In the Philippines, a former US colony, people are steeped in American culture, and America is, or once was, the beckoning dream for nearly all of the characters in Tenorio’s universe. “Growing up, I watched branches of my family break off as they headed to the States,’’ says the teenage narrator of “Help,’’ one of only two stories in the book set entirely in the Philippines, where Tenorio was born. The author now lives in San Francisco, and his stories navigate both worlds, inhabited by people who cannot shake the feeling of being somehow other.
For the 19-year-old grandson in “Felix Starro,’’ staying in the United States seems the only way to escape the family business, a con begun years before by his grandfather. A bogus healer, Papa Felix has brought him from Manila to San Francisco so they can spend a few weeks preying on ailing Filipinos, but the grandson is choked by guilt over the harm they are doing to strangers, and by the prospect of hurting his grandfather by abandoning him.
The book’s most poignant tale is “Save the I-Hotel,’’ a chiaroscuro of loneliness that’s also a quiet portrait of abiding friendship and life-changing betrayal. Inspired by an actual event and set in the original Manilatown section of San Francisco, it toggles between the 1930s, when Fortunado and Vicente meet as young men, recently arrived from the Philippines, and the 1970s, when they’re about to lose their home in a resident hotel. That both are single, still, in their 60s, is a disquieting reminder that laws - against interracial unions, against same-sex unions - have often stood in the way of love.
