All this takes place as the novel’s back story, but it refuses to stay in the past, resurfacing in flashbacks as Hero tries to adjust to the disorienting lull of peacetime and “a world in which there was still corny music, lechon kawali, heavy but passing rain, televised sports, yearly holidays, caring families, requited love.” Once she fought alongside comrades who prized “the ability to put a knife in the chest of a mayor or landlord on a regional bus and walk away with no injuries, minimal witnesses”; now she ferries Roni from school, works the cash register at a strip-mall turo-turo (steam-table restaurant) and wanders through parties at strangers’ houses, picking up one-night stands, mostly men and sometimes women.

Hero is difficult and prickly, qualities shared by Roni, who loses a tooth in a scrap at school (to her glee), and Rosalyn, a new friend acquired practically against Hero’s will. A tough-talking makeup artist who feels uneasy with the ideal of beauty that requires lightening the skin and rounding out a flat nose, Rosalyn bluntly propositions Hero, masking her true feelings as mere lust, an act of bravado that fools no one. Hero in turn rejects what she sees as Rosalyn’s simple-minded sentimentality: “A heart was something you could buy on the street, six to a skewer.” Their love story starts in stutters, the risk of exposure all the more real with every touch.

Prickliest of all the characters is Hero’s aunt Paz, whose impoverished origins (in Pangasinan, Bulosan’s home province) no distance can be great enough to erase. Although she’s not the heroine, in some ways she owns the book. Nothing else in it quite matches the sheer velocity and power of the opening chapter, which recounts Paz’s life in the second person, like an incantatory prophecy or benediction: how she scrabbled as a child for crabs in holes that could as easily harbor snakes, weighing danger against hunger (“hunger always wins”); saved up pesos to have a tooth pulled so she could replace it with one made of gold, a sign of status — only to have her other teeth fall out, thanks to the cheap dentist’s bungling; and finally landed a husband above her station, not knowing that “marrying someone who’s always slept with a full belly will be like being married to someone from another planet.”

Castillo’s prose is less lyrical than propulsive, driven by rises in cadence. At times it reads as if spoken, even declaimed. Like Bulosan, she channels a righteous anger, revisiting America’s historical crimes, among them the practice of waterboarding, inaugurated during the Philippine-American War. But her true target is the persistence of social iniquity both in the Philippines and among Filipinos in America. At Roni’s school, the term “Igorota,” referring to a Filipino hill tribe, is flung at her as an insult; further south, in Glendale, an undocumented Filipina housemaid is kept prisoner by the family that employs her. Everyone still privileges pale skin (“beautiful meant she was white-white-white, practically lavender”). Castillo repeatedly returns to emblems of provincial life as talismans against wealthy arrogance, like a gourd hollowed out by hand to make a rustic bowl, or a dessert of sticky rice cakes sold by the side of the road.

The book, like its characters, roams freely among languages: English, Tagalog, Ilocano and Pangasinan. Castillo subtly makes the meaning of words known without direct translation, reminding us how much conversation consists of chain-links and muscle memory — of words that are felt more than understood. Here too are details not entirely translatable, like a picture of Jesus with a flaming heart; instant ramen noodles crushed and eaten raw from the plastic bag; a widow refusing her husband’s last wish to have his ashes sent to the Philippines, instead keeping them in a cemetery by the hospital where she works so that on every lunch break she can visit his grave. Such details are strewn like crumbs for Filipino readers like me: moments of recognition marking the way home.