Faith Healer

Victoria G. Smith, named an outstanding writer by the Chicago Filipino Asian American Hall of Fame, explores the Filipino diaspora with magic, lyricism, and humor.

Ousted years ago from the Malacañang Palace in Manila, where he healed the people’s ailments with the power God sent through his hands, Victor Mariano has made a peaceful, if lonely and uncertain, life for himself as the caregiver “Tita Vee” in a California long-term care facility.

Victor is no stranger to living as neither one thing or another—not a man or a woman, not a fraud or a miracle, not black or white or Filipino. Like the sacred mountain that chose a penniless intersex bastard to receive the gift of healing, Victor lives on the very edge of where any other human could travel.

Faced with crisis and deportation, tormented by the loss of his unbelievable gifts, Victor has nothing left but memories and a remarkable story of multiple abandonments, faith and disbelief, palaces and poverty. Hair graying, with no hope even of escape, his own tale might be the only way to save the twisted heart of a cruel racist who threatens the small peace he has forged.

Faith Healer is a book of tremendous depth and tenderness, a fearless exploration of how small and ordinary tragedies twist a life into a cruelty of social injustice, loss of faith, yearning for love, and literal exile.