Sherds : a novel / F. Sionil Jose.

Sherds fragments of pottery found in sites where pottery making peoples have lived Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The first Golangco in F. Sionil sprawling gallery of literary characters appears in one of his early novels Gagamba. The Golangcos are a pillar in the powerful Filipino oligarchy. The original Golangcos were two brothers who came to the Philippines in the 1850's from Fookien, in China. The older brother settled in Binondo, learned Spanish and became the Governor General's tong collector of the Chinese community in Manila. The younger Golangco settled in the Central Plain, traded in rice and became an hacendero. PG (Peter Gregory) in this novel belongs to the fourth generation of this clan. He is completely detached from the family businesses.He is an artist, a potter and scholar, a sybarite and cosmopolite with a doctorate in aesthetics. He is a tenured professor at the University of California in Berkeley but he elects to return to the Philippines to teach at the urging of another Filipino Chinese, Betty Sy, a former student. Into his seminar class, a freshman comes. She is tall, talented, combative. A tenacious teacher pupil relationship starts, develops and culminates in an unexpected ending. Sherds the latest work by the Philippines' most widely translated authoris, perhaps, his most thoughtful and incisive comment on the Filipino condition. For all its sophisticated urban setting, it still belongs to the vernacular literary tradition, hewing ever closely to the author's major theme the Filipino's often hopeless search for social justice and a moral order. In 1980, Sionil Jose received the Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Award for Literature. In 2001, he was named National Artist for Literature, and in 2004, he received from the government of Chile the Pablo Neruda Centennial Award for Literature.