The picture below is of the fourth anniversary banquet of the local Asinganian Club, November 1941, just two weeks before Pearl Harbor. That’s my dad, extreme right under the picture, when he still had hair.
Asinganian, I have to explain, means “of Pangasinan”, which is the province my father comes from—but it can be extended to also mean “of La Union”, meaning from the province above Pangasinan, called La Union, which is where my mother was born. Think of these provinces as the Lancashire and Yorkshire of the Philippines, John.
There were about 100 Filipino-American clubs in the US around this time; this is the way Filipino immigrants socialized, and it was pretty successful. Even years later my mom could tell you the names and phone numbers of Filipinos in Calgary, Denver, Manila etc, just because they were Filipino and traded cards with her at some get-together for Filipinos-and-their-white spouses/children in Minneapolis. It was quite a network while it lasted.
But don’t get the idea that my father and my mother met through some stateside Filipino club, because at the time she was still in the Philippines, getting occupied and bombed on. (See “The Pure Joy of St Trinian’s and The Inn of the Sixth Happiness by Malcolm Arnold“.) We never talked about that part of her life at home, but after my father died I eventually managed to get some extremely unsettling details from my various cousins.
But aside from that, as it turned out, after the war mom and dad had met through the penpal ads that were in the back of the regular issues of the Asinganian Club newsletter, which circulated not only in the States but the Philippines. After my dad’s first marriage in the mid-1940s to a white, probably Irish, woman named Margaret—I’m going to imagine her name was Margaret—failed to work out (see “25 May—Two Birthdays: My Dad’s and My Beloved English Conductor John Wilson’s”) my dad, like so many other young guys working far from home in a strange new place, was counseled to take “a wife from the old country”. But where to find one? The immigration quotas of the 1920s-1940s were not favorable to single, marriageable Filipino men: the percentage during that time was never more than 2 marriageable females for every 98 marriageable males. But if you were a citizen (by then, my dad was already a total US citizen and the Philippines was a separate sovereign nation), you could travel to the islands, choose a wife, and bring her back as your dependent. A lot of American soldiers did this after the war.
What I didn’t learn until the second wave of cousins passed through our house in the period after my father’s death, was that my mom wasn’t the only by-mail bride he was courting.
EXTRA! As a San Francisco treat, here’s Dennis Hagerty between showings at the Castro Theatre playing our city theme, “San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate” from the 1936 MGM classic movie with Jeannette MacDonald and Clark Gable, San Francisco.
- “The Story So Far, with Conductor John Wilson”
- “The Story So Far; Or, Conductor John Wilson—His Limits”
- “Cantara Christopher Gives Her Beloved Conductor John Wilson Crib Notes on Todd Field’s Screen Masterpiece, Tár: Love, Teshuvah, and Filipinos Will Save Western Music (PDF)”
FULL DRESS // A gifted mesmerist—a sinister composer—a naive young conductor from the north…inspired by an episode from the life of Rachmaninoff // DOWNLOAD FREE BOOK POSTER
"I'll Be Dead Before You Break My Heart" 