Carlos Bulosan is a young boy helping his father plow their small plot of land in a rural village outside of Binalonan, in the Philippine province of Pangasinan. Suddenly, he notices a man emerging through the tall grass and heading towards his father. It is Carlos’s older brother, Leon, who has returned from fighting in a war in Europe. Carlos meets his older brother, who left when Carlos was a baby, for the first time. Leon returns during a tumultuous time for the Philippines, as the peasantry begins to revolt against the greed of the large plantation owners who have consolidated peasant lands. Carlos’s family owns four hectares of land, which places them firmly in the peasant class who live in poverty. Shortly after his return from the army, Leon selects a peasant girl to marry, but the wedding party learns that the bride is not a virgin and beats her mercilessly as punishment.
Carlos has three other brothers. Luciano is completing his service in the Philippine Scouts (a native branch of the U.S. Army), Amado helps father with the farm work, and Macario is attending high school in Lingayen. The occupying American government has brought public education to the Philippines, but Carlos’s family can only afford to send Macario to school in the city. Though they are illiterate peasants, Carlos’s parents prioritize education as a pathway out of poverty. Carlos spends his days harvesting crops with father and Amado, but he is an innately curious child who is eager to learn how to read. Amado and Macario encourage his interest in books by recommending that he read as much as he can. In order to continue sending Macario to school, father sells his land to a moneylender, but is never able to purchase it back. The loss of the land turns father into a broken man. Carlos’s mother spends her days peddling salted fish, rice, and beans in the local villages.
Macario eventually finishes high school and secures a job teaching in Binalonan, which provides the family with much-needed income. Carlos also tries to earn money through various odds jobs and helping mother with her trading business, a dangerous process that involves long treks and perilous river crossings. In some villages, Carlos witnesses Igorots who come down from the mountains to trade. For Carlos, daily life is a struggle. He manages, however, to find joy through bonding with his family, especially Luciano, who teaches Carlo about beauty by catching birds by the riverside. Carlos also plays with his young sisters Irene (who dies as a baby), Francisca, and Marcela. Meanwhile, peasants continue to revolt against large landholders throughout the Philippines, raising Carlos’s awareness of how the rich are able to dominate over the poor.
When Carlos is 13 years old, he moves to the city of Bagio to look for work. Eventually, he meets an American named Mary Strandon, who gives him a job and teaches him about America, where Carlos hopes to go someday. Soon after, he decides it is time to join Amado and Macario in America to seek a better life. He bids farewell to his parents and sisters, and goes on to board a ship bound for the U.S. Carlos stays with the poorest passengers in the ship’s hot, cramped steerage. He survives a meningitis epidemic and a verbal brush with racist white Hawaiians who call him a “monkey” before the ship finally docs in Seattle. With only 20 cents remaining, he winds up in a hotel with another Filipino named Marcelo, where he learns he will be sent to work in the Alaskan fish canneries to cover the cost of rent. Working in the canneries is a miserable, dangerous job, and he sees one worker lose an arm in the cutting machines. Carlos meets a university student named Conrado Torres who wants to unionize the cannery workers. When he returns to Seattle, he finds that the company has skimmed his pay. Most of the other Filipino workers blow their entire pay at the Chinese-owned gambling houses, bars, and brothels, but Carlos is not interested in these dens of vice.
Carlos meets a man who takes him to an orchard to pick apples in the Yakima Valley. He works under two shady characters named Corneilo Paez and Pinoy. He also meets a friendly older Filipino named Julio. One night, a racist mob attacks the orchard and the home of the owner, Mr. Malraux. Julio and Carlos flee for their lives and eventually part ways at a railyard, where Carlos boards a train to California. After making several stops, he learns that prejudice against Filipinos makes them targets for police, prohibits them from working many jobs, and bars them from acquiring decent lodging or marrying white people. In Los Angeles, Carlos finds that his brother, Amado is involved in bootlegging. His other brother, Macario, is living in a hotel with a group that includes brothers José and Nick, with whom Carlos becomes close.
Carlos briefly works with Macario in the home of wealthy movie director, but leaves in disgust after the man’s white dinner guests describe Filipino’s as inferior and sex-crazed. He travels to the Imperial Valley with José, where he learns that local whites hunt Filipino farm workers with shotguns. Carlos and José hitch a ride with a truck driver named Frank. He takes them to the train yards, where detectives chase them. In the ensuing scuffle, José’s feet to become severed under the train. He recovers in the hospital but wears a peg leg. Carlos continues to travel. He picks peas in Idaho and beets in Montana. Carlos worries that the relentless violence he continually witnesses will make him hard and cruel. He returns to Seattle but narrowly escapes being sexually assaulted in a men’s shelter, prompting him to leave town. In Klamath Falls, two police officers beat and jail him, and he wonders how some Americans can be so sadistic.
After dabbling in crime himself and learning of his father’s death in the Philippines, Carlos eventually joins the union movement alongside José, Nick, and Macario, and writes for a a socialist newspaper run by Pascual and his wife, Lucille. He is inspired by Macario’s passionate belief that they must build a better America for themselves and future generations. He distributes pro-union pamphlets, helps to organize striking agricultural workers, and continues to write for socialist publications with José, Nick, and a Filipino radical named Felix Razon, whom he once met as a child. When an independent union known as the Filipino Workers’ Association threatens to fold, Carlos and his associates work to save it by trying to unite Mexican and Filipino workers and supporting various labor strikes. As they are preparing pro-union leaflets in a restaurant, anti-union thugs kidnap Carlos, José, and a lawyer named Millar, drive them to the woods, and beat them savagely.
Carlos manages to escape his assailants, but he is severely injured. He makes his way to San Jose, where he stumbles into the home of a kind woman named Marian, who takes him in and nurses him back to health. They spend several weeks together until Marian dies of syphilis, devastating Carlos. Back in California, he learns of the new United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) union and meets with representatives from the Communist Party. Carlos helps recruit for the UCAPAWA, but his heart is still drawn to writing, especially poetry. He soon becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis. He enters the Los Angeles Hospital long-term, where and spends his time writing and reading great works of literature. Carlos is overjoyed when Harriet Monroe, a journal editor, publishes some of his poems. While in the hospital, Alice and Eileen Odell, two sisters who read his poetry, begin visiting him. They bring him books and food, and Eileen in particular becomes Carlos’s close confidant, who he feels represents the best of America.
After undergoing a successful operation on his lungs, Carlos continues reading books and finds comfort in the hospital’s outdoor porch near a beautiful tree. Eventually, Macario is able to get Carlos released after two years in the hospital. Carlos is frightened to go back to the outside world of violence and struggle. Already distraught over being thrust back into a world of crime and poverty, Carlos is further devastated when the doctor tells him he will probably only live for five more years. Determined to make the most of the time he has left, Carlos vows to write the story of his life and experiences in America.
Carlos seeks refuge in the Los Angeles Public Library, where he plans to read as many books as he can on every possible subject. He finds particular inspiration and personal relevance in the narratives of Asian immigrants who came to America. He also immerses himself in leftist literature, and meets with several local communist leaders. José suggest forming a separate Filipino unit of the Communist Party, and Carlos likes this idea. They distribute leaflets emphasizing 10 points of discrimination that Filipinos face and attract a fair amount of worker interest. The party leaders, however, reject the idea of a Filipino unit.
After falling out with the communists and being outed by a newspaper as an agitator, Carlos boards a bus and dreams of being back in the Philippines and bringing food and money to his parents. Back in Los Angeles, he helps organize a conference of Filipino labor leaders from across the state of California. The conference establishes the Committee for the Protection of Filipino Rights (CPFR) and takes up a campaign to demand American citizenship for Filipinos. Carlos becomes invested in the CPFR, but he also becomes disillusioned by the antics of members Roman Rios and Javier Lacson, who foolishly squander their goodwill with the movement over a woman, Lucia Simpson. Although communism for Filipinos seems attractive at first, its endless party divisions prevent any broad-based Filipino communist movement. Carlos does, however, see value in the ideals that communism imparts on Filipino workers.
Around this time, Carlos suffers a coughing fit and Nick takes him into his apartment and cares for him. When he recovers, Carlos goes to back to Los Angeles and finds José, Amado, and another friend, Ganzo, sleeping in Macario’s place. In between jobs canning fish and picking peas, Carlos begins writing again, and focuses on his personal experiences in America. He is overjoyed when a small company publishes his first book of poems. After the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, Carlos’s friends, including Amado and Macario, join the military, leaving Carlos alone. In Carlos’s hotel room, Macario has left an envelope filled with money and a photograph of himself. Carlos deposits the money and gets on a bus bound for Portland. As the bus pulls away, he smiles and reminds himself that no none can ever destroy his faith in America.
