This blog site began as an idea lolling around in my head for several years. How could I capture the Filipino-American experience? What does that mean anyway? Like many ideas it was rough and not fully formed, it was a jumbled mess of ambitious starts and disappointing dead ends. Often I would tinker with the thought of writing a short story, compiling an essay, or interviewing Filipinos with a distinctly American experience. Most of the time, I pushed that idea aside. Occasionally, when I would visit my grandma or attend a Filipino-styled party, the idea would peek its head out at me and beckon me to mold it into something more. As always, I’d brush it off.
Last year I went off on a trip to Taiwan to study and perfect my Chinese. Don’t ask why I did it, that’s a whole different story.
While in Taiwan, I ate, lived, and breathed Chinese/Taiwanese language and culture. There I established a small barkada (group of friends), the majority of them hailing from the Philippines. They reminded me of my childhood friends and opened up a part of me longing to relate to their lives. With their encouragement, I booked a $100 round trip ticket to the Philippines… my first time. I suppose you could call it a pilgrimage to my homeland. But, it wasn’t that at all. I had my sights set on eating as much Filipino food I could, while sunning on the pristine beaches of Palawan, occasionally snapping a picture or two of historic sights and ogling the locals.
And, like my nagging Filipino mother, the idea of writing about my Filipino-American life emerged once again. Right there. I think it was when I met my uncle for the very first time and felt ashamed that I couldn’t speak a single word of his dialect. Or was it when the concierge at the Palawan inn I stayed at tried to ask me about myself in Tagalog and I could only pretend I understood what she said. Perhaps it was when I made that first step on Philippine soil and felt like a traitor for waiting so long to make that trip. How awkward it was to be an American in the PI… and the locals all knew it by the way I dressed, moved, and stuttered.
That idea emerged full force refusing to go back to that cluttered mess in the back of my mind. Either I was going to find a way to creatively express the Filipino American experience – both good and bad – or it was going to nag at me until I went crazy. I thought, why not write about all these awkward experiences, both in the Philippines on that one trip and here in the US.
This blog site serves as an outlet for me to work out how I felt about those awkward moments. I spent the first half of my life miserably aware that the color of my skin and my socio-economic status didn’t match the skin tone and wealth of my friends and heroes. The second half of my life was spent successfully in oblivion to Filipino culture and tradition. My visit to my mom’s home and the country she spent her childhood solidified my desire to figure out what it means to be ethnically Filipino but culturally American.
I hope that these blog topics and posts will allow me to personally explore and become more open to the Filipino parts of myself and reconcile them with the American parts. I hate it that I pushed the boisterous heritage side away, while I embraced American individualistic ideals. I really missed out on what it meant to be part of that Filipino community, a community that didn’t even notice that I was absent.
So one day at work, I pitched my roughly formed idea to Grace-Sonia and Beverly. Instead of laughing, the more I discussed it with them, the more they became enthusiastic to become part of this experiment to shape and define that idea. We met a couple of times and this blog site became the final product.
The idea is still forming.
Let me know what you think.
