Ablah Library

Wichita, Kansas

By Abby Bayani-Heitzman

Filipino American writer Bienvenido “Ben” N. Santos had a complicated relationship with the Midwest. He first arrived in the United States in 1941 as a pensionado, or government-sponsored scholar, to study at the University of Illinois. After World War II, he settled into a career as an educator and taught as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Iowa before arriving in 1973 at Wichita State University. He served as a Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished Writer in Residence until 1982, a period that coincided with his voluntary exile from the Philippines.

During the dictatorship of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos (1965–1986), Santos’ 1982 novel The Praying Man was banned for its perceived criticism of the Marcos regime due to its depiction of political corruption. Although living and working in the Midwest kept Santos free from political persecution, it also distanced him from the country and culture he loved.

I first learned about Ben Santos and his writing while I was a student at Wichita State; as a Filipino American and aspiring writer in Kansas, his story really resonated with me, not least because of his ties to both the Philippines and the Midwest.

After learning about Santos, I started to look at the Wichita State campus differently. I imagined him frequenting Ablah Library, which holds a collection of his personal writings and was my favorite place to study and write. Although there is no sign or sculpture at Wichita State that visibly marks Santos’ time there, I felt that I was following in his footsteps whenever I walked along the path between the library and the English department offices. I also imagined how lonely it must have been for him while he was living so far from both his home country and the well-established Filipino American communities on the coasts.

Themes of geographic distance as well as the distance created by passing time permeate Santos’ stories set in the Midwest. In the 1955 story “The Day the Dancers Came,” Fil, an older Filipino man, eagerly awaits the arrival of a Philippine dancing troupe, planning to invite them to dinner and give them a tour of Chicago, where they are performing. Fil sees the young Filipinos as a way to reconnect with and relive the happy memories he has of his home country. However, his hopes are crushed when the dancers avoid and ignore his invitations.

Before the dancers’ performance, Fil gets the idea to record the audio of the performance—the stomping of feet, the shouting and singing in dialects—with what he calls his “sound mirror,” a portable tape recorder. In this way, he seeks to preserve the past forever, creating a way to immerse himself in his idealized memories through sound.

As a member of an earlier generation of Filipino immigrants, Fil is not only separated from the Philippines he left by a great distance but also by the cultural changes that happen over time. Having not been back to the Philippines since he left as a young man, Fil knows the country only as he remembers it and is reluctant to accept that that place no longer exists. For him, “time was the villain” because it creates a distance that can never be bridged. He knows that what is lost to time is lost forever, and that clinging to a memory can warp how a person perceives the present: “Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.”

Fil records the performance, but in the end, he fails to preserve his sentimental memories of Philippines, its people, and its cultures. By accident, he partially erases the tape and is left with nothing but confused noise:

“Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country… everything… all of them… talking eyes… and the scent… a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming, senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell.”

Santos seems to suggest that attempting to preserve the past according to subjective beliefs as to what is important is a fruitless struggle. His stories are often concerned with finding a sense of belonging amidst the changes of modernity, and Santos surely experienced these struggles himself while in the Midwest. However, he accepted the changes that life brought and became an American citizen in 1976, while he was living in Wichita. Eventually, he returned to the Philippines — one he may not have recognized but embraced nonetheless.

When I returned to the Wichita State campus to photograph Ablah Library, I was shocked to see all the construction and renovation going on around campus. The place was still recognizable, but I felt a little melancholy that some of my favorite spots might one day disappear or be replaced. Ironically, Ablah Library itself is an example of this kind of development; built in 1962, it was designed by John Hickman, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was modeled after Wright’s “Prairie Style” that reflected the expansive landscapes of the Midwest through a dramatic emphasis on horizontal lines. The original long, low profile and details such as a concrete cantilevered balcony over the entrance were eventually obscured by new additions to the building.

The world is a palimpsest, constantly overwriting itself. Like people, cultures, and countries, places change with time. It’s unavoidable, and it’s often necessary, but that doesn’t make it hurt less when we lose what means so much to us. Even so, while I struggle to accept change, I take comfort in the fact that no one can ever really alter the past and the impression that it has left on me. When I visit the places that hold special meaning for me, I see ghosts, traces that show: this was a person, this was a place, and this really happened.

Abby Bayani-Heitzman was born and raised in northeast Kansas, where she continues to live and work. She received her MA in English from Wichita State University and participated in the second cohort of the Kansas Creative Arts and Industries Commission’s Critical Writing Initiative. Since 2020, she has served as coordinator for the Filipino American community organization Malaya Kansas, a chapter of Malaya Movement USA

The post Bienvenido Santos – Wichita, Kansas appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Vegetarian Settlement Company

Allen County, Kansas

By Pete Dulin

Concern loomed like a thunderhead in this untamed place. Miriam Davis Colt, her family, and other settlers intended to make their home in the Vegetarian Settlement Company, a planned community within Octagon City envisioned to become a city “of considerable wealth and importance.” Colt’s family arrived on May 12, 1856, at the proposed site in the Territory of Kansas, south of present-day Humboldt.

With the Missouri border in her wake, Colt beholds the vast Kansas Territory and its potential: “A broad green sea of prairie is spread out before us, and in the distance large mounds stretch themselves along the horizon.”

Soon, however, Colt realized the settlement was not developing according to plan. Six years later, she published a detailed memoir titled Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results.

I drove two hours southwest from Kansas City, Missouri, to see this Fairy Land. A roadside historical marker divulged no secrets. Vegetarian Creek, woodlands, and grassy fields refused to gossip. Time, heartbreak, and death have eroded the imagined potential of this land.

Promissory plans for the Vegetarian Settlement Company originated in 1855 in New York City. A circular proclaimed that morally pure families could raise and educate children at the settlement away from “vice, vicious company, vicious habits of eating and drinking, and other contaminations of old cities.” Colt’s family and other investors sent significant funds, life’s savings for some, to underwrite the development, based on the circular and correspondence with company directors.

Unspoiled prairie and woodland suitable for settlement, farming, and investment near the Neosho River was only part of the allure. Colt believed her family would find community “with people whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”

Colt, her husband John, their young son and daughter, her sister, and her husband’s parents departed in mid-April. Traveling weeks from upstate New York led them to Kansas City. Oxen pulled supply wagons ten days toward the promised land. Arriving at nightfall, Colt’s rain- soaked party encountered men and women at the site cooking supper over a campfire and living in tents and wagons.

“The ladies tell us they are sorry to see us come to this place; which plainly shows that all is not right,” wrote Colt. Their lament was a harbinger of struggles ahead.

Settlers found no purported development or shelter from “furious prairie winds” and “terrific storms.” They ground corn with hand mills. Without a sawmill, they cut timber to fashion crude log cabins.

Summer’s blistering heat and plentiful mosquitos battered the spirits of these starving settlers. The river and creek yielded scarce, undrinkable water. Fever caused by malaria led to illness and death. Foraging, subsistence farming, and the generosity of distant neighbors provided meager sustenance. Colt wrote that Osage tribe members took tools and housewares and raided field crops. News of Kansas-Missouri border ruffians to the north spurred concerns.

Colt and her family abandoned the stillborn community four months later. Her sister and in-laws remained behind and died within months. Colt wrote on September 2, 1856, “We start out upon the world again. Many a dark shade has passed over us since last Spring.”

When I visited the settlement site, spring was still a month away. Bluebell, bloodroot, and prairie larkspur have yet to bloom. This soil was once fertile enough to plant dreams. What happens when fragile hope withers and roots immersed in the prairie do not take?

Colt’s experience prompts wonderment at my own mother’s uprooting and journey.

She met and married my father, a U.S. soldier stationed at a base near her home in central Thailand. Mom left her family, friends, and rural village in the early Sixties and emigrated to Kansas City, Kansas.

Love, hope, and opportunity do not fill an immigrant’s pockets. Wayfinding in life involves unexpected outcomes and consequences. Bearings may be lost along the path chosen.

Mom arrived at an unfamiliar place. Routines formed with each word spoken and decision made, and the fog of how little she knew slowly lifted. Understanding bloomed, its tender roots sunk into non-native soil.

She gradually learned English, earned citizenship, and acclimated to American customs. My parents eventually moved out of my grandparents’ home, bought a house in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised four children.

What happens when dreams exact unthinkable personal cost?

Colt and her beleaguered family stopped in Boonville, Missouri, en route to the “known world.” Her husband John, 40, and son Willie, 10, suffered from fever, malnourishment, and likely malaria. Willie died on September 24, three weeks after leaving the settlement. John perished on October 4, cradled in the “cold embrace of death.” Colt buried them, returned to New York, and bought a five-acre lot.

My mother remained entrenched despite life’s unpredictable storms – divorce, the death of a son, tangled family ties near and far, and health issues prompting thoughts of her mortality and legacy.

What happens when choices and consequences become uneasy cousins?

Colt and fellow settlers faced stark choices. Shed the weight of sunk costs, sever the cumbersome tether of hope? Colt sharpened her survival skills against the grindstone of trial and trauma.

She chose how to lead the remainder of her life, persevering to raise her daughter Mema, publish her tale for income, and establish a home and farm. Her memoir closed with a prayer to “have grace to bear all the remaining reverses that may come in my pathway.”

Footsteps from the past can no longer be heard. The settlement represents more than the sum of broken dreams. Their unrealized vision still exudes the faint residue of reality, a premise to ponder on our journey.

The territory is not new, only our presence on it. Leaving this land and thirsty creek bed, I deposit questions like seeds in soil foreign to me.

What remains when we depart a place? The lips of John and Willie offer no answers. Perhaps my mother knows.

Colt’s story implies that we eventually abandon the place we sought to settle. We will exit the land and return to earth. Death awaits, an assured outcome.

Until then, I am a vessel of my own making. I choose what to carry, what to leave behind. No oxen in sight. My wagon bears hope and conviction, fear and wonder, loss and what remains, grief, sorrow, some fortitude.

Our words and our will, they form within us, born of the same substance, depositing, eroding, ever shifting.

February wind blows against me. I head in that direction and return home, unsettled.

Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite, and is currently working on his next book. A professional writer for more than 20 years, Pete’s work has appeared in many print and online publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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