When We Had Wings

Another of the novel’s protagonists, Penny Franklin is an Army nurse from Houston, Texas. Like Eleanor, Penny came to Manila to escape heartbreak over the loss of her unborn daughter and subsequent death of her husband, Sam, in a traffic accident. Adding to her heartbreak, Penny’s parents refuse to write or return her phone calls as a result of her leaving home to join the Army. Quick-witted, with brown hair cut in a stylish bob and “a confident air about her” (12), Penny uses dry humor to deflect the pain she feels about her past and to defend against further hurt. Early in the novel, Penny doesn’t cry sad or happy tears, only angry ones, stoically burying her emotions in an effort to cope with the traumas of loss and her duties as a wartime nurse.

Penny’s experiences strongly connect her thematically with The Nature of Loyalty, Grief, and Honor. Her grief is so strong that it initially causes her to see her affection for Charley as a betrayal and to try to push Newt away, calling the potential for loss “too much to ask of any woman” (171); her sense of honor binds her to her grief. However, this sense of honor also guides her in new directions as she grows and adapts. Maude Davison knows that Penny can be trusted with important secrets; Maude’s confidence in Penny and her own sense of duty give her the courage to help smuggle messages and supplies. When Akibo propositions Penny, she firmly tells him she values her honor over any power he might provide. This sense of honor, along with her bonds with Maude, Charley Russell, and Newt, sustain her throughout the war, and she learns that it’s possible to love again and to cry for emotions other than anger.

Penny’s struggles with loyalty, grief, and honor strongly associate her with the novel’s symbols and motifs, including the eight of hearts, the gold nugget necklace, and promises.

Another of the novel’s protagonists, Angelita Capel, known as Lita, is a Filipina nurse from a village on Leyte. Because of her status as a mestiza, the daughter of a Filipina woman and a white Christian missionary, Lita lacks confidence and worries about being perceived as sexually promiscuous. The novel’s early chapters characterize her as having a “cheerful veneer” and by her inability to be punctual or make decisions; she’s the youngest of four sisters and the only one who hasn’t yet immigrated to the US to work as a nurse: “An endearment in Tagalog for the baby of the family, bunso […] appeared at the start of every letter her sisters sent from New York, where together the siblings were building exciting new lives while working as nurses” (4). Lita went into nursing to pursue opportunities in the US because it was what her mother wanted. She’s dogged by guilt over arguing with her mother about this just before her death and feels like an imposter who lacks the devotion of other nurses.

As a Filipina nurse, Lita’s experiences during the war are shaped by the way both US and Japanese forces see her and thus differ significantly from Eleanor’s and Penny’s. As non-American civilians, the Filipinas are repeatedly left behind by US forces, despite working beside them, and the Japanese treat them as traitors and threaten them with execution. Lita’s experiences as nurse, prisoner, and caregiver to the orphaned children of Manila represent the extent to which the people of the Philippines were affected by the circumstances of their nation’s larger history, caught between Eastern and Western powers in the struggle for control of the Pacific. Her personal transformation from hesitant “imposter” to determined decision-maker thematically illustrates The Impact of Extraordinary Circumstances on Ordinary Lives. Through a series of small moments and significant traumas, she discovers what’s truly important to her—rebuilding Manila to help ensure a better future for the next generation of Filipinos—and is even willing to give up her romance with Lon to pursue her true purpose.

A Filipina nurse and Lita’s rival from nursing school, Reyna Delos Santos is a foil for Lita. Reyna’s “snide looks and flips of her bobbed hair, always insinuat[e] her superiority over those she didn’t care for. Lita, in particular” (50). Reyna, whose brothers are guerilla fighters attacking Japanese forces from the jungle, embodies the characteristics Lita feels she lacks: courage, natural nursing skills, and loyalty to her homeland above all else. When the Filipina nurses are imprisoned at Bilibid, Reyna demonstrates all these traits by refusing to sign the oath of allegiance to Japan. Confronted by Lita, she reveals that she dislikes her for lacking these characteristics and for only becoming a nurse as a way to immigrate to the US. Reyna says, “All I ever dreamed of becoming was a nurse, so I could help people here, in our own country. That’s why for years I did nothing but work and save money to go to school for a job that, clearly, you didn’t even want” (162).

Their conversation at Bilibid is a turning point for Reyna as a character and her relationship with Lita, and they become friends as Lita realizes that she does have the same qualities as Reyna. Both characters later track one another closely through their experiences: Reyna is arrested for working with the Resistance shortly before Lita is also arrested, and both are brought back to Bilibid and tortured before being sentenced to hard labor. Reyna’s shame over Lita’s arrest—she was the one who gave up Lita’s name—helps develop her as a fully round character, capable of weakness like anyone else and needing forgiveness.

Newt, or Ellen Briscoe, is 10 years old when Penny meets her at Santo Tomas internment camp. Newt’s mother left to visit family just before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and her father left her with her grandparents to join the Philippine guerillas, so Newt is on her own and attaches herself to Penny, who is initially unwilling but finds it impossible not to love Newt. A pickpocket who steals from the Japanese guards because “it’s not stealing if you take it from someone bad” (175), Newt follows her own moral compass and refuses to be frightened. Her irrepressible nature represents the innocence of childhood, and the concerns that Penny and Maude harbor as years pass and Newt fails to grow due to malnourishment humanize the point that not even children were spared the deprivations that POWs suffered.

Newt’s presence in the novel functions as a way for Penny to confront the loss of her own motherhood. The authors note, “[I]t made sense to us that Penny—in all her brokenness—would be the one to care for this little girl” (413). As Penny looks out for Newt and comes to love her, she experiences the healing realization that she’s capable of mothering someone even in the worst of circumstances. When Newt, at 17, accompanies Penny and her family to Manila, her ebullience shows the end result of Penny’s caring.

An officer in the Japanese Army, Akibo is Penny’s primary antagonist. Educated at Harvard, he speaks excellent English and is a translator for Japanese command. Like other Japanese officers and commandants, such as Konishi, Tsurumi, and Onozaki, he personifies the antagonism of Japanese forces and the inhumane treatment of POWs. His constant surveillance of Penny, taking and wearing her necklace, and his efforts to coerce her to become his mistress illustrate the extent to which POWs lacked privacy or power over their own bodies and demonstrates the life-or-death decisions some women felt forced to make.

In addition, Akibo represents the relationship between power and honor: For him, power confers honor, and he would rather die than surrender his power to US forces or allow Penny to treat him; for Penny, honor confers power, as is evident in her denial of Akibo’s demands and her offer to tend his gunshot wound, as she notes, “Mercy was always power” (323). His death and her recovery of her necklace represent her ability to fully own her power.

Japanese soldier Kenji Yamada isn’t a fully developed character but an expository and symbolic one: As a second-generation Japanese Canadian who returned to Japan just before the war’s start, he represents complex questions about loyalty and another lesser-known part of World War II history: the incarceration of citizens of Japanese descent by the US and Canadian governments. When Lita asks him how he can fight with Japan, against Canadian people, he remarks, “In Japan I might not entirely belong, but I definitely don’t belong [in Canada]. That much I know” (200). When Lita remains loyal to her promise not to reveal his background and ability to speak English, Yamada functions as a minor deus ex machina: His intervention saves her from execution for working with the Resistance. He illustrates the internal conflicts people felt as a result of being forced to choose sides. In addition, he represents how people can help one another by recognizing their common humanity.