What is culture?
Is it values, beliefs, a way of being – something internal and intangible and intrinsic?
Or is it literature? Learned movement? The things your mom bought to help you recover when you were sick? The clothing your grandparents wear?
Does choosing both make me a consumerist sellout who is craving an aesthetic of my culture, nothing more?
Or does it make me desperate, clinging to whatever vestiges of my culture I can claim for my own, even as people say I’m not really _ because I grew up in the diaspora?
I’ve always hated the word “traditionalist.”
I didn’t like it. I thought it meant the opposite of being progressive. Of loving others. Of caring about their rights.
But in some ways, I see now, that I am a traditionalist.
Traditionalist.
/trəˈdɪʃ(ə)nəlɪst/
adjective
1. advocating the upholding or maintenance of tradition.
noun
1. an advocate of maintaining tradition, especially so as to resist change.
And while in many cases, I am open to change, difference, and diversity, I undoubtedly cling to my cultural traditions.
(Some of these things, I didn’t even learn properly.)
I didn’t have a mother or a father or a grandparent who passed down each of these traditions that I now carry like a lifeline.
I grasp and yearn and gasp like I’m drowning, gulping in every last drop of air.
Greedily, I hand over money for arnis classes. A walis. Traditional Filipino jewelry and textiles. The big wooden spoon and fork that now hang in my kitchen. Apps that claim to help you learn a language that, in another life, could have been your native tongue.
I scour the internet for Chinese wellness products. Acupressure slippers. Oolong tea. Mugwort hammers. Tiger balm. Chinese community centers nearby. I try to forget those last internet searches, knowing that if the Chinese restaurant staff give me the American menus upon sight of me… well, it’s likely that I won’t be accepted in their community centers. At least not in the way I wish. Yet, my cabinet looks like a Chinese apothecary, full of glass jars where dried hawthorn, jujube dates, red goji berries, sweet longan, tangerine peels, rose buds, astralagus, and a wide variety of fungi…
When I buy these things, am I merely performing my culture? Desiring only to signal that I’m really one of them? That I truly belong to something, that to some group of people I’m not just Other?
Or am I trying in earnest to embody my identity, one trinket or workshop or poem at a time?
If I am performing my culture… what if that performance has been for me this whole time?
when home doesn't always feel like home
Home stops feeling like home,
when you're five years old and being laughed at for the scent of your food and the shape of your eyes
when you're eight and you realize that the first thing people notice about you is how you are different from them
when you're ten and it's the first time you cry, wondering if everyone thinks you are ugly because you are not White
when you're fifteen and wondering if you'll stay a citizen in your "home" country or be deported because some random man in a White house says so
when you're seventeen and anti-asian hate and violence are more rampant than ever and your parents think that you would be safer if you dyed your hair blonde
when you're nineteen, and your first date was with someone who used you as a placeholder, a body, because the White woman he liked didn't like him back
when you're twenty-one and your partner asks if you heard that man on the street call you a slur
when you're twenty-three and realize the place you thought was home doesn't see you as coming home either
and the first thing, the thing that defines you, becomes the one part of you that never loved you
I'm introduced as the cousin "from America"
and people always ask "what was it like to grow up there"
and i'm supposed to be happy
but i'm bitter
how ironic that i can't get away
from the place that never loved me
that it sneakily wound itself around my identity,
choking me
clawing at the copy of The History of the Filipino People book in my hands
my Mother's T'boli Necklace at my throat
the tongue that clumsily wraps around Tagalog words and phrases
the heart that belongs to Kapwa
the feet that were dusty from walking the dirt roads of Jimalalud and Pako Fields in Dumaguete
every single thing was part of my armor against the fear
that i wasn't filipino enough
and i wonder
who was i consuming for
who was i performing for
was it ever enough?
would it ever be enough?
will it never be enough?
for me?
and when, oh when
will i be home?
has it been inside me this whole time?
Leave a Reply