Hardship/Abuses
The novel is full of narratives detailing the hardships and abuses that the author-narrator experiences while on his journey of discovery. It almost seems as though his life is one long narrative of difficulty. He describes his life as a poor lad working in the rice paddies in the Philippines then as migrant laborer working on a California farm. Through it all the constant fatigue, hunger, then the beatings, the threats, and the social exclusion are consistent elements of the novel’s language.
Poverty
Tied up with the narratives of hardships are descriptions of poverty that he experiences both in the Philippines and when he finally gets to America. He recalls his youth in the Philippines where the specter of hunger followed his family constantly and he had to endure the indignity of pawning their farmland to survive. He then moves on to describe life as a migrant worker putting up with barely livable conditions as well as the miserable wages that they received as cheap labor.
Isolation
Accounts of isolation also abound in the novel, closely tied to the narratives of poverty and abuse. Coming from a poor farming family in the Philippines, the author-narrator experiences being kept on the fringes of society simply because they were poor. This then moves on to how he and other Filipino migrant laborers are kept well away from mainstream American society despite their valuable contribution to the economy, mentioning the horrible indignities such as signs that read “dogs and Filipinos not allowed” that kept him and his fellowmen well and truly apart from the nation and the people that they looked up to so much.
Agricultural Vistas
The book also describes at length the scenes of farm life, both in the tropical Philippines and the temperate US. In doing this he is able to show both the great contrast, such as the widespread use of the water buffalo to plow fields rather than use tractors as the norm for Filipino famers, as well as the great similarities, such as the difficult lives that sharecroppers live as a whole, that tie the lives of people in agricultural communities.
