Until 1982, he lay in an unmarked, pauper’s grave in Mount Pleasant Cemetery on upper Queen Anne. It took money-raising friends and admirers to mark the spot with a headstone more than two decades after his death.
Filipino writer, poet and labor activist Carlos Bulosan (1911?-1956) had been a famous author in his day. His 1944 bestseller, “Laughter of My Father,” and his 1946 semi-autobiographical “America is in the Heart” were the high-water marks of a near-miraculous life in literature that sank into obscurity in the 1950s.
Bulosan came to this country in 1930 and worked the Alaskan canneries and the West Coast harvests. Strikingly handsome, he weighed less than 100 pounds — women loved him, men felt protective.
Novelist John Fante wrote of his friend: “He was no saint, but he was an angel.”
“America is in the Heart” is a powerful, angry, often beautiful work that chronicles the racism he and his fellow countrymen experienced on the West Coast, a racism that made him feel like he was “a criminal running away from a crime I didn’t commit.” Dazed by this country’s kindness and cruelty, he wondered how he could be brutalized on the streets and cared for so compassionately by doctors and nurses.
It is a seminal American book, reminding the rest of us that newcomers to this country have taken the American dream seriously. Despite everything, “It is still a great honor to walk on the American earth,” Bulosan wrote.
The 1950s were a story of neglect, ill health and alcoholism. In 1956, Seattle Times writer Lucille McDonald visited Bulosan in his downtown apartment. Knee-deep in manuscripts, obviously ill and driving himself to write the sequel to “American is in the Heart,” Bulosan told her, “Writing is the most lonesome business. I don’t know why people do it.”
The next week, Bulosan collapsed on the lawn of the King County Courthouse. He died a few hours later at Harborview Hospital, taken for a tramp.
The lobby of the Eastern Hotel, 506 Maynard Ave. S., is the site of a Carlos Bulosan exhibit. Neglect of his life and work is a thing of the past.
— Mike Dillon