The Bonsai Center: A Food Diary

The Vice of Our Jaws is a verse novel in diary entires. Accompanying each lyric diary entry are devised ephemera pasted onto the page, from food packaging to receipts to medical records. Set at the Bonsai Center, a fictional psychiatric institution in Connecticut for mga bakla (queer Filipino boys), readers follow the patient Malo as he discovers the center’s quiet goal it is to have patients lose weight and develop disordered eating habits under the whitewashed guise of health and fitness. Poems trace his time at the ward with his fellow patients through their discharge into a real-world aftermath marked by trauma, resilience, fraternity, and the confusion of freedom.

Living together in grad student housing, the institution of the university begins to mirror that of the center. Hilly remains religiously attached to what he learned at the center, while Val recognizes the harm caused and tries to pull himself and his friends from their disorder. Malo is caught in the middle, confusing the bravery to resist imperial control with the bravery to discipline oneself.

This project draws together disparate research into Malo’s singular experience: the colonial sugarcane famine on the Filipino island of Negros and subsequent generations of diabetes and psychosis; pre-colonial Filipino spiritual practices that revered mga bakla as shamanistic leaders; María Orosa, war heroine and inventor of banana ketchup; scholarly work in critical disability studies on eating disorders as disabilities; accounts on racism and white supremacy in gay male spaces drawn from both interviews and lived experience; psychiatric treatment as a pillar of imperialism and the capitalist medical-industrial complex. Malo’s life, as self-reported in his junk journal, is the distillation of these concerns. More than reading a book, readers instead stumble upon an artifact of queercrip living that brings an unseen knot of social forces to the surface.