Monsoon Mansion

I’m not always interested in memoirs. I’ve started receiving unsolicited review copies of a certain kind of self-pubbed memoir, and so memoir is starting to mean a heartfelt and unedited divorce or cancer story, and the guilty feeling like I really ought to slog through it.

This is not that kind of memoir. Cinelle Barnes’ memoir Monsoon Mansion is like Educated or The Glass Castle, because it feels like reading fiction, with the constant background knowledge that this really happened. These characters exist.

At first, young Cinelle experiences extreme luxury, although her parents have a dramatic and explosive relationship. Their home is a palace, with servants and endless luxuries. Beautiful clothes, fine food, and most importantly, connections to the powerful elite. Her father’s wealth comes from connecting migrant Filipino laborers with Saudi employers, but when the political situation shifts, he loses his wealth and status. He disappears, promising to bring his men home safely…  but I sort of thought he was trying to escape from his increasingly volatile and unstable wife, too. I knew about overseas Filipina maids from my students and my reading (including fictional portrayals in Crazy Rich Asians and The Farm) but this was the first time I’d thought about male overseas workers.

Just as Cinelle experienced almost unimaginable luxuries, she also faces almost unimaginable hardships. After her father leaves, the family struggles to live even a modest, middle-class life, and her mother can’t handle the end of her privileges. Young Cinelle tries to keep up appearances, surviving on a few cans of food and almost no care, but still attending a posh school, where she pretends everything is great and her maid just forgot to pack her snacks today or she doesn’t have any small bills today.

Her mother’s violent emotions power a lot of the family’s life, and her new partner is even more extreme, constantly grabbing up any resources around for new get-rich-quick schemes. Cinelle and her brother attempt some normalcy and try to earn money, but any progress is immediately stolen by their mother’s boyfriend. It’s hard to see the children still trying for affection and stability from a mother who simply can’t provide either one, and remember that this is a memoir.

There is a dreamlike quality to this book, partly from the prose style and partly from the environment, a semi-destroyed palace in beautiful, dangerous tropical surroundings. With descriptions of cockfighting, drinking tainted water, and loads of fights, many of the scenes are not pretty, even gross sometimes, but even in those parts, the writing style is still really lovely.