The Boy with the Pet Dog

Abstract

Set at the beginning of the hot season in the Philippines, when heat starts to crawl on skin, the short fiction “The Boy with the Pet Dog” (“Ang Batang May Alagang Aso”) stages an encounter between the titular character and a young man from the province who intends to work on his family’s farm. Queerness figures in the narrative as intimately entangled with class, and becomes articulable only through a language made possible by the tropics itself, in the form of butterflies coming out of chrysalises, brown bodies glowing with sweat, and swiftlets flocking mango trees. At the heart of the story is a dog, whose unbridled elan unleashes the tempered and unnameable yearning that suffuses the narrative. With a title that seemingly alludes to Anton Chekhov’s famous short fiction, the story, in its cunning lightness, can be ultimately read as a rehearsal of tropical queer reimagination of writing desire.

Keywords

• animality
• tropical heat
• queer coming-of-age
• translation
• Philippine fiction
• tropical queer