Time, Space, and Trans-Pacific Community in Noel Alumit's Talking to the Moon

This paper explores the role of time, space, and knowledge in Noel Alumit's recent novel, Talking to the Moon (:  Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2007).  This novel is a transpacific tale of a Filipina/o American family in, and crosses back and forth from the to the, and also through other dimensions of time and space as well.  Opening with the hate crime of the shooting of the father, Jory, a postal service employee (a fictionalized event which invokes the real-life 1999 shooting of Filipino American postal employee Joseph Ileto in Los Angeles), the novel explores the consciousness of Jory, his wife Belen, his son Emerson, and Emerson's partner Michael, as shaped by the cataclysmic event of Jory's shooting.  For historians, this novel gives us an important way both to showcase and to teach the processes of historical memory and character formation in communities which traverse transpacific spaces.  By examining different sites in the and also in the, the novel enables us to interrogate how past issues of migration, class formation, and spirituality shape our behavior in present, as well as affect the kinds of future choices that people make.  The novel further underscores how the relationship of immigrant communities to the past becomes become mediated through such processes as war, trauma, separation, migration, and racism.