Review for The Son of Good Fortune: A Tempestuous In-between

Over the past little while, amidst tending to a garden and designing job applications, I’ll admit I haven’t been doing my best at reading novels. My Goodreads challenge is two books behind, but I think I’m slowly and surely getting back into the swing of things. So, doing my best to change from last summer’s sporadic posts, I’ll begin again with some words about Lysley Tenorio’s lovely novel The Son of Good Fortune.

The story is, as my title suggests, an explanation of the logistics behind a tempestuous in-between. Our main character, Excel, named after the two letters of a boarding ticket that were fanned in front of his mother’s face as she was giving birth to him on a plane from the Philippines, lives in Colma, California with his mom, Maxima. The novel opens to Excel as he returns home from a nine-month stint away in Hello City with his girlfriend, Sab, only back because of a mysterious debt of 10,000 dollars. The bulk of the story, then, amidst flashbacks, follows his quest to earn this money to get back to his girlfriend. So, he takes back his old job working at a run-down spy-themed pizza parlour dubbed The Pie Who Loved Me and takes whatever money he can get. Maxima works as well in a form of sex work (though she would never call it that), talking to men around the country who believe she is a different woman with a different life, living in Manila as a God-loving poor mother with a dream of seeing snow.

There isn’t much in this novel that Tenorio doesn’t succeed in throughout, but his characters are a special highlight as each of them are not only completely developed and realized, but also purposeful. Maxima is a particularly cool character, capable of everything yet always limited. She was born in the Philippines and grew to become a rising action movie star and stuntwoman, until she got pregnant and had to leave to the States, where her old mentor, Grandmaster Joker, was waiting for her. Everyday throughout the story, she continues to keep her fighting skills sharp and watches her one starring-role movie on repeat, living and working every day only to keep glorifying a past life. As we quickly find out, both Maxima and Excel are what they dub “TNT,” or “tago ng tago,” “hiding and hiding.” In Maxima’s words, they aren’t really there and must make sure that no one knows that they are hiding in their own home.

This information, then, becomes the ghost behind every word and choice Excel makes. In every image that Tenorio introduces to the plot, like the Helipads in Hello City, the Nirvana shirt Excel wears, the switchblade that Maxima twirls in her hand, the televisions scattered throughout, and the spy-themed pizza shop, are all brilliantly integrated with this spectral knowledge of cautiousness and entrapment within them. It is a state of living that doubtless carries extreme, pervasive weight that cannot be shed, and Tenorio does an incredible job of weaving what this experience looks and feels like into every moment of the novel.

Further, one of my biggest takeaways from this story was in how, despite constantly looking and feeling alone, Excel and Maxima live in a space of mutual aid. The novel never explicitly uses these terms, but almost every character practices and benefits from it. Every character except, of course, the rich men that Maxima talks to who believe they are doing the right thing but are actually just indulging in their own superiority complexes that lead them to believe they are entitled to Maxima as their own personal “investment.” In other words, a bunch of a-holes that deserve to be swindled.

If you’re unfamiliar with it, mutual aid is not charity. It is not a person or corporation with great amounts of wealth donating a sum of money to a person or organization with less, but instead it is a network of people who benefit from sharing and distributing their own wealth among each other, whether that wealth be monetary, craft-based, or knowledge-based. It’s a shared way of living that asserts community care amidst the over-arching arms of a hetero-patriarchal capitalist economy that can only thrive with the exploitation of many for the benefit of the few. It’s the type of thinking that makes it so when Excel says he’s in trouble, Maxima doesn’t hesitate for a second to help him. Similarly, just as Joker didn’t hesitate to help Maxima, and Maxima doesn’t hesitate to help her friend, Roxy, and Roxy doesn’t hesitate to help Excel. Which is why I loved the character of Roxy so much.

Roxy is a woman of trans experience from the Philippines, and she is the first trans side character I’ve read that cannot be tokenized. Everything about her character is generous, warm, and genuine. She’s a woman who says what’s on her mind, calls out bullshit, but will support her community no matter what as she is supported by them. And for Roxy, her community is mainly Maxima and Excel, who she constantly buys food for, drives them to where they need to go, does admin work for Maxima, and slips Excel twenties as Maxima funds her medication and gender-affirming surgeries. It is important because women of colour, and particularly Black women, were the biggest innovators of mutual aid in the United States and further, as the AIDS epidemic swept through the nation, trans women of colour were the ones who organized and created systems of community care. For Tenorio to highlight two more women of colour as some of the most prolific members of mutual aid was not only wonderful to read, but also the right move in showcasing how powerful this system is.

That said, this is a beautiful story about what love can look like for different kinds of families and people. It shows the intricacies of a ghostly life and is a story of love, life, death, service, duty, and generosity amidst that which I highly recommend to anyone interested!