I’ve been thinking long and hard about what I would tell you and how this would all go down. As a reformed professional filipino, I have a few things to say on the record.
1. You have so much richness but are so mired in the unimportant, you can’t see it.
I wish I could sum up the sum of the history, economic, and social realities I’ve learned that could back this up. I suppose there are plenty of people who postulate about this over and over already, so why bother rehashing stuff you already know. I just wanted to add that I’m supremely disappointed that there are so many of us stuck in the worship of celebrity, appearance and all that is superficial in order to mitigate the feelings of lack and poverty we know so well. As if living in someone else’s detritus would somehow make us smell better, look better, feel better. Yet we do not have the faculty to find the beauty and grace in what we already have.
2. You are not white, nor are you black. No sense trying to fit someone else’s mold.
The complexity of the systems of oppression is something I wish I knew how to sum up in easy bullet points. In its most basic, this is part of the last point too. We do not need white culture or black culture to demonstrate our collective worth. We don’t need to assume the dominant paradigms to feel validated in our presence. We do not need to define ourselves by someone else’s terms. We need to stand up for ourselves and the tradition and history we have had to pull our definitions from. In fact, I truly believe that our combined experience is exactly what the rest of the world needs. I see those who understand it as those who uniquely embody an ability to facilitate through most any issue. We are uniquely leaders in this multicultural community.
3. Its time to think bigger, but to stop thinking we are individually stronger than the collective.
This is not culturally authentic. Those years of American colonialism has only served to fuck us up in our most basic of places. Filipino psychographics and spirituality continues to support the belief that we are supremely connected to each other and the rest of the spirits and beings in the world. This is truth we’ve lost to American materialism. Its a truth that we know in the depths of our being, but a truth we have learned to distrust. I admit, that I have also come to distrust it. I need to be a part of us, but sometimes I want to cut myself and my family away from how destructive it is.
4. Pay attention to your young, they’re getting lost.
I was born in the Philippines to parents and grandparents who embraced America so hard it hurt. Then I came to America so young that I lost the language and the connection that I’ve been seeking since. Now I have children who are half Filipino and twice removed that I wonder will ever feel the richness of the culture I’ve only recently felt. I wonder how many others feel the same way. I wonder how many of them think that knowing the language is enough to get them by because everything else is so un-modern and uncool. I had an intern once who came from the Philippines who said that the youth there rebuke the traditional so much that she didn’t really see the difference between here or there. The increasing globalization of the Filipino worker has created a world-class genre of the poor that the culture is becoming more of a derivative culture than anything else. There is almost no way to clearly define what is culturally authentic anymore, and that is sad.
5. Like a long abusive relationship, I love you but I have to let you go.
There may be a lot of things I may never be able to do in my life. One of the things I’m going to let go is wanting to save you. Cuz well, thats impossible. Too many different reasons, institutional and otherwise, that exist to thwart whatever I may think are solutions. I’m gonna go figure out how else to strengthen and when I come back, you’ll know.
Peace out,
V
