In the following essay, Tan discusses the stories in Santos's Scent of Apples and their common theme of expatriation and its effects.

Scent of Apples: A Collection of Stories (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1979, 178 pages) is Bienvenido N. Santos's first book to be published in the United States, but fifteen of the sixteen stories in this collection have appeared before in two books published in the Philippines: eleven in You Lovely People (Bookmark, 1955) and four in The Day the Dancers Came (Bookmark, 1967). Thus, all the stories in this new collection are familiar to Filipino readers except the first one, "Immigration Blues," whose significance in the book, apart from its own separate virtue as a story of understated pathos and the very human and selfish motive of marriage for convenience, is that it brings to the present decade the continuing story of Filipinos in America.

The...