There’s No One Way to be Filipino
An essay on how one Filipina-American woman finds connection to her Filipino roots in a culturally mixed world.
“What are you?”
That is a question I have been asked countless times, and one I have asked myself an equal amount. What am I?
I’m a woman. A daughter. A granddaughter. A high school graduate. A college graduate. A writer. A plant lover. A creator. I am, as we all are, many things. And yet, none of what I listed answers the question above. That question, I have come to learn, usually implicitly refers to my ethnicity. And my ethnicity, it seems, is often up to the interpretation of the person asking the question.
The answer, in theory, is simple: My mother is Filipino, my father is German and Swedish. But that answer only ever leads to more questions.
“So, you’re not Chinese?” “Hablas español?” “Oh my God, you’re Asian? You look so white.” “But where were you born?” “Do you speak Tagalog?” “Is your mom Filipino? It’s usually the mom.”
“You’re mestiza,” my mom told me at an early age. “Mixed.” That, to many Filipinos, is a highly desirable quality — colorism and colonial mentality run deep in our culture — but it’s not without a price. For me, the price has always been that I am too white to be Filipino, yet not white enough to just be white.
One day in high school, my classmates and I were asked to sit in sections that corresponded with our ethnicities. I watched as the European, South Korean and Chinese students decisively took their spots, while a handful of white students inexplicably sat in the Native American section. I sat down with the few fellow Pacific Islanders there were, only for a white classmate to approach me and say I did not belong there.
Illustration of the author by Goldie Siglos
Exclusively for Mercado Vicente
“Microaggressions, whether conscious or unconscious, always have the same effect: they separate you from those around you. After a while, they start to separate you from yourself, too.”
A few years ago, an Asian friend told me I could not call myself Asian if I couldn’t give myself a proper manicure. I laughed it off, but later internalized the passive aggression behind that comment. Microaggressions, whether conscious or unconscious, always have the same effect: they separate you from those around you. After a while, they start to separate you from yourself, too.
All humans seek connection. We seek it through family, friends, food, fashion, books, television shows and so on. On a deeper level, though, we seek connection from ourselves.
Since the coronavirus quarantine began, I have been living with my parents in my childhood home, sleeping in the same room where I used to stay up late on AIM, play Neopets on my desktop, talk to strangers in internet chat rooms, journal, collage, read magazines and sit on the floor listening to mall-bought CDs on my boombox. Here, I’ve begun reconnecting not just with my younger self, but the Filipino self from which I have long felt disconnected.
I sensed at an early age that tradition and culture are essential to healthy self-esteem. I have long struggled with self-esteem, as I’m sure those of you reading this have, too. I believe my own struggles have stemmed from a lack of identity partly rooted in a disconnection from — and within — the Filipino culture.
For the past two months, I have been video-chatting with a woman named Connie from Bohol, a province in the Visayas region of the Philippines that boasts, as she likes to remind me every now and then, “the world’s smallest monkey,” aka the Philippine Tarsier. Connie is my Tagalog teacher. Natututo ako.
Language, to me, is the key to culture. More than a tool for communication, language gives insights into the collective mentality of the people who speak it. It didn’t take many Tagalog lessons for me to learn the following about Filipino people:
We are humble. We are polite. We are respectful to elders. We don’t assign genders to objects. We are resourceful, using one word to mean a variety of things depending on the context of the sentence and the stress of the syllable. Due to hundreds of years of colonization, we sometimes use Spanish and American words, but we have adopted them as our own because we are a welcoming people. Despite speaking more than a hundred different languages, we have chosen one language to unite us because we value community and connection with one another, as well as with other cultures.
“Due to hundreds of years of colonization, we sometimes use Spanish and American words, but we have adopted them as our own becaue we are a welcoming people.”
Kapwa is my new favorite word. It means “shared identity” among Filipinos with each other — and beyond.
As I write this, race is the topic in the United States. The death of George Floyd and too many other Black men and women at the hands of police has reignited widespread fervor for the Black Lives Matter movement. I recently read “Brown Skin, White Minds” by E.J.R. David and learned about David Fagen, an African-American soldier stationed in the Philippines who abandoned his position to join the Filipino revolution at the end of the 19th century. Fagen’s “fuck you” to the Americans sparked a sense of pride in me. A hero, he chose to stand in solidarity with the oppressed Filipinos.
That is kaisahan.
My favorite dessert is halo-halo, a cold dessert introduced to the Filipino people by the Japanese. My favorite kind of halo-halo has shaved ice, beans, fruits, chunks of leche flan and ube ice cream. Halo-halo means “mix-mix,” which describes both my ethnicity and Filipino culture at large.
When I entered my late Twenties, I started caring less about what sets me apart and more about what connects me to others. Americans, particularly white people, have a tendency to value individuality over community in a way that can be selfish and even harmful to ourselves. We spend so much time thinking about what makes us unique, we forget how good it feels to tap into our shared interconnectedness.
“Americans, particularly white people, have a tendency to value individuality over a community in a way that can be selfish and even harmful to ourselves.”
Filipino culture is a halo-halo bound together by kapwa. There simply is no one way to be Filipino because being Filipino fundamentally means being many things at once. Have you ever considered how amazing it is that the Philippines is made up of thousands — thousands! — of islands, and yet, we remain as one? Who else in the world can say as much?
ILLUSTRATION BY MAURA RODRIGUEZ
EXCLUSIVELY FOR MERCADO VICENTE
If I could, I would tell my younger self to not feel the burden of explaining my ethnicity to others. I would tell myself that I don’t have to prove I am Filipino because simply being me is my birthright. If people find my ethnicity confusing, that’s their problem, not mine. And certainly, no one ever has the right to tell me what I am or where I belong.
I wrote earlier that the price of being mixed, I feel, is a lack of belonging to either race that shapes me. I wonder now if belonging really comes with a price.
As I reconsider the opening question to this essay, the only answer I have come up with is this:
Ako ay.