American Asian
Seven Yrs Later are stories on change, in dialogue with Seven Yrs Ago. For a glimpse into my ethnic identity at 17, read my common app essay. For blunter views at 21, read my Note to Self.
Amid the incomprehensible chatter and tangy aroma, I leaned on two legs of the chair. My last personal statement was on my hatred for smiling, or rather, faking a feeling, so it was ironic I had a new topic. My college counselor pressed that it would be in my benefit to write about race instead. “Colleges like that,” she said, having said the same thing to my friends who didn’t look like her. I pumped my leg twice, dropped, and finished: Amid the incomprehensible chatter and tangy aroma, I sit, silent.
For me, identifying myself as Asian is similar to how probably many white people identify themselves as American; roots dissolve. Mom and Dad came through JFK, closer to Ellis Island than Angel. I’m a New Yorker by birth, Arizona cowkid by raising, Filipino by milk and blood. Lola tended to her first grandchild as Mom and Dad worked when and where they had to. Memories overwritten, I imagine sewing machine laughs and strong whiffs of my forehead until Lola was pulled back to her homeland. Mom luckily had a scattered village in place and I slept over at every Tita’s she knew. The decor, games, and playmates changed, but the scents and sounds seemed universal: crunchy lumpia, sizzling loganisa, catfish bathing in vinegar, plopping mounds of rice and silog. These goods proved less ubiquitous in school, making them assets in the Lunchable economy. As food became a conscious marvel, appearance turned into speculation.
Eyes were stretched and rhymes deemed me Chinese, but I retorted I was Filipino every time. How could they not know what everyone else around me knew, nevermind that the best movie was Mulan? When I started Spanish in first grade, my teacher and parents exclaimed it shared words with Tagalog, the Philippines’ national language. Yet that was an ocean away from Arizona; I wasn’t Mexican though we were the same colors. My fairer classmates commented on my skin, often with envy, which Dad confirmed. I browned with glee on trips to the Philippines, not having to peel my way there. Donning my preteen “Filipina with a Brain'' shirt, I still heard “Chinese,” less insult than mislabel, but it didn’t stop me from tackling assholes. In spite of the sport, I was reputably high-achieving and polite, which are supposedly Asian qualities, but I’m my parents’ daughter. Then came the depressive drifting and changing schools, and after the divorce, cultures receded.
Talk vanished from my homes as I cobbled whatever friends would accept someone who was so quiet. I found kinship with the white and black kids who liked anime though I watched little of it. I befriended the five other Asians and we self-sorted by personalities like everyone else. Our class got into the paper for being “diverse” though we had less than 25 kids. I guess it was interesting we resembled a model UN; I was just trying to finish high school.
While I was annoyed with my shapeless body and how we didn’t have more bread, I don’t recall wanting to be white. The white people around me didn’t make a big deal out of being white, so I didn’t make a big deal out of being Asian. Then college apps came, student body stats, then college, and something I stopped paying attention to moved with me to California.
I get offended. I don’t do anything charac. Asian (to my knowledge)―only my parents + small background. No one asks where I’m from like Asian people do: I respond, “Arizona,” and they say, “No, really.” Other ethnicities ask too, but they don’t have the rubric, the one that deducts when I forget to take my shoes off and when I cannot eat pho. I left a generous feast hungry when I couldn’t apply chopsticks like my Chinese friends did, and worse, how my white friend did. Korean and Taiwanese kids took me to night markets, shopping trips, their houses, a grunion run, but I waited, just waited, for when my card would be revoked. I didn’t know that India was part of Asia, that eyelids were a thing, that people cared that much about the moon. Yet when someone non-Asian assumed I knew, I bristled over presumably somebody’s behalf.
Confounding this, no one can tell what I am, not even other Filipinos. I’ve heard Thai, Mongolian, Chinese, Japanese, but in the Philippines, I’m almost exclusively guessed as Korean. Having met actual Koreans, I see no resemblance, but it’s fine to be mistaken for an heir to a beauty empire. My light tan and lanky frame perhaps take cue from the Hispanic and Chinese bends in my line. At least my nose is classically nonexistent; Dad said our ancestors fell flat on their faces.
Filipino life is a combination of Spanish familial and religious principles, Chinese societal standards, and American pop culture. The islands became independent in 1946, after centuries of being the colonial stepping-stone into the east. Save the mass of experts unpacking that, I’m fragmented from the outset. I don’t know where the indigenous traditions of 2000 inhabited islands transcend and end, so I can only skim the bubbles of influence and pop.
Competitive excellence and adherence to elders seem to run throughout Asia, though that racialized formula gets reinforced everywhere. As malls declined in the states, they surged in the Philippines, blasting Taylor Swift and airing NBA games to cheering food courts. My enormous family felt less like Eat Drink Man Woman and more like My Big Fat Greek Wedding if Greeks were staunchly Catholic. Mom is one of seven, and her mom, one of eleven, and that adds up to joyous Sunday shouting over the clinks of forks and spoons. And I, a former nonconformist, one of one, who goes to church when I feel guiltiest, would find this mix profound if I just knew what anyone was saying.
[T]he decide-all question is asked: “Do you understand or speak Tagalog?” Feebly, I reply, “Sort of, well… no.” As expected, the person turns towards mom, changing the topic with laughter and native tongue. I return to refuge on the couch, enveloped in a cloud of sticky air and anticlimax. My parents thought Tagalog would confuse me; people speak English here after all. I had a few ad hoc lessons—“Kamusta ka” and “I know that already”—but I understood enough what was meant, not even aware that Mom had a different dialect than Dad. After the divorce though, the sole common language was English, sprinkled with “anak” and “pangga.” International cousins translate their parents for me, and Filipino strangers scoff right after they hear that I’m not Korean.
I practiced Spanish for years, passed an AP test, wrote a 20-page paper, yet I haven’t tested my tongue in LA. Cuban and Nicaraguan friends flowed, and I understood them better than I did Tagalog, but I never trusted I could jump in. Even if I remember the words, there’s the way to say them; I went on a date with a Filipino who said lolo with long o’s and I knew that it was over. A great-aunt crooked a finger to contend the importance of knowing numerous languages and I was well-aware. I had begun to understand what not understanding has kept me from by then.
I, on the other hand, have to carry a country of people I don’t know, a language I don’t speak, a culture I don’t understand. And it isn’t wrong that I don’t know these things; it’s wrong for people to assume I do. I think of what has led me to writing this now, no casual suggestion for getting into Yale and the thorniness of divulging my disconnects. What’s become apparent the past decade is that much of what exists warrants a reckoning, and America is not exempt, and neither am I. Since college, I’ve joined collectives that celebrate nuanced identities; found creatives and friends who share mine; written stories about inherited patterns and ideals, what I enfold and what I sense could be challenged. I engage with my racial identity because I’d rather feel deserving than defined.
I haven’t reached full acceptance that where I lack has its own authenticity. What eggs that on is the one-take that I should be an encyclopedia on being Asian, let alone a symbol for Filipino America. One’s background and value cannot be determined by sight and I’m not obligated to answer anyone’s thoughts on mine. But then I consider the Asian Americans who’ve been forced to answer to others’ perceptions without a single word.
Before “Kung flu,” Vicha Ratanapakdee, 84, took a walk when he was rammed into the ground and died of a brain hemorrhage. Pak Ho, 75, suffered a fatal injury from someone who assaulted another 70-year-old Asian man weeks before. An unnamed 39-year-old Asian woman was doused with acid outside her apartment. Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Sun Cha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaoje Tan, and Yong Ae Yue, 44 to 74, six Asian women of nine victims, were shot while doing their jobs. Such attacks have existed, like in 1989 Stockton, when a white gunman entered a school, wounded 30, and killed five children of Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees. In 1982 Detroit, Vincent Chin, 27, was butchered as a war cry against the Japanese auto industry, despite Vincent being Chinese. Chinese people were targeted a century earlier in 1871 Los Angeles during one of the largest mass lynchings in US history. Current headlines do not cover every unmasked aggressor who coughs, spits, and throws slurs like “c*nt Ch*nk.” The majority of discriminatory AAPI incidents the past year were against women and the elderly.
Appearances don’t matter unless you’re seen as threatening and violence doesn’t ensue unless you seem defenseless. I want to claim my identity before someone claims it for me. I’ll take your questions now.
A version of this essay was republished by Reappropriate.