Dear Mama,
I know you'll probably hate hearing this, but I feel like you already knew…
For the longest time in my childhood, I hated being a Filipino American.
It didn’t help that the town I grew up in, Fairfield, CT, was 91.6% white, and only 3.7% Asian. And I don’t think that demographic includes Southeast Asians like us.
I remember in Sunday school, there were roughly thirty kids in my First Communion class. At 7 years old, I sat right in the middle of the classroom, looked around, and realized I was the only brown girl there. There was not a single person that looked like me, that I could relate to. I was probably the first Southeast Asian those kids ever met in their life. Every single student there was white, there were no Asians or other minority, and at 7 years old I realized that being me, I was automatically different from the rest of them.
Halloween came every year, and I wanted to be Snow White more than anything. I came to my own realization that Snow White is literally 'Snow White' because of her fair skin. I didn’t want the other kids to laugh at me for trying to be something I wasn’t. I settled on wearing some skin tight green and orange zebra striped morph suit with feathered arms. I was basically a disco parrot. It was terrifying.
I hated our Filipino culture. I remember my Sunday school teacher asked everyone to write down their favourite foods, and I said, dinuguan. When she asked what that was, I yelled out happily, “PIG’S BLOOD!” Not that I had friends in that class anyway, but addressing my culture didn’t help my outcast status. I didn’t understand that Fairfield dinners were pretty much limited to pizza, pasta, ribs, and burgers with half a dash of pepper. I argued with you and Papa for always cooking rice for dinner every single day without fail. I questioned why we couldn’t eat like “normal people”. Normal people.
I remember as a young girl, I would ask you over and over why I couldn’t go to summer camp, the YMCA, or take music lessons. I hated how you always stitched my older sister’s clothes to fit me instead of buying new ones. You said it was all too expensive. I was too young to understand. All I knew was that it wasn’t fair that other kids had all these amazing opportunities and material things but I didn’t. What did I do to get the short end of the stick?
What stuck with me the most, Mama, is that I couldn’t understand why other moms were doctors, teachers, store owners, and politicians, while you wouldn’t even tell me what you did for a living. Once I finally learned, I had to listen to people take the occupation of “housekeeper” and sugarcoat it into “secretary”. I never thought of you as any less. You told me that Filipino highschool degrees were useless in America and that it was extremely hard for poorly educated immigrants to get well-paying jobs.
I blamed it all on my race. The loneliness, the yearly struggle of finding an Asian or Southeast Asian idol that I could be for Halloween, the shame I had towards my favourite food, our struggles with money, and it all fueled my hatred even more.
I didn’t know any better. I looked around the white community I lived in, saw the privileges little kids my age had no idea they possessed, and I’m sorry Mama, but I was jealous. I wanted the life they had. It looked easy, glamourous, fun, and it looked like they never worried about the things that plagued me since I was 7.
I’ve grown a lot since then. I know it was hard and extremely frustrating when I took the culture you grew up with and spat it back in your face.
But never again. I spent too long searching among branches for something that only appears in roots. Thank you Mama, for never assimilating into white American society like I so pathetically tried to for so long. Thank you for feeding me rice and dinuguan, and thank you for putting pretty lipstick on me to take the attention away from my disco parrot costume. Thank you for working your absolute hardest in a job most people would scoff at. And thank you Mama, for loving me when I didn't love myself.
Love,
Your Filipino American Daughter
