Remembering the Roots
My mom grew up in an area of Manila (in the Philippines) called Binondo. It's a humble place where there isn't much other than the bustling China Town. Despite the rampant poverty and general uncleanliness of the area, I always had good memories of it. There isn't a single time from my childhood from there that I can't look back on without smiling.
We used to go on vacations to visit some of my mother's family (who still live there) every two years, up until I was 10. As I graduated from high school, my mom's gift to me was to send me on a trip back to the area I'd so fondly remembered from my childhood.
Binondo, at age 18, was a lot different for me than the happy place I used to run around in as a child. Where I'd remembered playing with my cousins were now construction sites and squatters living in cardboard boxes. The street my mother grew up on was now lined with drug addicts and naked children being carried by their mothers who were begging for even the smallest amount of change anyone had for them.
My family lived comfortably in a modest home with all the luxuries of having relatives in America. Had it not been for the hard work of my mom and aunts in the United States, they wouldn't have been so lucky. This idea was reiterated in my head daily as I'd stare out the window to see the beautiful sunrise and breathe in the smog-saturated air covering the myriad of people that peddled their goods to passersby. It was in this poor, but happy area that my mom and her sisters were raised, and from which my cousins and I derive the fondest of our childhood memories together.
Being born and raised in California my childhood was considerably different. In West Hollywood there were no squatters (at least not visibly), poor sewage, or people living in scrap metal homes. Nor was there a semblance of poverty. My only tie to my Filipino roots were eating native meals and speaking the language my parents had in common, Tagalog.
When my parents divorced my mom took us to Virginia to begin a new life in a city outside of Washington DC called Falls Church. Falls Church's ethnic composition was akin to those found in cities like Los Angeles, or New York. A majority of the people that populated the city were foreign-born and many were new immigrants to the United States. The first public school that I went to there was a hot pot of cultural diversity. There were scarcely any students that weren't bilingual or biracial, and where whites were the minority.
It was in that first public school (Ellen Glasgow Middle School) where I began to feel and see the color of my skin for the first time. It was a beautiful thing to be part of such a special collection of students, but it wasn't without it's downside.
Glasgow was the first place that moved me into a set of classes that would ultimately change what the word 'culture' meant to me. Without sounding like a complete ass hole, it was that school that first moved me into a bracket of classes above most of the other students and where I met the other girls and guys that I'd be spending my high school years with.
For what ever reason, once I'd gotten pulled into the "Gifted and Talented" program classes (GT was the pre-quel to the International Baccalaureate program before they had implemented IB Middle Years) the ethnic diversity I had once enjoyed had somehow faded. I was once again a minority, and moreover now a de-facto representative of what it meant to be Filipino. But, like most other children, what I wanted was to fit in with my friends -- most of which were from white, upper-middle class families and whose extent of ethnic exposure was as far-reaching as Chinese food.
Middle school was the first time I began to feel the weight of being who I really was and the person that everyone wanted me to be. I stopped eating Filipino food for a time because it was considered, "stinky" and "gross" by my classmates. I renounced and joked about Asian culture because it was "funny" to my friends. Even Tagalog took a backseat to English when I was at home with my family.
My first two years of high school at JEB Stuart were much the same. Joining intramural sports teams like crew and marching band continued to have a similar effect on my relationship with my culture. It wasn't until my junior year of high school where I met my beloved best friends (Eric, Najwa, and Ahmed) that I began seeing that being who I really was, was ok.
Eric is child of a Vietnamese mother and American father; Najwa, the eldest of two Palestinian parents, and Ahmed the eldest son of a popular Egyptian imam in Washington DC and his Egptian wife. Then, there was me, the only daughter of two Philippine-born Filipino parents. When the four of us were together we didn't have the need to be anyone but our true selves. We took great pride in being different, but still best friends in spite of them. It was also with those three that I finally began to see what a sham the term 'melting pot' really was.
After moving on from Stuart, I realized that despite what ethnic or political differences existed between the students that gathered there -- it was a special place and time that could not have existed anywhere else. The article that National Geographic had gathered information for over my four years there as a student was finally published during my first year of college. We were the United States' most diverse school at that point in time, and everyone was finally opening their eyes to our special place in the nation.
It wasn't until college that I began to realize how much that meant to me. For all the hoopla that my university made for being diverse, it had little to show in comparison to Stuart's colorful mix of students from around the world. Many of the students were, like me, the first American born generation of their families. But, unlike me, most had lost touch with their roots -- whether it was the language (which, unfortunately is the first to go) or their ethnic identities. After talking to many of them, I realized that most had traded their parents roots for American ones (which though isn't bad, isn't great either).
Many of them don't know about the kind of place their parents were from other than from stories or what they see of their mother countries on TV. The scenes were usually like the ones I described above of my mom's own hometown -- dirty, poverty-stricken, and in a state of disarray. What incentive was there to want to reach out to the culture that produces such scenes? Most had never been back to their parents' homelands or had little to show for their relationship with their ethnicities except for eating the food.
I was watching culture's death in my college classmates.
This past trip home to northern Virginia I had a conversation with another childhood friend of mine, Jose, about high school and what it really meant to me. It was during our discussion that he brought up something he had heard one of his mother's friends (one of another of our old classmates' parents) had said in a conversation with his mom.
Our old classmate was (and I don't mean this in a serious or hateful way) your typical Jewish-American princess whose parents were both lawyers that had graduated from a good private school in the northeast. She was one of our peers in the IB Programme through our high school years. Her mom had said to Jose's mom that she was so thankful her daughter had grown up in such a culturally diverse environment and that she had gained a lot from the experience of being caught in the eclectic mix that was our school.
It was Jose that scoffed at the statement, realizing perfectly well what I had also come to see years before. "How culturally diverse did she think IB really was?" he said.
IB classes in those days were challenging environments that served as the home for the minority of upper-crust wasps that attended our school. Jose, I, and a few others were one of a handful of non-whites that attended these classes and actually thrived in them. It was there that we also felt the unspoken weight of being representatives of the cultures we were part of. Every failure, every misspoken phrase, every academic slip -- was counted as one more "dumb minority" thing for us to do. Every achievement of ours became an inequality -- an A in a math or science course was just "unfair" because I was Asian, the good grades Jose would pull in IB Spanish for fluent speakers a fluke. Most kept their cultures to themselves, trying to blend in and just finish the four years without too much friction. I smiled and grit my teeth, like I'm sure some others did -- and became one of the silent ethnic 'sambos' of a generation raised in the supposedly 'tolerant' microcosm known as J.E.B. Stuart High School. What ever parts of our roots that managed to branch outward in IB were merely watered-down version of our cultures, much like American "Chinese" food. We were the melting pot teenagers who were losing a bit of our identities to become a part of another.
I sometimes wonder whether the most valuable portion of my ethnic education was in the IB classes or whether it was the time I spent outside them during my electives like photography. Those were places where I met students who didn't live in the 'bubble' and had very different lives and problems than the other teenagers I had classes with for 90% of the day. Regardless of the differences between each of the educations I received; I realized how precious each was to me.
Though I don't see them much now, Phuong, Caroline, Anh, and Trang who helped me form Stuart's first pan-Asian organization were all people that helped open my eyes to how great cultural pluralism was. Countless newspapers and magazines wrote about the great diversity that was our high school and how we were the best example of the American melting pot. But what each of these attention-deficit afflicted articles forgot were the true experiences of the students that were a part of it -- how each, in the process of assimilating to the American 'norm' had lost a piece of what their families had each brought to the United States.
It's only appropriate to end this bittersweet entry with an appropriately bittersweet ending.
The fall of my senior year, Phuong (the vice president to our Asian-Pacific American Club) had asked me to read over her college admission essay. I agreed and began reading the story of how she and her family came to the United States.
Her father had fled Vietnam during the war as a political refugee. At the time, Phuong's mother was pregnant with her and they had hoped to raise their daughter close to their family in Vietnam. They initially escaped to Malaysia and continued 'island hopping' to the Philippines, until finally realizing that when they could no longer return home they would go to the United States to seek freedom. It was in Falls Church that they first lived -- the five of them packed into two bedrooms of a house that they didn't own. Set backs with the owners occurred, and eventually with the money that her parents had managed to tuck away working meager jobs they were able to move into their own home. Phuong and her siblings feeling burdensome and helpless, painfully supported their parents through the rough emotions and financial issues. After many more years of working countless difficult positions (from cooking in restaurants where the management was unfair and at times unemployment) her parents had finally saved enough to make her father's wish come true and start a restaurant. Phuong watched with teary eyes as her parents finally realized their dream, and ended her essay with her own hopes and wishes that she could achieve her own by going to college. She reminded us that regardless of how rocky her roots were, she was still thankful that they had brought her to where she and her family are today.
In the process of editing the story, I managed to become emotionally engaged and by the conclusion was crying into the papers I had been marking up. It's my sincerest hope that in the future when I have children that they can cherish their roots as preciously as Phuong and I hold ours -- even if they have no birth ties or memories of the places that our ancestors call 'home.' After all, it's our roots that helped make us who we are -- and for better, or worse we are a nation of immigrants.
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