You grew up hearing two languages
—one you can pull apart, name, slap a series of rules to, twist like clay-dough
in a child´s hand—the other you cannot explain, you listen and you know. It is
a language you understand intuitively —like being able to read the sunrise, the
strips of pink and orange, the clumps of uneven clouds, a thin patch of grey
and the moon and somehow, without thinking twice, you know what kind of day it
will be. You understand like this because you are the first born. First generation.
First American. First cousin. First hope.
Back
home, one of your grandmothers sewed children´s clothing by hand, and sold them
in an open-air market. The other grandmother raised seven children´s on her own,
gathering them up, hiding them away in the provinces along the sea, away from
Japanese soldiers, away from American fighters. Away from war. Your grandmother
feared the safety of all her children, especially her young ladies. Your mother
survived wartime. She was smart and well-read and ambitious, skipped grades,
travelled across the oceans, met your father in Milwaukee, gave up her princess
status to be your mother. As a boy, your dad farmed fish out of monsoon-swollen
rice paddies, cut school to hitchhike from Pampanga to Rizal just to see MacArthur.
Somewhere in his youth, he spied on American Gls and caught on to this notion
of democracy, this notion of rights. His rights, his family´s rights, the
rights of his countrymen. The rights taken fist by three hundred years of
Spanish rule, then Japanese terror and war, then of course, there were the
American and their intentions. After sneaking about soldier camps, making
friends with a Gl from Atlanta, bumming cigarettes from another one from
Pasadena, your father worked his way out of those provinces, studied hard at
school. He passed his boards, passed immigration, slipped into that ballroom on
Racine and Wisconsin, and charmed his way into your mother´s life.
They
raised you to understand that back home, a young girl serves her parents, live
to please them, fetches her father´s slippers and her mother´s cups of tea.
Back home a young girl learns to embroider fine stitches, learn parlor dances,
wears white uniforms at all-girl schools, convent schools. She never cross her
legs or wears skits above her knee. Back home a girl does not date. She is
courted. And when there is a young man present, there is always a chaperon. Young
ladies grow up to be young housewives, good mothers, and in their old age, they
still behave like obedient daughters.
You,
on the other hand, have never had to obey a curfew because of war, never had to
tiptoe through your own house, never had to read your books underneath a
blanket where no soldier would see. As far as you knew, your curfew was your
curfew because Mom and Dad said so. You were raised in suburbia in a
split-level house, always in fashion, even when you were only two, dressed in
your white lace and pink ribbons, toting your very own parasol. You´ve never
been without heat, without food, without parents. All your life your worries
consisted of boys and pimples and overdue books. You have your first boy-girl
party when you were five years old, played Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey and
kissed Timmy Matasaki underneath the dining room table. You had a bad habit to
talking back. You learn how to scream not to your parents, and it didn´t matter
if you were punished, slapped across the face, sent away to sulk, banished to
the kitchen, you still opened your mouth and the words came out.
You
grew up pouring chicken soy sauce dishes over beds of steamed rice, never
mashing potatoes until you were on your own, eating your meals with a spoon in
your right hand, a fork in the left, marveling at the Americans and how they
could balance entire meals on one fork, or the Chinese who could eat bowls of
rice with two sticks. Your family roasted pigs on a spit, while next door, the
neighbors cooked brats and burger on electric grills.
From
the start, you were a piece that did not fit, never given the chance to be like
the rest —the ones with blond hair and red hair and something someone called
strawberry. The ones with eyes that change like the ocean —green to blue to
seafoam, depending on the color of their sweater. Your eyes have always been
black. Your hair dark. Straight. No variety. To the kids at school, you were no
different from the other Oriental girl, the one who spoke English with a
chopped-up accent. To your aunts and uncles you were turning into bratty Americana, loose like those blond
children, mouthy like the kids who ran the streets wild. They worried you might
grow up too indelicate for marriage.
Now
you are well over twenty-five and still single. The old aunts raise one eye
brown and say, See? But you know, it´s because you refuse to settle for less
than best. Anyone can get married, you say. You not only tell men off, you ask
them out. Recently, you´ve considered having a child without a father. This
attitude bangs up against your mother´s heart like the bumpers of two cars when
she´s parallel parking and the car doesn´t fit. Sometimes she looks at you and
sighs.
Your
home is in Bucktown, Wicker Park, Ravenswood, Illinois, and because you won´t
admit the fact that what your parents call “back home” has made a place in your
house, because you are not white, and still you are not one of them —the
foreigners—you continue to displease everyone. Your father´s headache is mostly
you. He has been known to throw his hand up, call you stubborn, say Bahala na! It´s up to you. Your choice.
Your responsibility.
Still,
in the privacy of your kitchen, you admit you cannot live without your family,
your history, this ideal called “your people”. You cannot divorce yourself from
yourself. You know you are the hyphen in American-born. Your identity scrawls
the length and breadth of the page, American-born-girl. American-born-Filipina.
Because you have always had one foot planted in the Midwest, one foot floating
on the islands, and your arms have stretched across the generations, barely
kissing your father´s province, your children´s future, the dreams your mother
has for you. Because you were meant for the better life, whatever that is, been
told you mustn´t forget where you come from, what others have done for you.
Because all your life you´ve simply been told. Just told. Because a council of
ancestors —including a few who are not yet dead, who are not related to
you—haunt you, you do your best. You try. You struggle. And somehow, when you
stand in the center of a room, and the others look on, you find yourself acting
out your role. Smart American girl, beautiful Filipina, dutiful daughter.
M. Evelina Galang.
Her Wild American Self. 1996.
