I knew that if there was one redeeming quality in our poverty, it was this boundless affinity for each other, this humanity that grew in each of us, as boundless as this green earth.
As bloodily as this wealth concentrated into the hands of the new companies, as swiftly did the peasants and workers become poorer.
I became sensitive in the presence of poverty and degradation, so sensitive that my unexpressed feelings tempered my psychological relation to the world.
My education with Luciano was very useful to me when I was thrown into the world of men, when all that I held beautiful was to be touched with ugliness.
Why don't they ship those monkeys back where they came from?
And perhaps it was this narrowing of our life into an island, into a filthy segment of American society, that had driven Filipinos like Doro inward, hating everyone and despising all positive urgencies toward freedom.
Why was America so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no way to simplifying things in this continent so that suffering would be minimized?
I knew, even then, that it was not natural for a man to hate himself, or to be afraid of himself. It was not natural, indeed, to run from goodness and beauty, which I had done so many times.
America is not merely a land or an institution. America is in the hearts of men that died for freedom; it is also in the eyes of men that are building a new world.
I could not believe it: the gods of yesterday were falling to pieces. They were made of clay. I had to make my own gods, create my own symbols, and worship in my own fashion.
I knew now. This violence had a broad social meaning; the one I had known earlier was a blind rebellion. It was perpetuated by men who had no place in the scheme of life.
I wanted to educate myself as fast as possible, and the fury of my desire was so tumultuous, I could not rest.
I was enchanted by this dream, and the hospital, dismal as it was, became a world of hope. I discovered the other democratic writers and poets, who in their diverse ways contributed toward the enlargement of the American dream.
I acquired a mask of pretense that became a weapon I was to take out with me into the violent world again, a mask of pretense at ignorance and illiteracy, because I felt that if they knew that I had intellectual depth they would reject my presence.
Maybe I succeeded in erasing the sores, but the scars remained to remind me, in moments of spiritual vicissitudes, of the tragic days of those years.
But now this desire to possess, after long years of flight and disease and want, had become an encompassing desire to belong to the land—perhaps to the whole world.
They worked as one group to deprive Filipinos of the right to live as free men in a country founded upon this very principle.
Then it came to me how absolutely necessary it was to acquaint the Filipinos with the state of the nation.
We are Americans all who have toiled for this land, who have made it rich and free. But we must not demand from America, because she is still our unfinished dream.
It came to me that no man—no one at all—could destroy my faith in America again.
