Meet Buwan: Character Profile & Excerpt

Before we jump into Buwan’s profile, mark your calendars for my interview with podcaster and author Karen E. Osborne, airing on Tuesday, April 1. You’ll be able to watch the show, called “What Are You Reading? What Are You Writing?” after 9:00 a.m., on Karen’s YouTube channel. (And check out her just-released murder mystery, Justice for Emerson, which I loved!)

This is the last of six character profiles to introduce you to the group of friends in Beautiful & Terrible Things. Award-winning author Cam Torrens had this to say about the friendship aspect of the story:

“Stevens left me with the lesson that we are born as we are, but live lives shaped by the transformative power of friendship.”

Character Profile: Buwan

Meet Buwan Bakunawa: Buwan, or “Bu” as his friends call him, is a 31-year-old, straight, Filipino-American man. He is an unemployed artist who suffers from Bipolar 1 Disorder. His name means “moon” in the Tagalog language.

What He Represents: Our instability

Personality in Brief: The Artist

Personality in More Detail: Buwan is a happy-go-lucky individual on the surface, but he bears the weights of racism due to his bronze skin and of his mental health challenges. In some ways, he is the glue that holds the group together, reminding them of what matters most in life with his casually dispensed nuggets of wisdom.

A reader favorite, he has a habit of pointing out that “there are two kinds of people in the world” – for example, those who, as adults, continue trying to please their parents, and those who don’t.

His Challenges, Hopes & Dreams: Buwan’s mental health struggle is significant enough that his goal in life is merely to hold down a job or sell his artwork.

What Others Say

How the Friends Describe Buwan:

Charley: A sprightly figure with bronze skin, short black hair, and a huge smile burst from inside with a bang of the screen door. A Chinese-looking dragon tattoo emerged from the sleeve of his black T-shirt, encircling much of his left arm, and tattooed bracelets of various geometric designs encircled his right forearm.

How Reviewers Describe Him

“Buwan [wages] a heartbreaking war to be someone other than himself.” (Booklife)

“Bu, perhaps the most challenged, is the heart of the group and the story.” (Carla on Goodreads)

What Buwan Says

Quotable Quotes:

“I’m not really an introvert. I like being around people. I only like being alone when I’m in my studio. But technically, I go both ways, social and anti-social. High and low. Officially. Medically.”

“[Depression is] a sickness. When you get a cold, no one tells you to decide you don’t have one. They don’t say it’s the food you eat or your attitude making you sneeze and cough. But when someone’s got a mental illness, people say you should just get over it or decide to be normal. If it was that easy, a lot less people would be depressed.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who seek the love they need, and those who seek people they think need them. Wanting to help people doesn’t make you bad. But don’t forget to think about what you need.”

“If we don’t stand by our friends, we’re nothing.”

Excerpt: Buwan

Buwan had put his prescription away after making plans for this weekend with Xander, first because he was tired of feeling sluggish and foggy-brained, and he missed the power of creativity rushing through his veins; second, because Xander had said he’d bring a few female friends, and Buwan needed his sex drive back to normal, just in case.

He lay on the living room floor, trying to lure Fred into play. Fred stood, stretched, yawned, and padded down the hallway where he nudged Xander’s door open. Buwan heard the dog settle on the floor inside with a grunt.

“Traitor,” Buwan mumbled while pacing the living area. His energy had increased throughout the day, his long-suppressed vitality returning in an ebb and flow pattern, and now he was jazzed. Giving in to the house’s silence, he retreated upstairs to his parents’ room, where he flopped onto the bed and lay spread-eagled, his eyes tracing the swirled architectural detail on the ceiling.

He’d been mildly depressed when his parents first suggested he invite friends out to their summer home for the weekend more than a month ago. Then he ran into his old high school friend Xander before a therapy appointment in the city, and he’d asked Xander to come to the summer house basically to make his parents happy. But over the next few days, Buwan repeatedly flashed back to how stable and strong he’d been in high school, and he got excited about the weekend, thinking it might bring some surety back to his life. Excitement turned to frustration when he realized merely thinking about his better years wasn’t going to return him to the physical and mental state of that time. In particular, his weight bothered him; he fluctuated from paunchy when taking his meds reliably to skinny when the mania was stronger than the meds. Reliable muscle tone was a thing of the past.

Convincing himself he would stop the meds only long enough to lose a few pounds and regain some energy before the weekend, he went cold turkey. Sure enough, a few days ago he’d felt life surging through his body, albeit still sluggishly and in bursts, and his appetite abated. His brain cleared, his thoughts crispened. His confidence returned from the dark closet where it had been biding its time.

And now, man, he had so much energy. He jumped off the bed and moved to the master suite’s spacious sitting room, which his parents had re-purposed as a studio with a daybed for him. Both the studio and bedroom pulled the water view in through massive picture windows in daytime. At night, the studio window resembled a gaping, pitch-black abyss, until Buwan flicked on the light and tamed the view. He picked out a primed, four-by-five-foot canvas from a stack in the corner and set it on his easel. He wheeled over two small tables, one holding palette paper, his favorite palette knife, and a clean rag. The other held dozens of acrylic paint tubes, several large tin cans full of brushes, and a glass jar, which he filled with water in the bathroom before replacing it on the table.

He selected a large brush and faced the easel. The nighttime window reflected the back of the easel and canvas, and Buwan, paintbrush hovering in the air. Susurrant water sounds filtered through smaller, open windows to the sides of the picture window. He closed his eyes for several minutes. Upon opening them, he tore off his T-shirt, revealing a series of moon tattoos trailing down his spine, starting with a waxing crescent at the top, building to a full moon in the middle, and ending with a waning crescent.

His tattooed arms took off in a frenzy of sweeping motions like a symphony conductor guiding his musicians. The sinuous dragon on his arm rippled as if it were a muse guiding the creation. Buwan blazed broad trails of color across the canvas, jabbed blobs of paint as accents, and slowed to a concentrated pace to refine hue, line, and intensity to his liking.

Three hours later, arm and wrist muscles throbbing, he dropped face first onto the daybed, paintbrush clutched in one hand. The paintbrush dropped, smearing an inch of rich black paint on the light gray wooden floor. Drool slid out of the corner of his mouth as he snored, smiling, into the sheets.

Where to Buy

Beautiful and Terrible Things is available in paperback, ebook and audiobook, on all major sites. Click here to get to most of them; it’s also available on Walmart and Target.

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