Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review, Anderson Tepper
A middle-aged Philippine-American son pauses thoughtfully at a cluster of graves in a Seattle cemetery: alongside the body of his enigmatic father lie several other colorful characters from the same generation of Philippine immigrants who came to America in the 1920's and 30's.... In rough-hewn and wistful style, Bacho's stories bring to life the hardscrabble years of the first wave of migrant laborers--and capture as well the ambivalence of their American-born children, who come of age during the 1960's. Throughout these tales of embattled lives, there is the reminder of the original immigrants' dream--shiny blue suits, but word and faded over time.

From Kirkus Reviews , August 15, 1997
A modest collection by Filipino novelist Bacho (Cebu, 1991) that gathers momentum as it proceeds, adding up, in the end, to a good deal more than the sum of its parts. More of a discursive novel that an anthology of tales, the book narrates the experience of several generations of Filipinos who settle on the West Coast before WW II and raise children who eventually move deeper into the US--both psychically and geographically. Buddy, who tells the tale, is a schoolteacher whose easy authority over his students conceals a deep ambivalence about his own identity and ambitions. Buddy's father Vince was part of the great wave of Filipinos who emigrated back and forth during the 1920s and '30s according to the rhythms and needs of the fisheries and canneries of the Pacific Northwest. In the best second- generation style, Buddy gets an education and settles himself in the suburban middle-class that his father had always held out to him as his goal and station in life. But the introspective Buddy keeps looking over his shoulder and wondering what might have happened to him had he taken one different turn or another along the way. In ``Rico'' and ``Home,'' he describes the tragedy of a working-class friend from high school who, lacking Buddy's college exemption, is drafted, goes to Vietnam, and never recovers. ``Stephie'' recounts a meeting between Buddy and an old flame who dumped him years before for a white law student, while ``Dancer'' is an account of Buddy's meeting with his grown half-sister, abandoned by their father, who refused publicly to acknowledge that he had kept a mistress in the States. Though bound together with the same characters and similar settings, the stories manage to provide a broad and very rich portrait of life among immigrants, exiles, and more-or-less happily settled newcomers from the Philippines. A skillfully drawn first collection, with a quiet intensity that captures the imagination and stirs the heart. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. 

Synopsis
Twelve powerful stories by award-winning novelist Peter Bacho. Set in Seattle from the 1950s to the present, Dark Blue Suit depicts the lives of two groups: Filipino immigrant pioneers and their American-born children. Although narrated as fiction, the stories--their landmarks, activities, settings, and events--are grounded in historical fact.

Set in Seattle from the 1950s to the present, Dark Blue Suit depicts the lives of two groups: Filipino immigrant pioneers, the Manong generation who arrived on the Pacific Coast during the 1920s and 1930s, and their American-born children. Although narrated as fiction, the stories - their landmarks, activities, settings, and events - are grounded in historical fact. The book opens with the annual spring dispatch, by the Seattle-based Filipino union, of thousands of Filipino workers to the Alaska salmon canneries. We meet characters who reappear throughout the stories: Vince, the tough but charming union foreman, his American-born son Buddy, and many others who age and change in ironic counterpoint to persistent themes of loyalty, fierce ethnic pride, and a willingness to struggle against hostile forces in society. We encounter the inevitable aging and passing of the Manong generation, but we sense as well the arrival of its vision. Babies are born. The migrant fisheries worker gets a nine-to-five job, and his children go to college. The conclusion builds to a quiet power that is essentially elegiac; an era closes, but the voices of the older generation are shouldered by the younger, to keep the history, to retell the stories, and to pay homage.

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