Bienvenido Nuqui Santos

Bienvenido N. Santos was born in Tondo, Manila, on March 22, 1911. When Santos started school, the Philippines was already a colony of the United States and instruction was in English. In his early attempts at creative writing, Santos developed an ear for three kinds of communication: Pampango in the songs his mother sang at home; English in the poems and stories his teacher read at school; and Tagalog in the street life of the Tondo slums. Santos left for America in September 1941 as a pensionado (scholar) of the Philippine Commonwealth government. Thirty years old and an established short story writer in English at home, he enrolled at the University of Illinois in the master's program in English. When war broke out in December, he found himself an exile in America, cut off from his homeland and his wife and three daughters he left behind. The heartbreak of this separation during his first sojourn in America is crucial to Santos's development as a writer. Exile defined the central theme of his fiction from then on. In the summer of 1942, he studied at Columbia University with Whit Burnett, the founder of Story magazine, who published his first fiction in America. After studying Basic English with I.A. Richards at Harvard in 1946, Santos returned home to a country rebuilding from the ruins of war. He came back to America in 1958 as a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. His first two novels, Villa Magdalena and The Volcano, written under a Rockefeller grant and a Guggenheim fellowship, were published in Manila in 1965, the year Santos won the Philippine Republic Cultural Heritage Award for Literature. In 1972, Santos and his wife Beatriz were on their way to the Philippines to "stay home for good," when news of the declaration of martial law reached them in San Francisco. The new regime banned The Praying Man, his novel about government corruption, and he was once again

exiled from his home. From 1973 to 1982, Santos was Distinguished Writer-In-Residence at Wichita State University. In 1976 he became a U.S. citizen. His short story, "Immigration Blues," won the best fiction award given by New Letters magazine in 1977. In 1980, the University of Washington Press published Scent of Apples, his first and only book of short stories to appear in the United States. The next year it won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Santos died at his home in Albay on January 7, 1996. Santos's stories can be grouped into three literary periods. The first period, the prewar years in the Philippines (1930-1940) are set in the fictive Sulucan slums of his Tondo childhood and the rural towns and villages in the foothills of Mayon volcano in Albay, where Santos married Beatriz Nidea, started his family, and built his house. These stories are in the collections Brother, My Brother and Dwell in the Wilderness. Santos's exile in America during the war years produced stories set in Chicago, Washington, New York, and other cities, where he lectured extensively for the Philippine Commonwealth government in exile. You, Lovely People, The Day the Dancers Came, and Scent of Apples belong to this period. In the postwar years Santos set his stories in different places as he commuted between the Philippines and America. These years mark a period of maturation and experimentation, and a shifting away from the short story to the novel form.

The Day the Dancers Came

by: Bienvenido N. Santos Summary The story is about a Filipino U.S. citizen named Fil. He was a corporal during the war and since he got an American citizenship, he lived in America. Fil lived with Tony, a fellow Filipino who also became a U.S. citizen after the war. One day, Fil got so excited because he knew Filipino dancers from the Philippines were coming over to America to perform. He got so excited that even practiced the way he would talk in front of them. What dialect would he use? He even already cleaned his car, planning to be these young dancers tour guide in America. He had tidied the house, he planned to cook adobo and other Filipino dishes that he was certain they are craving for. Tony, on the other hand, doesn't care much about these dancers. Only Fil feels so excited. Tony doesnt even want to participate with Fils plans. Fil drove to the hotel where the dancers were supposed to stay. Still at the lobby of the hotel, he already saw them. They were a group of young dancers. He felt the desire to approach them, invite them to his house and they would have a wonderful conversation. But he was so shy that he does not know how start. How he wished Tony was with him. He knew Tony could speak English more fluently than him and also Tony is better with dealing with other people than him. Finally, he approached a small groups but they all neglected his offer saying that they had no time and would move away from him. They were always moving away. As if by common consent, they had decided to avoid him, ignore his presence. Realizing that they were not really interested of his humble offer, he sadly went away. Later that evening, he watched the dancers performed in the theatre. He recorded everything in his tape recorder this is where he kept all the significant sounds he hears and whenever he was free, he would listen to the sounds recorded and it always felt like being in the place again. When he came home from the theatre, Tony was already asleep. He turned on the tape recorder and listened to the music and the pattering of feet during the dances. Meanwhile, Tony woke up and ordered him to turn off the recorder. He was in such pain that he was moaning. Meanwhile, in panic, Fil accidentally erased the recordings on the tape and there was nothing now but the dull creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds My own take of the story

I feel sympathy for Fil because he badly wanted to talk with the dancers. He was as excited as a child but in the end, he was slapped with the reality that not all Filipino will regard you as you might expect them to. Fil reflects the Filipinos we have outside the country that are already homesick and would want a fellow Filipino to talk with but ends up being ignored. It is such a

poor thing. I also felt sympathetic towards Fil when he was attempting to talk with the young dancers an old man looking so desperate in the midst of a throng of young people such a pathetic scene. No one paid decent attention to him. Maybe he thought he was crazy. Well, perhaps they could not be blamed to think of that because Fil was a stranger and to start with a quick invitation to his apartment is indeed a wrong move. But, let us consider that he wasnt talking to other people. Note how he trembled and sweated before he could finally talk with these dancers. I felt sympathy the most for Fil at the later part when accidentally, the records of the music and the dances. It was supposed to be his only connection with that memory but it was deleted. It might be too risky to interpret the deletion of the music as a signal for Fil to move on and to stop forcing himself to other Filipinos like those dancers that did not actually pay much attention to him. But Im taking the risk of doing so. On the other hand, even though Tony did not show much excitement with the dancers, I still believe that he was as excited as Fil but was much good in hiding what he felt. The following lines by Tony suggests that he was indeed looking forward for the presence of the dancers. So, they didnt come after all? I knew they wouldnt come. But thats okay. The apartment is old anyhow They didnt have to see me, but I could have seen them. I have seen their pictures, but what do they really look like? Note that they were still parts that Tony was trying to hide from Fil the regret he felt that the dancers couldnt come.
Summary=http://bluejeni23.weebly.com/the-day-the-dancers-came.html http://iwrotefiction.blogspot.com/2012/02/bienvenido-santos-day-dancers-came.html