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This Poem is a Typhoon
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 to find Tita Chato and Tita Ines making breakfast. He apologizes for being disrespectful last night, and Tita Chato says it’s okay—Jun meant a lot to all of them. Jay watches his aunts cook and notices how happy they are. As the three of them eat, Tita Chato and Tita Ines apologize for not being able to take time off work but tell Jay that they’ll do something together when they get home. Jay says he can do his homework while they’re gone, and they say goodbye and leave.
The contrast between Tita Chato and Tito Maning is stark. Tito Maning would have been upset at any perceived disrespect from Jay, and his relationship with his wife is nothing like the comfortable joyfulness so evident between Tita Chato and Tita Ines. Further, Jay’s aunts seem to want to spend time with Jay for the sake of spending time with him. They’re not trying to educate him about Philippine history to prove a point. And yet, Jay is lying to his aunts about doing his homework, much like Jun lied to them when he secretly dropped out of school. Once again, Jay is following in Jun’s footsteps.
Themes
Jay looks around the house while he’s waiting for Mia to drop by. It’s smaller than Tito Maning’s house and hasn’t been renovated, but Jay notices the family photos all around. Everyone in Jay’s family, including Jay, is featured, and there are pictures of Jun at various ages. Jay and Jun are together in one of them. Jay remembers that the photo was taken on a basketball court right after Jun defended Jay from a bully. There’s another one of Jun playing the piano—Jay didn’t even know that Jun did that—and one of Jun with Tita Chato and Tita Ines when he’s much older. In that last photo he doesn’t have his tattoos yet, though.
Tita Chato and Tita Ines embrace their entire family, and do not try to erase or hide their past. While Jay is starting to learn the “truth” about what happened to Jun after he left Tito Maning’s, Jay is also learning more about the kind of person Jun was—for instance, Jay didn’t know that Jun played piano. This discovery of who Jun was feels like another, adjacent truth-seeking quest, but a healthier one, since it’s natural to want to know more about someone who passed away. The note about Jun getting tattoos after leaving his aunts’ house seems to imply that Jun was rebelling in some way (though nowadays getting a tattoo isn’t necessarily rebellious at all).
Themes
Mia arrives at Tita Chato’s house, and Jay greets her in Tagalog. She jokingly starts speaks to him in rapid Tagalog, which Jay can’t understand, then has Jay do “mano,” a deferential bow of respect to his elder. She tells Jay that he’s better off staying with Tita Chato than with Tito Maning and expresses her admiration for Tita Chato’s work. Jay agrees, though he doesn’t actually know what Tita Chato does. He says that he wishes his aunts could get married, and Mia says that in the Philippines it’s still illegal to divorce, which Jay didn’t know.
Jay has been hugely insecure about his inability to speak Tagalog, but when Mia turns this inability into a joke, Jay doesn’t seem to mind. Once again, Jay and Mia seem to have a healthy friendship, since she gets Jay out of his own head and also communicates openly with him. While she does inadvertently remind Jay in this passage that he doesn’t know much about his Filipino family (since he’s not sure what Tita Chato does for work) or Philippine politics (since he didn’t know it was illegal to divorce) she does so in a way that isn’t meant to show him up—she’s helping him learn.
Themes
Jay says that his dad is going to be furious with him for confronting Tito Maning about Jun, but Mia says that she admires Jay’s bravery. He wonders if he should have said nothing, but Mia thinks it’s not healthy to keep silent about things. For instance, Mia told Jessa about Jun, and Jessa talked to Grace about it. Grace is mad at Jessa now, but if their relationship is going to work out, they have to be honest with each other.
When Jay and his mom had a conversation about the value of truth, Jay took a strong pro-truth position, arguing that truth was always worth knowing and worth telling. Jay seems less sure of that position now, but Mia strongly argues that his original belief was right: in saying that Jessa had to ask Grace about Jun, she is saying that human relationships can only flourish through open, honest communication.
Themes
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Mia then says that she tracked down the owner of the bookstore from the card Jay found. Apparently, Jun used to special-order books from him. The man doesn’t know where Jun went after leaving Tita Chato’s, but he did provide Jun’s most recent address. However, the address is in the slums, so Mia asked her journalism professor to safely guide her and Jay there. The owner also asked Mia who’s updating “the site” if Jun is dead, but then he got nervous and wouldn’t say more. She says that Jun must have been running a website, but that they won’t get any more info about it from the bookstore owner. For now, they should focus on visiting Jun’s address.
Mia and Jay’s detective work is going surprisingly well, since they now have a solid lead as to where Jun was living. It’s not totally surprising that Jun was living in the slums—in his letter to Jay, he said that he’d rather live there than with Tito Maning, and that’s exactly what he ended up doing. Once again, it seems like there’s more to Jun’s story, since the bookstore owner cryptically suggests that Jun was running a website of some kind. So far, Jay seems validated in his belief that there’s some hidden truth about Jun that he can discover—all the clues certainly seem to be leading to something big.
Themes
