I didn’t grow up thinking of myself as American.
I grew up in Fishers, Indiana in a predominantly White and upper-middle class neighborhood.
I’ve been well aware of the idea that I will perpetually be a foreigner to people living in these kinds of communities since long before I had the vocabulary to voice it as such.
I’ve known that shame from the moment I got into an argument with a White American classmate over the word “hammock” of all things.
In some ways, we were both right: I had the right spelling of the word. She, of course, had the “right” pronunciation.
Shame.
In some ways, I am morbidly fascinated by how vividly the memory comes back. The way she asked me to repeat the way I pronounced “hammock” and burst out laughing – mockingly, in a sort of disbelief, when I did. And even long after we got to the part where I “won” about the correct spelling of the word hammock, I was hot with shame and a confusing feeling of having lost.
It shouldn’t still sting.
Somehow, it still does. Less than it did back then. But the sting is still there.
The sting that sits atom-deep where I know that people never look at me and think American.
Hell, a bouncer at a bar in my college town once looked straight at my US passport that very clearly states I was born in Kentucky… and asked me what it was like to be an international student.
And honestly? Most days, that doesn’t bother me. I’m happy about that – really! I am so proud of my Filipino and Chinese heritage.
But… it’s different being Filipino in the States and being Filipino in the Philippines.
In the US, I am one of the lucky Filipino-Americans who has been to the Philippines. I am one of the lucky ones who was exposed proudly and often to different facets of our culture, our cooking, our art, and our history. I am one of the lucky ones who was born to not one, but two Filipino immigrant parents who didn’t want me to assimilate, but who wanted me to be Filipino much more than they ever wanted to see me become American. Heck, I even had a Filipino yaya as a child… but that is a discussion for another day.
All this to say, in the States, my Filipino-ness is rarely ever in question.
Yet, in the Philippines, I at once both find myself and lose all sense of the person I’ve always thought myself to be.
I marvel and am nearly undone by how small and innocuous things seem designed for me in a way I’ve never before experienced. Seeing cars flaunt bumper stickers with the Filipino flag. Noticing how frames in every glasses store actually fit my face. And, if you’ve been in my situation, you get how incredible is this: I can actually see myself in the faces and features of the people around me.
I am used to sticking out like a highlighter on a page. Though my mom has always been rather strict about my safety, she began allowing me to wander about on my own at the store when bringing me along on errands far earlier than I had ever expected her to. At first, it came as a surprise. But I quickly realized it was because it’s hard for me to go “missing” when I am the only, singular brown-skinned and black-haired child in the store.
I didn’t realize how alienating it was to be the singular Asian/Brown kid in every room I walked into until I was in a room full of people who looked like me.
And yet. They only looked like me.
I am deeply ashamed of how little I know of what it means to be a Filipino in the Philippines.
I speak no Filipino language fluently. I am not a graduate of the Filipino educational system. I am dumb with imposter syndrome.
Yet, strangely, because I am often the first Filipino they have ever met, it is an unstated rule that to White Americans, I must be a representative and ambassador of (and educator about) the Philippines
It’s baffling.
But in part because I want to know for myself and in part because I want to know in case I am asked, I find myself wanting to drink from the fountain of Filipino culture and identity.
I am endlessly fascinated by all things Filipino –
- our dances
- our martial arts
- our fiber arts
- our home decor
- our folklore
- our music
- our medicine
- our kapwa
And just as much as I love learning and reading about them, I inexplicably always feel shy talking about them.
Especially when it comes to tribal, Indigenous, or precolonial traditions or art forms.
Which is precisely why attending the Vogue Talk “Intelligence, Agency, and the Future” was so soothing in some regards.
While Marian Pastor Roces definitively stated that Ancestral Intelligence cannot be accessed by someone like me who lacks fluency in any Filipino Austronesian language, both she and Tad Ermitano agreed that cultural production/evolution comes from (and has always come from) the very interaction of taking, sharing, and borrowing between cultures. Entire genres of art have been founded on creative misunderstanding.
So in a sense, it almost felt like a benediction:
It’s okay to play in the sandbox of Filipino art (that might not have grown with me or been embedded within my tongue and DNA since birth), as long as I remain honest about my own lack of Ancestral Intelligence in those regards.
In some ways, the permission is like water to a garden. It makes me feel more comfortable to encounter different aspects of Filipino tradition and culture as a stranger, as much as I grieve the fact that I don’t know it like a sister.
Yet, even with my grief, I also feel excited by this framing – I have the opportunity to create new meaning through my encounters with Filipino culture as a Filipino who grew up in the diaspora.
And isn’t that a wonderous, beautiful thing?
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