My Transition from Deliberate Ignorance

I must have had at least one dream each week about something Filipino since starting this project. Just last week, I dreamed that my grandpa sold his first and only house in the United States to move to the SoMa district. It doesn’t matter whether the dreams are about my own family, the food, or the people I’ve recently met. The fact is that I’m now living my culture in a manner I once disdained.

My brother and I were understandably Americanized by both our parents and our two sets of grandparents. When they moved here as children, both of my parents had to quickly assimilate at school. While growing up, we rarely heard Tagalog or Ilocano (another dialect spoken by my dad’s side of the family) in our own household. We wouldn’t even have the choice to learn the languages or even the food, for that matter.

Consequently, I developed no interest or pride in my culture. It even went so far as I thought our food was weird, and not nearly as good as Chinese food or McDonald’s. The only dish my brother and I liked was chicken adobo, a simple stew made from soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves and pepper. Often, we still opted for fast food. Chicken nuggets and French fries ruled our palettes.

I finally took note that I was a bit of the odd-one-out in middle school. Most of my Filipino friends joined the Filipino club, Maharlika. The desire to fit in won out, and I suddenly found myself immersed in my culture, but uncomfortably so. I wasn’t doing it for my own reasons, so inside I was resisting. I quit after one year.

Fairly early on, my grandparents on my father’s side decided it had been a mistake to teach us only English, and it bothered them that we knew nothing about our history. Pa tried to tell us stories about the homeland, but we had already reached the age where we couldn’t be bothered with the past, or we greeted his stories with disbelief. I distinctly remember asking Pa to teach me how to whistle, but instead he started rambling on about Filipinos and the yo-yo. Irritated, I wandered away. (Later in life when we finally got Internet access, I looked up the yo-yo and realized he was right.)

Despite living in a very large Filipino-American community, I learned nothing about Filipino culture outside of my own home. There was nothing about Filipinos in our history classes until perhaps eighth grade, when I found a small section about the Philippine-American War in my textbook. Of course, there wasn’t any real substance to the subject, and it remained a mystery.

During high school and my first two years of college, I didn’t think about what it meant to be Filipino. By then I had already decided that it wasn’t really a big part of me. As I got older, I realized that outside of my hometown of Carson, California, not as many people even knew what a Filipino was to begin with. I spent a summer in Ithaca, New York and attended Boston University for a semester. In both places I was constantly asked, “So what are you? Chinese?” Even my current boyfriend, who grew up just nine miles away from my hometown, hadn’t heard much about Filipino-Americans before meeting me.

Ma’s death last year changed everything for me though. In reliving my life with her and acknowledging my life without her, I started remembering the hints of culture that my grandparents subtly weaved into our upbringing. I ate more Filipino food than I thought, such as Filipino egg rolls (lumpia), Filipino chicken soup (tinola), and Filipino beef stew (caldereta). I became more curious about my family’s personal history, and questioned my dad about it, verifying his information with whatever Pa told me.

I learned that my great-grandpa was among the first wave of Filipino immigrant workers to come over in 1906, when there was a need for sugarcane workers. He and his oldest son went to Hawaii to make a fortune. His son, Mike, was only 18 when he decided to stay in the States, eventually moving to Southern California, while my great-grandpa returned home to gamble away his share of the wealth and father more children.

When Pa was old enough to have his own family, he soon decided that moving to the United States was the best thing he could do for his young family. In 1968, he contacted Mike, whom he’d never met, and saved enough money to move to Carson. He left behind Ma, my dad and my aunt until he earned enough money to move them to the United States. My grandpa had a college education in the Philippines, but that meant little in the new country so he worked in a textile factory. It took him more than a year to save enough money. To cut costs, he lived with his brother, and when the rest of the family finally came over, they stayed with Uncle Mike until they could afford their own house down the street.

My dad was nine years old when he left the Philippines. In many ways, Filipino immigrants, especially younger ones, have an easier time assimilating because they already learn English in the Philippines. When they come here, many try very hard to downplay their accents. To this day, my dad and my mom (she moved here when she was 14) both barely retain the inflections that would make it apparent that they were born elsewhere. Consequently, I cannot pronounce anything in Tagalog or Ilocano that doesn't make it painfully obvious that I'm a native U.S. citizen.
Just the other day, I held open the apartment building door for an older Filipino man. He looked at me, asked me if I was Filipina, and when I answered in the affirmative, he smiled and said "Salamat po," which means "thank you." I desperately wanted to tell him "you're welcome" in his own tongue, but I completely blanked out and could only answer him in English.
After deciding to write this piece, I called my grandpa to ask him to verify some of the stories I remembered from my childhood. This became a fairly regular occurrence. I would call, ask him an arbitrary question, and then he'd chuckle and start rambling. I even started testing out some Filipino recipes that I had tried when I was younger, but only if I could remember the names of the dishes. My culinary attempts greatly amused Pa, because whenever I started cooking a recipe, I would call him right away to ask him how he would normally cook it. The first time I made chicken adobo, he asked me if I even knew how to work the stove.
At this point, it has been three months since I began this project. It has definitely proven to be more personally enriching than I ever could have imagined. My interest in my own cultural background has piqued so much that I'll be taking a Filipino-American course next semester. Despite living 400 miles away, my grandpa and I are closer than we have been in years. And now, when ever I get homesick for my grandpa's chicken tinola (chicken soup), all I have to do is remember his tips.