accomplishment’ (3). Berlant contemplates,

The fantasies that are fraying… particularly, upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and lively, durable intimacy. The set of dissolving assurances also includes meritocracy, the sense that liberal-capitalist society will reliably provide opportunities for individuals to carve out relations of reciprocity that seem fair and that foster life as a project of adding up to something and constructing cushions for enjoyment. (3)

The center cannot hold, and, for Berlant, affect and emotion provide an illuminating way of comprehending the continual unfolding of this historical collapse: ‘the present is perceived, first, affectively: the present is what makes itself present to us before it becomes anything else, such as an orchestrated collective event or an epoch on which we can look back’ (4). In this scenario, Berlant also points out the workings of the American dream, a fantasy that extends beyond its locale and contributes to the persistence of optimistic attachments to problematic objects as it conceals under the veneer of a good life America’s capitalist and imperialist complicity in the attrition of our collective world. Nevertheless, Berlant notes that ‘certain attachments to what counts as life… remain powerful as they work against the flourishing of particular and collective beings’ (13).

The migrant and their affair with the fantasy of a good life is not a sudden emergence in Philippine literature in English, a literary tradition to which Lim-Wilson belongs. Lim-Wilson wrote poetry from 1978 to 1995 after getting her degrees from Ateneo de Manila University, State University of New York, and the University of Denver. Before settling in America, she worked for the office of former Philippine president Corazon Aquino (Manlapaz 147). Her poetry engages with a range of issues, including Philippine politics and history, colonialism, gender, and sexuality (Clem, 2002; Sabanpan-Yu, 2011) and is praised by Filipino scholars and poets such as Ophelia Dimalanta, Marjorie Evasco, and Epifanio San Juan (Manlapaz 148). Despite critical acclaim, attention and analysis of her poems after her last collection eventually waned (Clem, 2002). Often anthologized in collections of Asian American writing, Lim-Wilson’s work predominantly explores the ‘wandering roots’ of the migrant with acute self-awareness of her position and the circulation of her work across American and Philippine readership.

Lim-Wilson’s work traces how diasporic sentiments and modes of living are historically and convolutedly entangled with Philippine-American relations as Filipino migration to America first happened during the American colonial period. The first Filipino laborers in America were from the Visayan and central region of the Philippines and were recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association in 1906 (Okamura 36-37; San Juan, “Alias Flips” 24-25). As labor recruitment became more streamlined, more Filipinos were able to go to America. First-generation Filipino immigrants arrived in the country in the early 1930s, during the American colonial period in the Philippines. This wave of migrants were known as ‘manongs’ (literally older brother in Ilokano) who came as labor recruits through the early 1930s, post-World War II arrivals’ (Okamura 35). Life and labor conditions at this time were inhumane. ‘They were victims of racist laws and discriminatory practices. They were hoodwinked by inflated advertisements of wealth supposed to be acquired through honest manual labor, but soon enough they learned the reality of the marketplace: ‘Filipinos and dogs not allowed’’ (San Juan, “Alias Flips” 25).

Harrowing experiences of the Filipino migrant live in Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart, perhaps the most canonical Philippine novel on the Filipino migrant experience and thus forming a crucial part of the literary and historical consciousness of literature on the Filipino diaspora and the American imaginary that this tradition sustains and questions. Bulosan, who himself went to America in the 1930s, writes of the plight of the migrant in his autobiographical novel: “I came to know afterward that in many ways it was a crime to be a Filipino in California. I came to know that the public streets were not free to my people” (123). Bulosan’s Allos, his novel persona, is witness and victim to the banality of violence during this time: ‘“I was talking to a gambler when two police detectives darted into the place and shot a little Filipino in the back…. They left hurriedly, untouched by their act, as though killing we a part of their day’s work’ (130). From these instances, readers of Bulosan’s novel will witness the gradual development of a radical consciousness grounded in the struggle of his fellow peasants. Towards the novel’s end, Allos unites with workers all over America, on a mission to stand against this violence and injustice. ‘I felt something growing inside me again. There was the same thing in each of them that possessed me: their common faith in the working man. I sat with them and listened eagerly…. Then it came to me that we were all fighting against one enemy: Fascism. It was in every word and gesture, every thought’ (310).