What is the symbolic meaning of the “Scent of apples” in the story?

Scent of Apples

Bienvenido N. Santos

Question: What is the symbolic meaning of the “Scent of apples” in the story?

Answer:

There are three identified symbolic meaning of the title “scent of apples”. These symbolic meanings are "exile, loneliness, and isolation". A line in the story illustrates that the scent of apples which Fabio always smell gives him the feeling of exile, loneliness, and isolation.

"Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.
"Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to die, and they show their colors, proud-like."
"No such thing in our own country," I said.
That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on a long deserted tangent, but ever there perhaps. How many times did lonely mind take unpleasant detours away from the familiar winding lanes towards home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost youth, the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the exile knows.

The excerpt above represents that Fabio feels that he is living in exile, even though he may have lived in America for many years. He had to create an identity for himself that could bridge the gap between his cultural and racial heritage as Filipino and his new status as Filipino American, living in a culture very different from his own.

Each time Fabio smell the scent of the apples, he always remember our country, our country that has no apples. He has the feeling of loneliness everyday because he smells the scent of the apple every time.

Looking at the bright side, Fabio has a good wife which is worthy of her namesake, the biblical Ruth. He has a good-looking son and an apple orchard which gives him more apples than he can sell. His wife, his son, and the apple orchard are abundance enough, but his excessive nostalgia for home, where nobody remembers him, makes him blind to all these blessings. He wastes his abundance, like the apples he gives to the pigs.

Fabio should rethink the idea of home as not a place where he were born and grew up, but where he is at present, where his new family is.

Thus, the feeling of loneliness, exile and isolation are the common feelings of immigrant Filipinos, it comes with the fear of no longer belonging to a culture which itself seems at times to be wasting away, and finds expression in the rhythm of arrangement provided by the selections in Scent of Apples.