(Note: This is part satire, part autobiography. It is meant to be taken with a grain of salt!)
Every time I’m out gallivanting and an older Pilipino asks me “Pilipino ka ba?” and I say yes, I get these answers:
1) “Oh, you don’t look Pilipino. Was your dad ever in the military?” (No, my father wasn’t cool enough to be in the Navy, let alone the Army or the Marines.)
2) “Where are you parents from?” (I tell them my mom’s from Kalibo, Aklan, and my dad’s from Bulacan.) One guy actually said to me, “Kalibo has a lot of manananggal, are you one?”
3) Are you a nurse? (I get this one wayyyy too often, and usually with not just older generation Pilipin@s, but non-Pilipinos as well.)
When I was a kid, I had a bowl cut and was built like a beanpole. I was also quite tan in comparison to my little sister (her childhood nickname was Casper because she was very fair-skinned). My parents come from the Bahay Kubo, but they met here in California.
The reason why my sister is so fair skinned is because our dad is mestizo (his mix consists of Pilipino, Italian, and Spanish blood). People don’t think he’s Pinoy until he starts speaking Tagalog. My mom, on the other hand, has very Pilipino features (tan skin with a bulbous nose).
There have been numerous occasions when I had Pilipino women tell my dad that my sister has a white dad (obviously to his displeasure). It really fed into the “mas maputi, mas kissable” (the whiter you are, the more kissable you are) colonized mentality. (This was an actual whitening soap billboard in the Philippines!)
Obviously, this was a source of contention for me. To add insult to injury, I was often bullied in elementary and middle school for NOT being “Asian enough” by East Asian kids. This bullying continued all throughout high school, but this time it was by skinheads and white supremacist jocks who didn’t like “my kind”.
As I left the gulag of high school and entered college, my physical appearance began to change. I began embracing my indigenous looks, even going as far as weekly trips to Hollywood Tans to maintain that kayumanggi skintone. (I even dyed my hair jet black, even though my natural hair color is medium dark brown.) Being in student organizations helped that indigenous pride come along. This didn’t please my mom, since she wanted me to major in nursing (how typical) and embrace her colonized right-winged belief system.
When she pushed me to do nursing, I got sick of her trying to be a “Tiger mom” and thumbed my nose at her for forcing me into such a thankless occupation. (I’m not knocking Pin@y nurses, but my introverted personality makes me recoil at the thought of touching a sick person shooting waste from their orifices.)
So I did what every rebelling Pin@y kid does: Major in something that’s your passion but makes your parentals threaten disownment, citing that “you’ll be poor for the rest of your life.” (To this day, I STILL get this from my mom, even though I graduated in Fall 2009 with a dual BA.)
But wait, there’s more!
Since I ran with the eccentric artists (there were no mainstream hipsters at the time), I stopped listening to hip hop and embraced heavy metal music. In high school I was very much into Rammstein and Nine Inch Nails, mostly because of the rage I felt from being bullied. It grew into an insane love for thrash metal.
(Fun fact: The first Asian American metal band ever was Death Angel, and all the members are Pinoy.)
Since I was a weird artsy-fartsy type and I lost the ability to tan, a lot of Phil-Ams didn’t embrace me as one of their kababayan. I struggled to fit in FASA, but my radical ideas just rubbed them the wrong way. My mestizo roots began to show (skin losing its golden color, I had a Goldilocks nose [not flat, not too aquiline, just right]) and my photography started becoming more brooding.
I joined MEChA because their beliefs were more up to par with mine. Even that had its problems though. I was called a “chinita” behind my back (which isn’t cool because I’m not Chinese and it’s a very derisive term for any Asian) and got caught in the crossfire of infighting. I left MEChA and decided it was better for my sanity if I wasn’t in any student organization.
Next week, part 2 of this story!
