Dreaming the American Dream All the Way From the Philippines

Though perhaps not as hazardous as our jeepney ride on half-carved roads precariously plastered on the hillsides of Ifugao province two weeks ago, our taxi cab rides around smoggy metro Manila lately have proven to be a whole lot more exciting than necessary. Multiple times, our cab has been on the verge of hitting a tricycle, a pedestrian, or a stray dog as the driver dangerously weaves in and out of traffic, impatiently taking over sidewalks, and extra-legally speeding through the lane of the opposing traffic – all in order to get us to our destination.

One of the rooms inside the CFO building 

One such destination was the office of the Commission on Filipinos Overseas (CFO), a Philippine government agency, which we visited last Wednesday. We sat in an air-conditioned room, eating empanada and drinking iced tea, while three CFO agents acquainted us with the agency’s commitment to strengthening ties with Filipinos overseas and promoting their interests in the Philippines and abroad, as well as introducing us to the various programs the agency champions. These include relief efforts for natural disasters, anti-human-trafficking, school building, and counseling services for those who are about to embark on a new life abroad.  

I was surprised to learn that there exist a plethora of resources available to Filipinos overseas and could only contemplate in silent amazement upon the ingenuous ways that have been laid out to enable us to help our countrymen.

My personal isolation and family’s disconnection from any sort of Filipino community in the US have, for years, predisposed me to think that my struggles were unique, that we had to go through and solve things on our own, and that nobody else could possibly have gone through or be going through the same situations or difficulties as our family. The feeling of being isolated and disconnected (or cut off) is something that I have recently just started to pinpoint. Many times, I have been frustrated and oppressed with a heavy feeling  in my chest in my inability to name my condition or know what it is that recurrently ails me. The fact that I can now identify these feelings and counter them with the knowledge that I am, in fact, not alone, and we are, in reality, in this together, bears great significance in the way I understand my growth as an individual relative to those who have come before me, and my perception of Philippine history relative to other nations that are still reeling from the blow of an oppressor’s heavy hand.

Philippine flags dotting portions of the globe where Filipinos reside

On a personal level, I can see how years of estrangement from my father and his side of the family have long left me unaware of certain tendencies I have, and, once aware, uninformed of why such tendencies within me exist. My recent reunion with him here in Manila has been akin to viewing myself – and, for the first time, my full self – in a mirror that has long only revealed half of my person’s image.

In one of the counseling rooms filled with teens and young adults, we are asked to give a piece of advice as someone who has “been there, done that.”

“Read often,” I tell many pairs of young and apprehensive eyes, “Your education is very important.”

As a first-generation immigrant and first-generation college student raised by a single mother, I think I have an idea of a couple of things that these young people might encounter in their life abroad. Education will be a weapon that they can wield even when their eyes begin to smart from seeing the realities of life, and their voices grow hoarse from shouting against the political, social and cultural injustices and inequalities that pervade the system.

Despite numerous challenges, I have persevered in my studies in order that, in attaining a good education, I might also use it as a tool to help elevate my family’s station in life. Since I attribute my family’s fall to poverty to my father’s early abandonment, part of my motivation and a portion of the fuel that keeps me going – keeps me awake studying at nights has been a desire to attain a level of success that even he would hear about and want to celebrate, but can’t. Because, having contributed nada to my upbringing, and much less my education, he would have no right to any feelings of pride that might begin to take root in his heart.

“I am proud of you,” he says to me. “You are like me in many ways.”

I squint my eyes and cast them downwards, afraid to look at the mirror, yet curious to see what my reflection looked like complete.

He continues: “When my father left, I said to myself, ‘I will beat him up the next time he comes around.’ So I learned some martial arts. So I could beat him’.”

In no time, he had a black belt in judo and, in college, was also trained in military combat. He could have beaten the shit out of his father, but he didn’t.

“After years of waiting and training,” he says, “my father came back and told me his side of the story. After that, I couldn’t beat him up.”

What?! What was this mysterious story? Where is the sweet revenge? How the f-

Baguio

I am silent and very agitated, not only because the story’s ending was highly unsuitable to my taste, but also because I realized that we were, in fact, similar –  if only by way of wounds.

My back and wrists ache from the initial conditioning my body received today in a Philippine martial arts called Arnis. We practiced basic moves with our sticks for seven hours and I have the hand blisters to show for it. I don’t know how much time my father spent earning his black belt, but he must have worked hard only to receive a story at the end that, for some reason or other, was enough to soothe all his aching muscles and smooth out the contorted landscape of his heart.

Our similarities are such that I can’t possibly continue to resent him. Like his father’s narratives, his stories have a disarming effect on me. Our similarities tie me to him and I recognize, with a twinge of annoyance, that I am relieved that he sees me, and knows me, and acknowledges that part of me that my mother and her side of the family have long chosen to let perish.

I rejoice because I am still here, and I am still whole!

Back in the counseling room and in front of the apprehensive eyes, a recurring advice given by the others was “Connect. Find a Filipino community in your area, and connect!”

Disconnection will lead you to ways of thinking that will poison even your motivations and further alienate you from your roots. At the same time that I am learning about my similarities with my father through his stories, I am also picking up on some similarities between the Filipino’s story of oppression under the US, and other people groups who have likewise experienced current and historical trauma at the hand of this superpower.

Japanese-Americans. Like Japanese-Americans, many noncombatant Filipinos were placed in concentration camps (“protected zones”) during a war the US waged against the revolutionary government of the Philippines.

African-Americans. Like many African-Americans, the dark complexion of Filipino natives earned them the derisive title of “niggers” in the lips of white American soldiers (Ileto). And, as if skin-deep offenses weren’t enough, in the years surrounding wartime, many Filipina women were sexually abused by white Americans who had taken over their provinces, and their land (Ileto). The image this calls to mind is the sexual exploitation of African-American women in the hands of their white plantation-owning masters.

Native-Americans. Like Native-Americans, Filipinos decried the loss of their land as Americans came and took it away from them, exploiting it and dividing it amongst themselves without any regard for its previous owners. In an essay by Erlyn Alcantara, “Baguio Between Two Wars: The Creation and Destruction of a Summer Capital,” we clearly see how Baguio was strategically chosen to become a hill station and health resort for US soldiers in the Philippines due to its close proximity to the Benguet mountains. These mountains contain a “vast field of gold-producing ore” that cradles a large amount of riches that, for generations, natives have left untouched and unexploited.

This is a statue of Col. Kennon, the man who made the building of the road possible

This pristine state of this northern Luzon city (now considered the summer capital of the Philippines) did not persist for long, especially when, on top of the money, the Americans discovered Baguio’s temperate climate, (20 degrees Fahrenheit lower than Manila). In Santiago Bose’s essay “Baguio Graffiti,” we learn how representatives from over 46 nations (including Native Americans, Mexicans, Russians, Germans and Swedes) were put to work in paving the 28-mile Benguet Road, or the American path to sure profit and bearable weather.

Last week, on the fourth floor of the Ayala Museum, my eyes feasted on gold, gold that Filipinos in pre-colonial times owned and fashioned and used in their daily dealings amongst themselves and foreigners. Carefully preserved within lit glass cubicles were bangles, earrings, diadems, and anklets dating as far back as 10^th-13^th century. What riches!

And, like the Japanese-Americans, the African-Americans, the Native-Americans, what thievery we’ve endured over the years in terms of lost lands, labor and lives at the hands of those who have shackled us under imperialism!

 “Education,” I tell them, “Your education is very important.”

And others in our group say, “Connection. This is what’s most important!” 

I knew the importance of one but not the other. I have been disconnected for far too long and didn’t even know it. My well-cultivated interest in ethnic studies has long shaped the types of classes I have chosen to take in school, and the kinds of topics I find myself engaging in and writing about. However, I have honestly never connected my sympathetic feelings towards the oppressed histories of different ethnic groups with what might be my own internalized reaction towards the plight of my own home country, the Philippines

Balikbayan Boxes outside the Ayala Museum

My people’s sufferings are part of a larger story of oppression, much like my own motivations are tied up with my father’s – apparently.

Education and conversation, through these means, you learn that nothing is an isolated event, and people don’t exist in a vacuum. If I had only been connected, known the great need to be connected, I would have been well-versed in these stories, and not have to currently wait for each word to emerge from my professor’s lips, for each piece of the puzzle to fall out of my father’s mouth.

There are others like me.

There are African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Native-Americans who, like me have experienced difficulties, and have wondered about the latter part of their hyphenated name: American.

If half of who we are consists of that portion of our history that has oppressed the heart and continually affects the present, how can we go about looking at ourselves in the mirror? How do you learn to love the image that reflects back at you? How do you become free?

 Education.

In “A History of Paradox: Some Notes on Philippine Public Education in the 20^th Century,” author Digna Apilado writes that the national hero Jose “Rizal believed in the importance of formal education as the way to economic progress and political liberation.” I am not alone in saying:

Education!