Soledad’s Sister (2008) by Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr.

Shortlisted to the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, Jose Dalisay’s second novel Soledad’s Sister somewhat paved the way for contemporary Filipino novelists based in the Philippines to gain international recognition. Only a year later, Filipinos would dominate the prize’s longlist, and Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino now living in Canada, would win the award for his novel Ilustrado.

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Unlike Dalisay’s first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, that obviously had a number of autobiographical inspirations, Soledad’s Sister is a novel that pushed him to imagine more of other people’s lives and sentiments. Although this is primarily a story of the encounter between Aurora V. Cabahug, a bar singer in Paez whose sister Soledad died of drowning in Saudi, and Walter G. Zamora, a police officer from Marikina that was assigned to the same remote town of Paez after a failed case on the kidnapping of Charlie Uyboco and an affair with masseuse Noemi that ultimately sacrificed his marriage with Bessie, we also get a glimpse of the stories of the other people that were somehow involved in theirs, no matter how tangentially: Filemon Catabay, the OFW beheaded in Saudi; Ms. Principe, the Paez chief of police’s secretary who had some affection towards Walter; Choi the Korean engineer who would table Rory in between her sets; Mercedes Laquindanum, more known as Mama Merry, the one who manages the Flame Tree after the demise of her husband Filomelo, the name of the bar being her “last concession to poetry and metaphor”; Nick Panganiban, the old piano player who taught Rory some classic songs; Nathan, Soledad’s son to the teenager Edison, a Hong Kong national and only son of the Lau family she formerly served; Paez Vice Mayor Tennyson Yip, who had some fling with Rory, and, later, with a bar newbie, Francine; Jose Maria Pulumbarit, or Jomar, aka “Boy Alambre,” who carnapped the van driven by Walter that contained Soledad’s casket; Meenakshi, the maid from India, who escaped with Soledad in the night of their disappearance; and a lot lot of other names and faces that made this a novel that recognizes that there were no uninteresting characters, only a limited space to have their own stories fully fleshed out.

On the side, the novel made references to pop and contemporary culture that somehow affect the common Filipino’s psyche: Brother Mike, People’s Tonight, Megamall, National Geographic, Readers Digest, Ruffa Gutierrez, Joey Marquez & Alma Moreno, Schwarzenegger, Ricky Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the divas Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Sharon Cuneta, Ivy Violan, Vernie Varga, and Regine Velasquez, and several pop songs that remain to dominate our airwaves: “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Love Is Stronger Far Than We,” “I’m a Fool to Want You,” “Am I Blue.”

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In the end, we would realize that both Rory and Walter had deep desires to be remembered, even by people they didn’t know personally, to not just be lost in obscurity in their ostensibly mundane lives: Rory, by trying to be a successful singer, and not just be one of the Regines in this country that so loves to sing both in its lowest and highest points; and Walter, by dreaming of eventually writing that master’s thesis on “criminal propensities in the Philippine countryside,” that hopefully would be of some use to someone. They hoped to accomplish their dreams without having to leave their country behind, despite the allure of working abroad (in the case of Rory), or following his estranged family in England (in the case of Walter), so unlike the thousands of other Filipinos who would gamble on where their fate and dreams would lead them––even if it were to their own deaths––outside the Philippines.