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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
Jay arrives at Tita Chato and Tita Ines’s house. After they hug, Tita Chato says that she’s glad Jay made Tito Maning angry, which makes Tita Ines laugh. The three of them sit on the patio while Tita Chato smokes and holds Tita Ines’s hand. Smoking in the Philippines is illegal, but only in public. Tita Ines wants Tita Chato to quit, but Tita Chato says that there’s many ways to die in the Philippines and she’s worried about smoking the least.
Tita Chato and Tita Ines are clearly very different from Tito Maning and Tita Ami, and not just because they openly dislike Tito Maning and joke about that dislike. Tita Chato doesn’t seem to have the same unconditional love for the Philippines that her brother does, since she acknowledges that the Philippines can be violent and deadly. And though smoking at home isn’t illegal, Tita Chato is still flaunting the rules by keeping up her smoking habit when smoking is banned in public. In contrast, Tito Maning,, is someone in charge of enforcing the government’s laws, including the law about smoking.
Themes
Tita Ines goes to make Jay dinner, and Tita Chato and Jay watch the rain together. She asks what Jay did to make Tito Maning upset. Because she used to be a lawyer, her voice demands truth, so Jay tells her. She tells Jay that Tito Maning is a liar, just like his government. It’s true that Tito Maning found drugs in Jun’s room, but Tito Maning never gave Jun a choice to stay. She knows because Jun came to her after he was kicked out of the house. Jay is stunned that he’s unwittingly followed in Jun’s footsteps—Tito Maning kicked him out and now he’s at Tita Chato’s, too. Jay realizes that this must be why Tito Maning no longer speaks to Tita Chato.
Jay’s search for what happened to Jun has caused Jay to follow in Jun’s path. There is a sense in which the search itself continues to connect Jay to Jun. At the same time, this path is also leading Jay to new information about Jun. Once again, though, that information makes the “truth” complicated: Tito Maning told the truth about Jun having drugs, but not about giving Jun an option to stay. Further, Jay now gets a further sense of the family’s dynamics: the political disagreements between Tita Chato and Tito Maning that then became personal because of Jun.
Themes
Tita Chato says that Jay’s dad has no idea that Tita Chato took Jun in. She thinks that Jay’s dad doesn’t like to dwell on problems in the Philippines because it makes him feel guilty that he left, something Jay never considered. Tita Ines comes back, and Tita Chato catches her up on what happened between Jay and Tito Maning. According to Tita Chato, Tito Maning believes he was merciful to kick Jun out and not kill him. Maybe he would have killed him if the incident happened during Duterte’s era (which began about a year after Jun ran away). Apparently, Tito Maning didn’t even find shabu in Jun’s room; it was marijuana. Jay can’t believe it: Seth smokes weed all the time, and no one would ever hurt him because of it.
Jay is suddenly given a new way to think about his dad: that he has complicated, guilty feelings about leaving the Philippines—even if he thinks he made the right choice—and his refusal to discuss the Philippines is a way to avoid that guilt. Jay is once more presented here with a comparison between American and Filipino values—this time with Tito Maning’s anti-drug values seeming strict to the point of insanity. Jay is confronted with the fact that no matter how distant he feels from his parents, that distance is very different from the ice-cold relationship between Tito Maning and Jun.
Themes
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Tita Chato says that Jun lived with her for almost a full year and went to school. After a year, Tito Maning called to tell them that Jay’s school had contacted him; Jay hadn’t been attending class and was going to fail. Jay is surprised that Tito Maning was still paying for Jun’s school—why would he?
A fuller picture of Jun emerges here, and it turns out that Jun too had secrets and misled others: he was pretending to go to school when in fact he wasn’t. Jay’s question about why Tito Maning would keep paying for school after kicking out Jun forces the reader to consider the question as well: it does imply that Tito Maning continued to care about his son, at least in some way.
Themes
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Tita Chato confronted Jun, who said that school was pointless. He’d been going to the library instead, even proving it by showing his aunts his checkout history. But one day, Jun left abruptly. He left them a letter saying that he was done “pretending” to be their son. Jay thinks that maybe Jun meant he was done pretending in general, because in his letters he often said that everyone was pretending. After he left, Jun would write his aunts letters sometimes but always from a new address, so they couldn’t track him down. He took most of his belongings but left a box of his things, which Tita Chato says Jay can examine if he wants.
Jun seems to have lost faith with all of the institutions of his world—the government, the church, school. And his argument that everyone is pretending seems to imply he had lost faith in people as well: he had come to see lies as the primary thing in the world. While one might see Jun as a truthteller fighting against lies, it's also possible to see Jun as a depressive. Regardless, it’s unclear whether Jun himself is telling the truth about anything, though Jay himself seems to not yet have realized this.
Themes
Jay decides to show his aunts the photo of the note in Tito Maning’s office. Tita Chato assumes that this means Jun really was using drugs, but Jay insists that there was a mistake or that Tito Maning added Jun to the list of dealers so that the police would find him. But Tita Chato thinks that Tito Maning would have hired a private detective in that case. No one says aloud that maybe Tito Maning wanted Jun dead. Jay also shows his aunts the profile photo of the anonymous Instagram account, but neither woman recognizes the man in it.
Jay continues to believe that something nefarious was done to Jun—that he was framed, for instance—but that Jun himself did not do anything illegal. Tita Chato’s view seems more nuanced and realistic, though, given the evidence. Jay wants to find the truth, but he can only see he truth he’s hoping to find.
Themes
Tita Chato thinks that it doesn’t matter what Jay found. Jay had hoped that they could sue the government over Jun’s death, but Tita Chato explains that the courts are corrupt. Jun says that they should at least protest, but Tita Chato says that the protest would be small. She says that most people in the Philippines like Duterte’s policies and wouldn’t believe that Jun was innocent, or they would say that even if there had been a mistake it was okay because the underlying the policies are sound. She says that Jun’s death was tragic regardless of what he did, but that they can’t bring him back. Jay is angry—it seems to him that, like Tito Maning, Tita Chato thinks Jay can’t understand what’s happening in the Philippines. But Jay thinks that right and wrong should “transcend nationality,” and he feels he needs to clear Jun’s name.
Jay wants Jun’s death to have meaning and purpose. Whether that purpose is clearing Jun’s name, finding and punishing the killer, or exposing the unjust reality of the drug war. Tita Chato is arguing that there is no way in the Philippines to do any of these things: that it is too corrupt on the one hand and accepting of Duterte’s policies on the other to make any such search for truth worthwhile or even possible. But Jay here insists (to himself) on a different universal standard: he argues that basic right and wrong can and must be measured and enforced regardless of all of the nuances of a particular place. It’s possible to see Jay here as naïve, but it’s also possible to see him as having a powerful idealism that could create change.
Themes
