Republic of the Philippines

CAVITE STATE UNIVERSITY

BACHELOR OF SECONDARY EDUCATION MAJOR IN ENGLISH​

Final exam in Survey of

Prepared by: Shane Anthel T. Vargas​

The short story Balikbayan is a powerful exploration of memory, grief, and social
violence. It follows Stella, a transgender woman who returns to the Philippines for the wake of
her sister, Katrina. What she faces is not just the weight of personal loss, but also the crushing
force of rumor, poverty, and state power that try to erase who her sister was. At its core, the story
is about reclaiming identity against forces that distort it. Through its layered narration, shifting
voices, and painful echoes of real-world events, Balikbayan reveals how ordinary lives are
shaped by larger systems of exploitation and neglect.

The main concern that Stella carries throughout the story is the struggle to honor and
remember her sister truthfully. From the beginning, she is already confronted with erasure and
misrecognition. Vangie, the receptionist at the funeral home, does not recognize her, even though
Stella’s return is a moment of great personal weight. Vangie then floods her with gossip about
Katrina, saying, “Since tokhang, diba, bodies just come and go, even in Mayabo, pero usually
nobodies sila.” In a single sentence, Katrina is lumped with nameless victims of violence,
stripped of dignity. Vangie continues, “they said she’s an NPA member… hostess, go-go dancer,
GRO to soldiers away from home… she’s a drug addict… a dealer to big-time clients. Shabu.”
These shifting labels do not reveal Katrina’s truth but rather show how women from poor
families can be endlessly renamed by others until their identities vanish. Stella pushes back
quietly. When Vangie insists on ranking what is worse, Stella says simply, “Dead. It’s worse to
be dead.” That line captures her central concern: her sister is gone, and what matters is the fact of
her death, not the judgments piled on her.

The story’s narration deepens this struggle by weaving the present and the past together.
As Stella sits in the funeral home, details around her trigger memories that rise without warning.
The text does not follow a straight timeline, but moves between her encounter with Vangie, her
conversations with Juday the parlorista, her childhood with Katrina, and her life with her
boyfriend Aaron. This braiding of time mirrors how grief works. Mourning is not linear, it is a
return to moments that explain, contradict, or comfort. For example, in the middle of Vangie’s
gossip, Stella recalls Katrina’s determination to go abroad. Katrina had said with hope, “I’ll have
enough to send. There will be a way. ‘Di ba, it’s the States.” Later, Stella remembers how Katrina
made the decision to sacrifice for her younger sibling: “I want her to have an easy life, a life as
the woman she wants to be when she grows up.” These memories arrive as counterweights to the
lies being told in the present. By structuring the story this way, the writer shows that to tell the
truth about a life requires memory, not just the official story that others give.

The narration also allows us to feel Stella’s own vulnerability. She is often misnamed and
misrecognized. When the manager appears, he calls out, “Mr. Langitan,” forcing Stella to correct
him, “Actually, it’s Ms. Langitan.” These moments reveal how she too must fight for recognition
of her identity, even in a time of grief. Symbols like the ring she wears carry this tension. The
text describes, “Under the fluorescent lights, the gold band around her finger glinted.” The ring is
a reminder of love and belonging abroad, yet when she is in the Philippines it also becomes a
marker of difference and of a life others do not fully understand. At one point she reflects, “Here,
it could never be anything else but a ring.” The simplicity of that sentence shows the limits of her
society, where the meaning of objects and identities is flattened by rigid norms.
 The concerns of the story reach beyond personal grief and point to real social issues. One
clear thread is the reference to labor trafficking of Filipino teachers. Stella remembers the case
that was “all over the news, a lawsuit against Alpha-Global Placement in America by the
exploited Filipino teachers, whose passports and visas were confiscated until they paid the
exorbitant recruitment fees.” Katrina herself fell into this trap, having to pay “three hundred
thousand pesos” and then later “seven hundred thou” just to secure a teaching job abroad. She
reassures herself, “They explained to me that I can pay the rest while I’m there, bit by bit, over
the years.” What might look like an opportunity is revealed as a chain of debt. This echoes the
experiences of many Filipinos who leave in hope of better lives but face exploitation abroad.
Katrina’s death in the Philippines makes the injustice sharper. The promise of migration failed to
save her, and her story ends in the same cycle of poverty and violence she tried to escape.

Another social issue that the story addresses is state violence during the drug war. Vangie
casually recounts, “When Katrina Langitan and her drug dealer friends realized they were in a
buy-bust, they fired at each other. Police didn’t even need to shoot. Mang Resti said she
sustained eight bullet wounds.” The contradictions in this line expose the lie. If the police did not
need to shoot, why did Katrina sustain eight wounds? The detail calls to mind real reports of
extrajudicial killings, where official accounts often do not match the bodies left behind. The fact
that the funeral home is “police-accredited” ties it further to the machinery of the state. In this
way, the story suggests that ordinary spaces, even a place of mourning, are not outside the reach
of power.

The personal also intersects with the political through Stella’s relationship with Aaron,
her American boyfriend. Aaron is caring but also careless with his words. He jokes, “Love and
war, two things that can really get a man going,” and offers to “teach the locals all the things you
should do to a communist.” He even says, “Duterte can hire me like a visiting professor.” For
Stella, these lines highlight how detached Aaron is from the dangers that shaped her sister’s
death. When he asks to visit Subic, she replies only, “Subic is really far from here.” Her short
answers create distance. She knows that Aaron sees war as memory and joke, but for her family
it is still an open wound. By including this relationship, the story shows the uneven encounter
between the global and the local, between the one who can leave and the one who cannot.

Through all these strands, what shines most is the memory of Katrina as a sister. Stella
recalls how Katrina once caught her stealing coins, and instead of punishment embraced her: “I
hugged her. I felt so bad.” She also remembers Katrina’s small gift of a lipstick box, meant as a
shield of pride: “so she won’t feel controlled by utang na loob.” These intimate memories are
what resist the power of rumor and state violence. They remind the reader that behind the
headlines and accusations is a person who loved, sacrificed, and dreamed.

The story ends in a way that echoes both despair and dignity. Stella identifies her sister’s
body and notices “the strange clean air in the morgue, like nothing. Sterile.” The sterility
contrasts with the overwhelming scent of the dama de noche outside, which carried life and rot
together. At the close, Aaron says, “Who they are, none of it matters when you’re out there.”
Stella repeats softly, “None of it matters. Who she was, none of it should have mattered.” The
repetition is haunting. For Aaron, identity does not matter because war erases it. For Stella,
identity should not have mattered because labels should never have justified her sister’s death.
The story leaves us with that tension, unresolved but unforgettable.
 In the end, Balikbayan is not only about one woman’s grief. It is about how grief opens
the structures of power that mark and destroy lives. Stella’s concern is to hold onto the truth of
who her sister was, even when others drown it in gossip and authority. The braided narration
shows how memory becomes an act of resistance. The story ties personal loss to real incidents of
labor exploitation and state violence, forcing the reader to see how individual lives are entangled
with larger social forces. At the same time, it insists on tenderness, on the small gestures of love
that survive rumor and bullets. In its final lines, the story leaves us with the truth that identity
should never have been a death sentence, and that to remember is itself an act of justice.