Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos: Summary, Themes and Ending
Quick answer: Scent of Apples by Bienvenido Santos: summary with the ending, Celestino Fabia's farm in Michigan, the question about Filipino women, the photograph, themes and craft.
After a wartime lecture in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a Filipino farmer named Celestino Fabia asks the speaker whether the women back home are still the same as they were twenty years ago. The speaker, a Filipino writer stranded in America by the war, gives a kind answer. Then Fabia invites him to his farm, and the visit tests the answer.
Bienvenido Santos (1911 to 1996) wrote Scent of Apples in the 1940s, drawing on his own years in the United States during the Second World War; it appears in You Lovely People (1955) and gave its name to his 1979 American collection. Santos is in copyright, so this page summarises and analyses without quotation.
The story in brief
The narrator, a Filipino intellectual touring the American Midwest during the war, speaks to an audience in Kalamazoo. A weathered man in the crowd, Celestino Fabia, rises to ask about Filipino women. The narrator says they are as good as they always were. Afterwards Fabia introduces himself: he has farmed thirty miles out for two decades, has an American wife and a son, and has not seen the Philippines since he left. He begs the narrator to come to dinner.
The farm is poor and smells of apples, the orchard's fruit stored through the house. Fabia's wife Ruth, worn and kind, and their boy Roger receive the guest warmly. On the wall is a framed photograph of a Filipina in traditional dress, which Fabia calls a picture of a woman from home, and it is clear it has become his memory of the country itself. Driving the narrator back, he asks him to visit his home town if he ever returns, then admits nobody there would remember him. They part at the station, and the narrator carries the smell of apples away.
The characters
Themes and meaning
Exam readings cover exile and nostalgia, the immigrant's divided loyalty, and the idealisation of home from a distance. The photograph is the standard symbol, a fixed image standing in for a changing country.
The sharper observation is that the narrator lies, gently, and the story approves. His answer about Filipino women is a gift rather than a report, and Santos shows that the exile needs the gift more than the truth. The scent of apples, an American smell, is what the narrator takes home; the exchange runs both ways.
The craft
The turn is the invitation, which moves the story from a public hall to a private kitchen and tests the narrator's easy answer against a real life. Santos structures the piece as question, answer, and then the long evidence.
The technique worth stealing is the object standing in for a nation: one photograph carries everything Fabia believes about home. Give an exile a single artefact and let its condition report the state of his memory.
For class and essays
What writers can take from this
- Name the photograph and the apples as paired symbols, one for each country.
- Argue that the narrator's kind untruth is the story's ethical centre.
- Give the wartime context: Santos himself was in the United States from 1941.
- For your own fiction, let one object hold a character's whole idea of a place.
- Structure a story as a public question answered privately.
- Let the narrator carry something away; exchange, not pity.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a visitor from home is asked a simple question by someone long exiled, gives a generous answer, and is then invited to see the life the exile has actually built, so that the answer must be judged against it.
Questions
What is the summary of Scent of Apples?
A Filipino writer lecturing in Michigan during the war meets Celestino Fabia, a farmer who left the Philippines twenty years earlier. Fabia invites him home, shows his American wife and son and a treasured photograph of a Filipina, and asks him to visit a home town that has forgotten him.
What is the theme of Scent of Apples?
Exile and the idealisation of home. Fabia keeps the Philippines fixed in a photograph while living a real life in a farmhouse that smells of apples.
Who is Celestino Fabia?
A Filipino immigrant farmer in Michigan, married to an American named Ruth, who has not seen his country in two decades and asks the narrator whether its women are still the same.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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