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This chapter argues that the traditional Western bildungsroman as a form is xenophobic at its foundation, with the adolescent’s requisite assimilation into white normativity as the standard telos for masculine identity development. Identifying the Filipino American bildungsroman as a distinct rejection of the traditional Western bildung, the chapter focuses on the ways in which Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel, American Son, exemplifies the refusal to adhere to European standards of adolescent identity development. Through his use of dual narrators, non-linear character development, simulated masculine identifications, biracial or mestizo identities, and multiple and conflicting national identifications, Roley presents ambivalent and unresolved narrative conclusions to reflect the adolescent’s essential hybridity, refusing Western standards of social integration marked by positive assimilation. By resisting the colonialist model of development, Roley’s work asserts the distinctiveness of the Filipino American bildungs roman as itself a rejection of whiteness.

This chapter focuses on Brian Ascalon Roley’s novel American Son and its representation of how racial shame is produced and consumed in order to provide enjoyment for the dominant regard of racial and imperial nationalism. It attempts to unravel the myth of neutrality that underlies and legitimates modern institutions such as law, democracy, and citizenship; instead it demonstrates how these apparently impersonal forms of modernity are highly affective, interested, and invested sites of racial and imperial power. This affective investment assumes the form of racial and imperial jouissance. Jouissance, or traumatic enjoyment, resolves the puzzling question of why subjects act against their rational self-interest.

This chapter delves into the transnational and cross-racial responses to racial misrecognition and “invisibility” in the work of M. Evelina Galang, Brian Ascalon Roley, Patrick Rosal, and Barbara Jane Reyes. The literary texts presented here offer two responses to problem of invisibility: first, a return to the “homeland” to forge a Filipino American identity and culture, and second, a turn toward cross-culturality. Focusing on Galang's Her Wild American Self, Roley's novel, American Son, and Rosal's and Reyes' poetry books extends the queer diasporic framework to analyze literature that initially seems more concerned with the “domestic” than the “diasporic,” and does not thematize nonnormative desires. By dissecting these works, the chapter reflects critically on the idea that literature can act as an antidote to the affliction of invisibility.

This chapter examines two novels by Filipino American writers: Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao. These novels document the lives of Filipino immigrants facing prejudice, racism, and alienation. They also reveal a number of common negative effects of globalization on young Filipino Americans: the overvalorization of and desire for wealth, First World products, and material goods; overdetermined and unattainable ideals based on Hollywood models of masculinity and beauty; and emotional and psychic transnationalism. The 1.5-generation children who grow up in these situations often resort to violence, fraud, and trickery in order to validate their sense of self, to gain acceptance into the dominant culture, and to obtain what they perceive to be the rewards of those who pursue the American dream.