REVIEW: The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting by Veronica Montes

Fiction. 18 pgs. Black Lawrence Press. September 2020.

Veronica Montes was born in San Francisco and raised in the Filipino American enclave of Daly City, California. Winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition from Black Lawrence Press, Montes’ chapbook, The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting, springs to mind as I think about the persistent invisibility Asian American women face, and how Montes’ short allegorical tales of eight women in dreamy and lyrical prose combats this very invisibility through the power of her characters’ gestures and movements, whether visceral or ethereal, when their voices have been taken away.

As seen in the title piece, “The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting,” Montes establishes the foundation of her female characters’ invisibility where we have a Medusa-like figure who is not feared, but more so used and exploited, where her own humanity is compromised that she cannot even see the one who calls her name.

In “The Sound of Her Voice,” the invisibility shifts to the absence of the character’s voice, where her husband’s voice dominates and in which she submits, while in “Lint Trap,” the invisibility shifts to the creative imagination of the character, where a wife and mother cleaning her laundry’s lint trap affords a moment of respite, playful at first, imagining all the ways a collection of balls of laundry lint could become a genius invention leading to fame and success, and then culminates to a Kate Chopin kind of ending, where a ball of laundry lint is imagined into an invention much more desperate: “To muffle her screams, to plug her ears, to cushion her long and graceless fall…”

In “Madaling Araw,” the invisibility of constant hurt inflicted on a woman’s body for generations now demands to be seen, while in “Interlude: The Ocean of Tears,” the power of grief is manifested, where grief and Woman as one demand visibility. As we think about grief in our society, it’s a taboo emotion expected to remain behind closed doors and should never be seen or even acknowledged. In “Interlude,” the main character grieves over her dead father, giving rise to the power of Woman herself. In dreamy and ethereal prose, the opportunity arises for her to magically end her grief under arduous and mysterious circumstances:

“What you must do,” [the floating mermaid lady] said, “is cry an ocean’s worth of tears. Then you must cross that ocean in a boat of your own making. When you reach the other side, you’ll find a door. Open it, and this will be finished.”

Our protagonist, however, chooses not to open the door, revealing the lesson that we are forever changed when it comes to grief, where there is no return from it even if we wanted to ignore and forget what has happened. Montes shows how grief gives voice and visibility.

In “The Man Who Came from an Island Where Everyone Knows How to Sing” and “The 38 Geary Express,” Montes juxtaposes the male transgressor with the female victim. Between the two short pieces, there is the insidiousness of the subtle perpetrator who attacks and then says, “I’m sorry” after slapping his lover across her mouth; or how an obvious stalker interprets his actions as romantic pursuit.

In the closing piece, “Ruby,” Montes reveals an empowerment versus an invisibility in contrast to the rest of her previous characters, but at the same time, an uncertainty of I don’t know what the future holds for my daughter as a mother watches her daughter fall in love for the first time.

Six months after the publication of Montes’ chapbook, a lone white gunman targeted three spas in Atlanta, Georgia, killing six Asian women. The Sheriff’s Office had told the media that a sexual addiction may have fueled the crime and said the gunman had had “a really bad day,” and further denied that the shootings were racially motivated. At the time, little coverage had focused on the victims themselves and instead focused on the shooter and his motivations, thus furthering and perpetuating the invisibility of Asian American women in this country, which had borne significant weight on my then reading of Montes’ chapbook. Reminiscent of how we Asian women are perceived in the media, Montes’ eight stories echo a persistent reality in our society—the microaggressions of imposed passivity on Asian women.

While the argument can be made that Montes’ chapbook speaks to the everyday microaggressions that exist for women regardless of race, Montes as a Pinay writer herself speaks volumes on who is telling the story and who these stories are about. When Montes’ female characters attempt to speak, they are oftentimes silenced, and thus left with their own creative devices to find ways to make themselves seen and heard—very much the struggle of Asian American women today and how we continue to be perceived by the media and society.

As each story of The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting reveals, these stories of women, Asian women, Pinay women, are not anything new, and yet American society has failed to listen time and time again. Montes’ stories, our stories, defy the historical and long-standing fetishization and objectification of women’s bodies, Asian women’s bodies, Pinay bodies, and dare you to see us. See us.