The Foley Artist: Stories
Ricco Villanueva Siasoco
Gaudy Boy, 2019
Review by Serkan Görkemli
Queer literary writing is enjoying unprecedented exposure in the world of publishing, but we need more stories that reflect the racial, ethnic, and geographical diversity in our queer communities. The Foley Artist, Ricco Villanueva Siasoco’s debut collection of short stories, is an important addition to global queer literature thanks to its diverse cast of characters and events. The nine well-crafted, interlinked stories represent queer Asian-American lives and the complications of sexuality in romantic and familial relationships.
Two of my favourite stories are the opening story, “The Rice Bowl,” and the closing one, “Babies.” In “The Rice Bowl,” David Chen, a first-generation Chinese-American, manages his father’s restaurant in Des Moines where they employ Barbarella and Viva, two drag queen waitresses. His math teacher boyfriend Howard wants to move with him to Chicago, but David hesitates for personal and familial reasons.
“Babies” is about the relationship between Hugo, a science journalist, and Mitchell, a body-conscious nutritionist. Aryana, Hugo’s sister, recommends having a baby as a solution to a problem they’re having. Both stories include beautiful imagery—a paved, lit road in an undeveloped subdivision in “The Rice Bowl” and sunlight fading on a cathedral floor in “Babies”—that symbolize the characters’ sobering realizations about their relationships. Thanks to the evocative storytelling and the nuanced portrayal of relationships, I identified with the diverse characters and felt their confusion and pain.
“Wrestlers” and “Dandy” highlight the tragic consequences of struggling to fully accept one’s sexuality. In “Wrestlers,” Thomas, a straight-identified married man who is attracted to men, coaches a high school wrestling team. In his perspective, wrestling becomes a metaphor for rejecting his sexuality through a competitive emphasis on discipline and winning. In “Dandy,” George, a college professor and straight-acting gay man who is self-conscious about how others view his masculinity, is homophobic toward Oliver, a flamboyant gay man with whom he engaged in BDSM when they first met in the 70s. In both stories, Siasoco’s lets other characters, and therefore the reader, see these protagonists for who they are more accurately than the protagonists see themselves.
Two stories are coming out out narratives. In “Wrestlers,” Thomas tells his gay brother-in-law, who comes out to him, that he is not gay. In “A Visit to California,” Teresa, an accepting yet distant mother, recalls her son’s coming out. Through the protagonists’ different reactions, Siasoco effectively and poignantly demonstrates the complexity of coming out and its deep emotional disruptions in interpersonal relationships.
Siasoco smartly employs the central motifs of queer literature––coming out, self-perception, and relationships––in order to tell specifically Asian-American stories. Some of the stories expand this cross-cultural orientation beyond sexuality, including language in all its different forms. In “Deaf Mute,” Teresa and Noel visit Tito Vic, who is deaf, in Manila; Noel has difficulty understanding both his uncle and Filipino culture. In “Nicolette and Maribel,” Nicolette, a Filipina immigrant from Manila, and Maribel, a Filipina-American, meet in a sign language class; Nicolette is unrelentingly cynical and belittles bubbly and pregnant Maribel, who wants to be friends outside class, for being Americanized. Siasoco’s third-person narration dramatizes the importance of non-verbal language in cross-cultural communication.
Several of the stories revolve around the Filipino-American Borgos family: Teresa, the mother; Noel, the son; and Maribel, the daughter. But other characters appear across the interlinked stories of the collection as love interests, teammates, etc. The recurring appearance of Chad Kline, for example, conveys an ongoing relationship between Chad and Noel, implying the crucial changes that must have happened with both characters between the stories of the collection. Chad, who briefly appears or is mentioned in six out of nine stories, is a secondary and therefore lesser-known character whose defining trait is being a universal object of gay desire. In contrast, as a reader, I encountered Noel, Maribel, and Teresa Borgos in fewer stories, yet I got to know them as protagonists and therefore could trace and engage with their personal trajectories as more developed characters. Despite this character building that shifts focus away from Chad to other characters, I am pleasantly surprised that a secondary, lesser-developed character like him still operates like a puzzle piece that fits into the other characters’ lives in small but unexpected and important ways.
In “The Foley Artist,” the middle story and the collection’s namesake, we meet Berong, Noel’s father, who abandoned his family. Now retired, Berong worked as a Foley artist who reproduced everyday sounds for movies using props. Siasoco depicts Berong as a misanthrope who appreciates non-human sounds more than the voices of the people who are, or used to be, in his life.
Most of the book’s characters, like Berong, don’t experience a fully realized change that is expressed through their actions during the course of each story. Instead, they come to an important realization about their status quo or have a significant internal shift, in some cases against their wills and perhaps even subliminally. These open endings and the return of characters in later stories hint at character development and further augment the drama of their lives. In this manner, the stories and their characters continued resonating with me beyond the page.
U.S.-based literary agents usually declare that story collections are hard to sell, but a collection would be more marketable if individual stories are interlinked. The Foley Artist: Stories provides an intriguing example of an interlinked short-story collection.
Furthermore, The Foley Artist: Stories is a testament to Siasoco’s literary Foley artistry, demonstrated through musical references in each story; and figuratively through the interlinked structure of this short-story collection and the style of storytelling that depicts the exquisite world of each character.
Serkan Görkemli’s short fiction has appeared in Epiphany, Ploughshares, Foglifter, and Chelsea Station. His non-fiction writing about media and Turkish queer activism has been published in the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Enculturation, Reflections, and Computers and Composition Online. His book Grassroots Literacies: Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey (SUNY Press, 2014) won the 2015 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award. He was a contributor in fiction at the 2019 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a fiction fellow at the 2018 Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices. Originally from Turkey, he has a Ph.D. in English from Purdue University and is an associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut in Stamford.