From Private Eye to Public “I”: The Chinese Filipinos in Charlson Ong’s Hard-Boiled Fiction

Abstract

Charlson Ong’s Blue Angel, White Shadow (2010) is a hard-boiled fiction that revolves around the issues of crime, corruption, and death in a postcolonial Southeast Asian state. Predominantly dark, gloomy, and mysterious, the mood of the narrative establishes a strongly morose reading experience. The narrative world portrayed in the novel is simultaneously sorrowful and somber. Binondo, the historical ethnic Chinese epicenter of the Philippines, is depicted with excessive chaos and moral disarray. I argue that the novel has attempted to reshape the usual form of hard-boiled fiction by systematically interrupting the narrative’s serious and cynical tone. More specifically, humor was deployed by the author as a mechanism to intervene in the novel’s subscription to the norms of hard-boiled fiction. The novel puts into perspective different facets of Chinese Filipino identity mediated through the Philippine postcolonial landscape. Ultimately, I initiate a discussion on the intersection of Chinese Filipino literature, identities, diaspora, and genre theory. I maintain that Chinese Filipino literature, like the subject of the present inquiry, is borne out of the diasporic experience through collective histories and memories.