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Its Center Unsolved
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Patron Saints of Nothing, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth, Adolescence, and Justice
Responsibility, Guilt, and Blame
Culture and Belonging
Death and Meaning
Summary
Analysis
The next morning, Jay wakes up after Tita Chato and Tita Ines have left for work. He ignores texts from his parents, then texts Mia and messages Seth, but neither responds. Jay checks his email and discovers that his mom wrote him a long message about how she and Jay’s dad learned that Jay got into a fight with Tito Maning. They’re unhappy with Jay’s lack of communication. Jay responds with a lie, saying that he shared a memory of Jun, which upset Tito Maning. He also tells his mom that his phone died.
Jay is obviously looking for someone to talk to, since he messages Mia and Seth. And his mother clearly wants to communicate with him—and explicitly references his lack of communication with her and Jay’s dad. Yet Jay continues to avoid and lie to his parents.
Themes
Jay tries to do some schoolwork but instead watches a TV show, which is mostly in Tagalog. In the show, two men are about to confront one another, but before they can, there’s a commercial. Jay pulls out his laptop and searches for Mia on Facebook, but he doesn’t remember her last name. Jay reads another article about the drug war, which he now finds impersonal after learning so much about Jun.
This scene shows the evolving mix of Jay’s connection to and disconnection from Filipino society. On one hand, he doesn’t understand the show he’s watching (or it’s metaphorical connection to his own failure to confront Tito Maning), and he doesn’t even remember the last name of his best friend in the country. On the other, he now knows enough about the drug war firsthand to find Western media coverage of it unsatisfactory.
Themes
Jay gets a message from Seth, which makes him feel less alone. Seth asks Jay how the “motherland is,” and Jay begins to type out the whole story, but then Seth sends another message saying that he’s heard people are really poor in the Philippines. He’s seen YouTube videos of the slums, which seem “effing depressing.” Jay tells Seth that he has to go.
Once again, Seth demonstrates that he’s not the world’s most empathetic friend. Jay wants to share his experience with Seth, but Seth responds with cultural insensitivity. Of course, Seth’s statement about the slums and the Philippines’ poverty isn’t that different from what Jay initially thought about the slums and about the Philippines in general. So Seth’s comments also serve to highlight how much Jay has learned and changed.
Themes
Jay begins searching Instagram posts near his location to see if he can find Mia’s account. He finds Jessa’s instead, filled with selfies, and Grace is featured in a few. He notices that Grace seems to have a private account, so Jay requests to follow it. He finds Mia’s account and requests to follow her, too. Grace approves Jay’s request quickly and Jay scrolls through her posts, discovering in the process that Angel also has a private account, which amuses him. Then he freezes: Jun is in one of Grace’s posts from four months ago. It was taken in a mall food court. Apparently, when Jun cut everyone out from his life, he didn’t cut out Grace. Grace never told Jay, but then again, Jay never asked.
The extent of Grace and Angel’s hidden rebellion against their father’s control becomes more apparent to Jay. The rebellion also establishes both girls as potential allies and confidants for Jay. Further, from the beginning, Jay simplistically assumed that he was the only person in the family interested in what happened to Jun and that Tito Maning was the only member of Jun’s family who might know what happened to him. Obviously, that’s not the case. Now Jay knows that Grace might have a lot of information to share about Jun’s life—and death.
Themes
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Jay suddenly recognizes one of the photos of Jun as the same photo that Jun’s friend sent to Jay. Jay realizes now that there was no friend—Grace made the anonymous account. Jay messages her to confront her, and she admits that she did it; she wanted to see if Jay really cared about Jun. Jay had stopped writing to Jun, after all. At the time, Jun assumed that Jay didn’t care about what happened in the Philippines, much like Jay’s dad didn’t care. She says that even though Jay is here now, it’s too late She adds that Jay can’t understand her pain. Jay asks if Jun left Reyna because he was in trouble, and Grace says yes. Jun was running an Instagram account, which Jay realizes must have been the “GISING NA PH!” account.
And, in fact, Grace knows a lot! And now Jay (and the reader) get a clearer picture of Jun’s life and death: he was running an anti-drug-war Instagram account, left Reyna because he was “in trouble,” and suggests that his death was a result of the government disliking what he was doing. This is the sort of simple truth about Jun’s death that Jay has wanted. And yet, Grace’s other comments are a mix of truth and assumption about both Jay and Jay’s father that further demonstrates there isn’t a “simple truth”—it’s easy to see why Grace would believe the story that Jun’s dad doesn’t care about his Filipino family, but Jay has learned that isn’t in fact the case at all. Every time the novel presents a simple answer, it embeds hints that the truth in fact is likely not so simple.
Themes
Jay realizes that Grace must be the one updating the account, which explains the bookstore owner’s confusion. Jay tells Grace to stop for her own safety, but she says that Jun believed it was important to honor people’s humanity. She’s doing this to honor him. She leaves the chat, telling Jay that she’ll see him at their grandparents’ tomorrow. Jay begins scrolling through the account and realizes that although the people depicted are dead, they’re also alive in these images. Maybe Grace is right, and the account is “worth it.” Jay messages Mia again and gets no response. He feels both wise and lost.
Grace thinks that Jun died because of the Instagram account—she finds meaning in continuing it as a way of honoring Jun and his beliefs. It’s notable that the account itself is engaged in a similar project: it is saying that those who have been killed in the drug war are human beings worth honoring and remembering. In doing so the account is asserting that these deaths should never have happened—that the deaths were meaningless, in a sense—but the account uses that argument to give meaning to those deaths, to create a kind of digital monument standing against the drug war.
Themes
Later, Tita Chato and Tita Ines take Jay out to an American restaurant to eat burgers. At dinner, Jay considers telling them everything, but he doesn’t know what he should say and what he should avoid. Instead, he says nothing at all.
The fact that there’s a restaurant for American burgers near Tita Chato’s village is another indication that despite Tito Maning’s position the American and Filipino cultures have in some ways mixed beyond any ability to tear them back apart. Once again, Jay chooses not to tell the truth, but this isn’t cowardice—he wants to tell Tita Chato and Tita Ines what he’s learned, but telling the truth might be unethical.
Themes
