Linda Ty-Casper’s short fiction “A Small Party in a Garden,” published in the Summer 1992 issue of The Kenyon Review, transports the reader, no matter where or when they’re reading the story, to a day decades ago in the Philippines. The story follows an unmarried working woman on a day trip to the province with her father, who turns to her in the car and asks, “Why don’t you get married, hija?” His daughter wonders if “[p]erhaps he threw the question at me to keep me at a distance.”
I recognize the awkwardness of this moment from the many years that I was an unmarried working Filipina and would occasionally, when visiting the Philippines, find myself in a small space with a relative or even a stranger who asked me this same question. Did I understand that every year I delayed marriage, I was increasing my risk of not having a baby? (They were right: I delayed marriage and, indeed, did not have a baby.)
Linda Ty-Casper’s “A Small Party in a Garden” is a perfect little story that satisfies in less spent time than someone scrolling through social media, requiring a commitment of only one sitting. For those who want a bigger meal, there is also Ty-Casper’s novella of the same title, published in 1988 in the Philippines by New Day Publishers. Or you can enjoy the story among other pieces in Ty-Casper’s collection A River, One-Woman Deep: Stories, published in 2017 in the US by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard at Philippine American Literary House (PALH). When I searched The Kenyon Review’sarchives, I entered keyword variations on “Philippines” and “Filipino,” a habit of childhood. I am always looking for evidence of the place I was born. In America, it was easy to forget about the Philippines, even though I constantly longed to know more. Many years before human knowledge existed a mere touch away, one place I looked for the Philippines was in books. Every time I went to a library or a bookstore, I searched. Inevitably, I would find Linda Ty-Casper’s books as well as her writing reprinted in anthologies, her byline a kind of talisman. A few years ago on an errand for my sister, I had the occasion to meet Ty-Casper briefly in her home. I am around writers often and am rarely starstruck, but I had trouble speaking when I met this elegant elder, this author whose name I had read in books since the time I began to pursue writing seriously myself. The cognitive dissonance of being in the presence of the actual person whose writing I had heard inside my head for so many years.
As the father and daughter drive, sometimes there is silence, and sometimes they speak what would not be possible to say outside that car. (Was it Flannery O’Connor who gave the advice about what to do with characters if you don’t know where to go with them? Put your characters into a moving car. The ride gives the story a destination, an A to B, and the confined space of a car adds pressure to the characters. Anything can happen.)
Father and daughter go back and forth, asking questions, but answering in non sequiturs, in ways that reveal character rather than directly responding to the inquiries. These are the best kinds of conversations to overhear. The daughter, the first-person narrator of this story, tells the reader, “I want to understand my father without simplifying his life, without falling on my knees.” The father drops gems such as “People do not make a sound when they are killed” and “Regardless of what you or Freud say, I still see Jesus crucified in every tree.” Without knowing much about the father except that this is postcolonial, post–World War II, Marcos-dictatorship Philippines, his statements tell me what role he played in society as he sided with whoever was in power, and how he has been haunted by their violence.
The daughter asks why the father and the mother, when she was alive, slept in separate bedrooms, and the father answers, “I was afraid I’d strangle your mother, thinking she was the enemy and finding out too late. Sometimes I wake up crying because I have killed her in my dream.”
Father and daughter stop for lunch at a carinderia, a roadside restaurant that the narrator mistrusts (“Perhaps if I get sick Papa will stop inviting me to roadside restaurants”) and that she describes as typically “a place which has no tablecloth, where the spoons are stacked beside the toothpicks for flies and idle hands to pick on.”
It is the first time that the family is here without the third leg of their stool: the matriarch. This is a place where the father is known to the proprietress, a woman who gives him her condolences on the loss of his wife and immediately apologizes for not attending the funeral services. She feared a man of his stature—a judge—wouldn’t recognize her outside her eatery and decided not to cross an economic and class borderline into potentially unwelcome territory.
As a counterpoint, the daughter notices that her father’s celebrity presence at the carinderia has suddenly shifted to center him. He holds court, acting as if he is hosting a party and the customers are his guests. Ty-Casper describes the scene: “A man selling Sweepstakes tickets stands inside the doorway, listening. Children on errands stop to look in. People who had not intended to eat lunch make their way inside, sit, and place their orders. A man selling a wooden bed he has made sets it outside the door to listen.”
The way the proprietress and the father express their relationship is, to me, quintessentially recognizable as Filipino. She offers him the best dishes, ones he hasn’t asked for. She tells him not to pay her, and he leaves a wad of bills on the table anyway. She won’t let him leave without piling her best treats into the car and promising that the sweetest mangoes will be sent to him later. The proprietress knows she cannot give the father and daughter anything that will ease the loss of their matriarch, and yet her presence in the story is like a ghostly appearance of the dead mother’s love. As a Filipina, I feel lucky to have experienced this form of generosity—giving the best of ourselves to others, and receiving and recognizing a precious gift, the sweetest mango, when it is offered.
