Growing up Filipino in America
By Yoli Tucay-Ricasata
Alma just arrived four months ago from Binalonan. Her English teacher gives up trying to pronounce her last name and calls out Alma. She raises her hand and mumbles "present mam". Kids around her giggle defying the teacher’s glare. She is later introduced to the rest of the Filipinos sitting around a table in the cafeteria. Ilocano, Pangasinan, and Tagalog expletives are sometimes heard unbeknownst to those around them. Alma is a picture of simplicity, innocence, and pure bravery in the face of a culture so foreign to anything she’s ever known.
Walking in to class one morning, Dominador announces that he is to be called "Shawn" from that day on. He is the one minority on campus that adults couldn’t help but profile. Most likely to start a gang, everyone fears. He has all the trappings, which go beyond the clothes, the bling-blings, the body language, and the street jargon. His is covert. His is the language he uses to get his peers to follow, imitate, and respond to what he breathes. With four more days to graduation, Shawn is a picture of notoriety, temerity, and utter arrogance that indeed he made it in the face of the adults who dared doubt him to begin with.
Stephanie is that "Asian" student who knowingly wears the sign "whitewash". She’s the editor of the school paper, class president, student rep to the Capitol, and voted most likely to succeed. When asked where she’s from, she’ll tell you she’s from Hawaii. She was born in Honolulu, but her parents are both from Pangasinan. Stephanie is a picture of competence, self-assurance, and total indifference to a heritage lost in the face of a convoluted future forming ahead.
Three atypical teenagers giving the world a glimpse of what it’s like growing up Filipino in America: confused yet confident, misguided yet effective, frightened yet courageous. ---#
(This is a part of a published essay which hopefully, will become a book someday.--Yoli)
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MY MOTHER
Mother’s Day is very different from any other holiday, at least for me. It’s the day when my daughter and I have our brunch and reminisce for a couple of hours about things we "majorly messed up" on as a mother/daughter. The jovial nit picking of our roles is, to say the least, entertaining. Until my own mother makes it to the picture, then it becomes a somber realization, guilt trip, and pangs of nostalgia all over again.
In the Philippines, her skills were limited to being a housewife and a mother. It wasn’t an easy task. I have pictures in my head of her balancing batya on her head, walking along the river’s side until she spots that ideal location where she sits under the sun for the next hour or two doing laundry. She wanders the treacherous land of pugaro looking for dried sticks so she can cook the following week. The sight of her balancing bundles of this fuel on her head while maneuvering a teetering bamboo bridge sends up shivers. She’s famous around town for her bartering skills as well. For next to nothing she’s able to feed and clothe her family. The balancing acts she performed raising nine children, oftentimes on her own, are unfathomable.
When she migrated to California in the mid seventies, life got a little easier. There’s a stove, a washing machine, and yes Dad was finally able drive her to the store. Bartering, however, was trickier, so she had to find a job to supplement Dad’s income. For the next fifteen years, she picked strawberries, worked at packing sheds, and collected aluminum cans. Life in the United States seemed over rated.
Pacing, as family and friends fondly call her, has won a few awards in the heart of those who know her. Her hands are forever marred by the hard work she’s endured, her face masks the pride and joy of watching her children graduate, marry, and bring home grandchildren, and her heart bares the scars of losing a child and a husband.
Her life, as she knows it now, is reduced to almost nothing. Her eyes are pools of uncertainties, her mind is a bank of memories she longs to remember,and her childlike ways slowly creep back to strip her of any dignity she has left. This disease that’s slowly eating away my mother is also wrecking havoc in my own world. Although guilt, anxiety, and anger, are suppressed in the back of my head, memories of her are part of my daily existence. Spunk, determination, and loving - traits I will always strive for from my mother, which I hopefully will leave behind for my own daughter to remember me by.
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