62 pages • 2 hours read
Randy RibayPatron Saints of Nothing
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Jason “Jay” Reguero
As a coming-of-age narrative, Patron Saints of Nothing follows Jay Reguero’s difficult, painful evolution into a new awareness about his family, his culture, and his identity. Because the novel is narrated in first person, Jay’s perceptions, limited as they are, shape the reading of the events in the Philippines. As Jay learns, the reader learns. Although he is in his final year of high school and preparing for college, Jay is still very much a child: immature, spoiled, shallow.
At 17, Jay does not understand who he is. His worldview is limited. He is unimpressed by the opportunities of education. He finds commitment taxing. He much prefers scrolling through Facebook, mastering video games, and smoking joints. What is central to his drift is the question of his cultural identity. Born in the Philippines, Jay was brought to the United States when he only one. Save for a trip to visit his extended family when he was 10, Jay has few memories and really no understanding of his Filipino identity. Yet he does not easily fit in to the largely white, comfortably suburban world he lives in. His brief correspondence with his cousin Jun provides him the only chance to explore his hyphenated identity, his status as a Filipino-American.
His experience in the Philippines becomes much more than what he expects. He goes to solve a mystery. He wants the world to be as simplistic as the video games into which he disappears. He goes to the Philippines for answers; he goes to confirm that Jun was a hero and that Jun’s father was a villain. In the end he confirms neither. The Philippines does not provide tidy and neat answers. Jay never actually figures out who killed Jun or even exactly how he died. Jun’s father emerges as a figure of great complexity, a father who loved his son and gave him the choice to save himself. Jun emerges as much a hero as a villain. Jay’s experiences reveal that the world is not ever one thing or another, and that each person is complicated, contradictory, and imperfect. That realization completes his transition from childhood to adulthood.
More important, as Jay returns to resume his suburban life, he knows now the importance of his identity as a Filipino. He learns the dimensions of the problems his country faces. He also learns that individuals, working together, can impact conditions and change the world. His commitment to join his aunts’ human rights organization rather than escaping into college reveals Jay’s growth into maturity.
Manuel “Jun” Reguero Jr.
Jun Reguero, Jay’s cousin in the Philippines, is almost entirely a perception, the subject of others’ conversations and memories. He appears only briefly in two memories Jay shares. Indeed, the narrative action begins with the news that Jun is dead. His character, however, dominates Jay’s coming-of-age story. Jun comes to life through the letters he sent years earlier to Jay, through poignant conversations Jay has with Jun’s grieving sister Grace, and through pieces of information Jay acquires talking to family and friends who knew Jun. But Jay never completely figures out his cousin. Indeed, part of Jay’s education is to understand how little he knows about his cousin. In the end Jay compares Jun to an intricate puzzle with missing pieces.
As a character, Jun is exactly what Jay does not want him to be: He is complicated and contradictory. He is not simply one thing or another. Jay wants Jun to be a victim of Duterte’s government or of Uncle Maning’s maliciousness or of a culture unwilling to grant compassion to those addicted to drugs. Jay needs a hero; Jay needs to assign blame. He wants to believe that Jun was a bright, feisty, precocious, full-hearted kid with a probing intelligence, a voracious reader gifted with a restless curiosity that belied his years, a kid full of big, tough questions whose life was rich with promise. And Jun was all that, but he was at the same time more and less.
As Jay probes into Jun’s family and into Filipino culture, he realizes that Jun was a drug addict, that his disease cost him the comfortable life of his wealthy Catholic family and, in turn, made him vulnerable to a street life in which he compromised his moral integrity to survive. In his letters Jun reveals how life was a challenge of mixed, even crossed signals. Despite growing up in his parents’ privileged world, Jun nevertheless saw the poverty, degradation, and suffering of people in the slums that bordered his family home. He worked to right that wrong. He worked in a drop-in street clinic to help addicts; he helped his aunts in their mission to guarantee civil rights to the poor and underprivileged. Using the reach of social media, despite the risks and despite his tender age, he challenged an entrenched government he saw as corrupt and amoral. Jun is in stark contrast to Jay, whose indifference to his comfortable suburban world is measured by his escape into video games and weed.
Jay comes to understand that Jun was a paradox: a heroic victim, a brave coward, and a doomed survivor who was as compassionate as he was selfish, as noble as he was ignoble, as much sinner as saint. As such, Jun is both a role model and a cautionary figure.
Grace Reguero
In a novel informed by the vocabulary and symbology of Roman Catholicism, Jun’s younger sister Grace, as her name suggests, is a vehicle for redemption, a way to salvation. Her example offers Jay nothing less than a way to live in a dangerous real-time world of complexity and brutality. It is Grace who shows Jay that the real world is no video game.
If Jun and Jay define extremes, Grace defines the via media, a Latin expression that has been part of Christian Catholicism since the Reformation. The term means the middle path, the path of life that balances the good each is capable of without spiraling into the bad that each is also capable of. It is the way of the (im)perfect saint/sinner. As such, she offers to Jay a template for his movement into adulthood, a way to balance his head and heart, to be both a compassionate person and a passionate activist.
The bespectacled Grace balances Jun and Jay’s extremes. She offers to Jay a model of quiet, informed, passionate activism without Jun’s careen into drug dependence. That she is a lesbian in a committed relationship confirms her status as an outsider. She accepts who she is. Two years younger than Jay, she pursues a rigorous, disciplined, self-directed reading program that exposes her to political and socioeconomic thought (it is a measure of how much Jay needs to grow that when he first meets Grace, he assumes she is reading Harry Potter). Unlike Jay, Grace is aware of the world around her. Her Facebook account catalogues the brutal conditions in her native country. Like Jun, she is involved in the risky business of the underground movement to challenge the Duterte government. But unlike Jun, Grace does not turn to the escape of drugs, never succumbs to such coaxing logic. Grace refuses to close her eyes or turn away.
If Grace is informed, committed, articulate, uncompromising, and passionate about political and economic reform, she is also compassionate and tender-hearted. The tipping point in Jay’s maturation is his long, teary conversation with Grace in which she confesses how deeply she misses her brother. This moment is not political. This is personal. This effusion of emotion, which so deeply impresses Jay, comes from her heart. Jay recognizes that for all her obvious confidence and savvy, Grace has never let go of her heart. It is a tonic moment for Jay, who to that point has been drifting emotionally—his family is there for him but distant, his friends are lost in a swirl of marijuana fog, his girlfriend is more a convenience than a commitment. Grace shows Jay the importance of intellectual stimulation and informed activism, certainly, but compassionate empathy and unstinting caring as well.
