What's yours?
I wrote a paper for one of my classes about my identity. I swear, I must have been assigned 9 different versions of this assignment ever since I started college, but I never mind writing it... it's healthy to think about who you are and why you are the way you are from time to time. Too bad this paper doesn't explain my love of Fruit By the Foot or why I have legitimate panic attacks when I see a Build a Bear store. For posterity's sake, I post:




Growing up, I always knew that I was, technically, Filipino American. I wrote it confidently on my college applications, and I represented it as best as I could during the well-intentioned “cultural events” my largely homogenous school district sponsored on a sporadic basis. To my peers, my identity was pretty obvious due to my brown skin, eye shape, and mild obsession with tropical fruit. My accent was perfect enough for the addition of “American” to my original ethnic marker. Both they and I saw a neat package of Filipino American-ness, a foreign-looking American festooned with the trappings of unfamiliar novelties, like lechon (roast suckling pig) and my parents’ amusing inability to pronounce the “ph” sound. I had no qualms with this conception since I grew up isolated from the Filipino American community, so I too shared the two-dimensional view of my ethnic background. Until I arrived at university, I did not understand that I was more than just a demographic and that identity was not a static concept comprised solely of my ethnic heritage. I know now that my identity has been influenced by external factors, some of which have been in existence centuries before I was born. These influences do not help me define who I am; more appropriately, in understanding the nature of these factors, I am more aware of how my identity continually changes over time.

Having been raised in a town progressive about gender equality but decades behind in cultural sensitivity, I have always been more conscious of my ethnic background rather than my gender. In college, I made a conscious decision to “discover myself” through understanding the lives of my parents’ generation, the history of the Philippines, and Filipino American immigration. I wrote a senior thesis about the aforementioned topics, along with Filipino American agency and conceptions of national identity, in a last-ditch attempt to discover what I thought were concrete truths about who I was and where I fit. In actuality, I became even more confused. The history of the Philippines and its’ peoples is a story of continuous conquest and cultural diffusion, first with the influence of Islam from the western islands of Indonesia and Malaysia in the fourteenth century, followed by the Catholic mandate imposed by the Spanish conquistadores in the fifteenth century, followed by the capitalist, westernized ways of the Americans in the late 19th century. When the Philippines finally became autonomous after World War II, the haze of cultural diffusion came to a sudden halt. Ever since, Filipino academics and scholars have agreed universally that the question of Filipino identity is muddy at best. The confusion over what exactly the Filipino identity is adds another dimension to the ambiguity of my own mixed-nationality identity.

For me personally, the “Filipino” part of “Filipino American” means a multitude of things. “Filipino” means being one-eight to one-sixteenth Chinese, having a healthy smattering of Spanish and Portuguese blood in distant branches of my family tree, and somehow having an Italian surname. The “American” half of my ethnic identity has the obvious connotation of my place of birth and the dominant cultural influence in my life outside my solidly Filipino household. One can draw many distinctions between the typical American household and its Filipino counterpart. One main example is that while I did not have a brother, I was continuously told that I was not allowed to participate in various social activities with my friends, who were predominantly white, because I was a girl and it was not proper for girls to do things like go to the mall and sleep over other girls’ houses. I did not notice a similar gender-specific rules at my American friends’ houses. Despite these clear cultural distinctions in households, American culture fundamentally influenced Filipino culture and lifestyle on the whole as a result of American colonial rule. Because of this influence I sometimes find it very difficult to negotiate where either culture begins or ends with respect to the influence both titles have in my life.

My parents came over during the second wave of Filipino immigration to the United States, an influx that brought mostly highly skilled medical professionals and their family to the United States. The majority of Filipinos living in the United States today came to the United States as a result of this wave. Because of the well-paying nature of the medical field, Filipinos tend to be in the middle to upper middle class economic bracket. My family falls into this category as well, with my mom as a Registered Nurse and my father as an Architect. I would consider myself a culturally oppressed person of relative economic privilege. Despite some measure of economic comfort, I perceive Asian Americans, particularly Filipino Americans like myself, as a different kind of citizen. I would not say that we are not second-class citizens; rather, we are invisible citizens subject to the covert oppression of American ignorance.

The first wave of Filipino immigration in the early twentieth century primarily consisted of unskilled laborers to Hawaii and the west coast until xenophobic immigration laws like the National Origins Act of 1924 were passed. This xenophobia has since been replaced by what I perceive to be cultural apathy. I see the ignorance of American culture toward Asian Americans as an affront to the many contributions Asian Americans have made to the United States. Asians in general are invisible to the sphere of American culture. Few works of literature by Asian Americans make it onto the New York Times Bestseller List, even fewer feature films and television shows featuring Asian Americans as principal actors attract many viewers. Asian American musicians are not on the Billboard Top 40, and outside of Hawaii, there are few Asian Americans in politics. Just as Asian Americans do not fit neatly into the American cultural sphere, Filipino Americans are further isolated despite being the second largest Asian American demographic in the United States. Not entirely accepted as pure “Asian” due to Spanish, American, and Pacific Islander influences, it is my experience and the perspective of many academics that Filipinos are ignored even within Asian American academic and cultural discourse.

While I was not cognizant of any of this while I was growing up, my life in the Caucasian-dominated suburbs was a small microcosm of this overall national trend. My friends used to refer to me as a “banana” or “twinkie” in reference to my Asian (yellow) exterior and my culturally “white” personality. There was really no place for my Filipino cultural quirks in the sphere of typical suburban life, but not because it was explicitly discouraged. My own ethnic identity, as confusing and non-cohesive as it is, became invisible even to me beyond the phenotypic exterior that reminded me I was just a little bit different from everyone else every time I looked in the mirror. I realize now that what was perceived to be a “white” personality is more accurately described as a “suburban-influenced” personality.

Living in New York City, choosing to be a public school teacher, and having the goal to teach in an urban school is yet another test to the already elastic terms I use to define myself. I have already transitioned away from the suburban world in which I was raised to the city life and diversity that I once craved. I will soon be cutting the final lingering threads of the financial safety net my parents have so willingly laid out for me over the years. Living autonomously in New York City on a public school teacher’s salary will certainly change the income bracket I was once apart of thanks to my family. As a result of my research objectives in college and my own personal growth, I have never been so enthusiastic about connecting with the Filipino community my parents inadvertently kept me from by moving to an isolated suburb. However, as a result of a number of lifestyle choices I have made, including rejecting Catholicism and choosing a non-salary driven medical profession, I have never felt so far away from what it is—or what I think it is— being a Filipino in America. Never before has my identity been in such flux, but I honestly prefer it this way. Nick Joaquin, a distinguished Filipino writer, historian, and journalist, once said, “The identity of a Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.” My amorphous, ambiguous identity is a reflection of my own maturity, the different influences that affect my own perception of myself, and the evolution of American culture.