Islands in the City
slow-burn revelations arrive in size-9 shoes and small button-ups
This is an in-depth narrative of the struggles I’ve faced concerning racism, using my own experiences as the Filipino-American son of a Filipino immigrant and Filipino-American. Written in 9 parts and around 8000 words, this read is neither short nor easy. I wrote this piece because I believe there is value in honesty when engaging people who don’t understand or are unaware of this side of the “American Dream.” Until recently, I consistently remained quiet about these uglier appendages of my life. Either I didn’t think people would recognize the pain or I was too ashamed of how I’ve dealt with them.
Because of how personal they are to me, I decided to be unapologetically unfiltered in these recollections. As such, there may be topics and language that may be offensive to some. Please recognize that I’m making no attempt to speak for all immigrants, minorities, or oppressed people groups; I’m not trying to make any calls to action or socio-political statements. I am simply trying to share my own story, as truthfully and wholly as I know how.
Part One
This is me.
I spent half my childhood in a small, two-bedroom condominium on the edge of U.S. Route 1 in Alexandria, Virginia. We had a stained glass cross hanging from the window that faced our neighbor’s door. The dining room bled over into the living room, where a floral box-spring couch sat against the wall. Those faded yellow-green patterns were the closest I ever came to envisioning my mom wearing maxi pants in the 80's. One day, tired of staring at the once-white living room wall, I took a pair of dull plastic scissors and spent six hours clipping away at half the couch’s springs. That was the night I learned to be scared of the phrase, “Wait till your father comes home.”
During the winter months, the snow would pile up against the windows and cover the long sidewalk that led to the parking lot. My father taught me to put shopping bags on my feet so the snow wouldn’t get in my shoes and freeze my toes off. Then he took me outside so we could shovel the walk. After an hour, he had shoveled the snow into a pile away from our van and I left my footprints in the remains. Without warning, he lifted me from behind and tossed me into a pile of snow.
Like one of those cats in an internet meme, I scampered out of the snow and ran to him with my arms raised. All terror replaced by wild laughter. Again!
As my lola says, every time she gets home safe, every time she steps off a plane or out a car: “Ay salamat. Thank you, God.”
Some parts of the year, we’d have up to six people living in our house. My lolo and lola took up residence in what was otherwise a bedroom shared by me and my sister, my sister would join my parents in the master, and I’d either sleep on the floor or in the closet. Getting too big to sleep in the closet was one of the few tragedies of my 4-foot-tall life.
My lolo, Dado, was not a loud man. Dado liked to sit by the window, eat chocolate Kisses, and do his crossword puzzles. When prompted to tell a story, he’d talk for less than five minutes about watching dog fights from the roof of his house. Since he didn’t like to talk, he taught me how to communicate through chess.
“This is the queen. She can do whatever she wants. In this house, I am a duke, you are a pawn, and your mother is the queen.”
Dado was also a man of simplicity: He wore the same white camiseta every day. He spent two hours in the kitchen to make dinner every night. He ate Klondike bars for dessert. He never went to the hospital (“Why should I go to a doctor when I have the Great Physician?”). He always personally thanked God for the good parking spots. He asked me to pour him a glass or two of Jim Beam and told me it was his “medicine.”
I always believed him.
I wasn’t good at too many things. I was deaf to high-pitched noises, taking frustrating speech lessons for a lisp, and technically blind at seven years old. Early in life, I lamented my inability to be a professional basketball player on account of my short stature. But boy, oh boy, if I didn’t have a stellar working imagination. I owed it to the deal my mom made with us as kids: An hour of reading earns you half an hour on the computer.
For that half of my childhood, I remember being blissfully unaware that my skin color could ever impact how other people viewed me. I grew up around the n-word with an a, recognizing it as a sign of familiarity and brotherhood. I played Spider-Man video games with my Muslim neighbor and street basketball with a couple black kids whose names I never had to learn. Colorblindness and tolerance didn’t have negative connotations. They weren’t even part of life.
I didn’t know how to express it back then, but I felt safe. Content. I had this misguided dream that I’d never leave that little condo, that one day I’d be the one paying its bills and that my parents would come back to visit every few months out of the year. When you’re a kid, it’s easy to ignore the gun shots in the neighborhood. It’s easy to romanticize the local drug dealer as an undercover superhero or not understand why your mother is panicking about you calling the local APD.
But then That happened, that sky-splitting headline that would forever turn my generation into the self-aware, politically-saturated, cynical and sarcastic, industry-killing Millennials we are today.
The air was so thick I felt I could bite into it. I thought if I ran outside, I’d still see the smoke curling into the air. I wonder if Dad’s okay, I said to myself, momentarily forgetting that he had quit the Pentagon six weeks prior. When your world’s been flipped upside-down, you don’t remember the important details. When your world consists of basketball, Hotwheels, and Pokemon cards, things are simpler. You tell yourself things like:
“This is my house and it always will be.”
“Dad’s worked at the Pentagon for 10 years and he’ll never leave.”
“Tomorrow things will be fine and I’ll be able to play the new Spider-Man game at my neighbor’s house.”
I didn’t go over to our neighbor’s house for several weeks after 9/11. In fact, I never so much as saw them peek their heads out the door. One of the weeks I went to play basketball at a local church, I didn’t see one of my teammates there either. Was this the new normal? Adults communicated in hushed whispers and words like “terrorism” became more common than talking about the weather. Eventually I couldn’t hold back my burning curiosity: “Coach, why’s Mohammed not playing with us today?”
I don’t remember what his answer was. I don’t think the answer is what mattered.
Part Two
At nine and a half years old, our family moved 834 miles south. I wasn’t exactly sure how far that was, but I knew it had to be at least two whole days of walking. That definitely made my plans of running away and hitchhiking back to Virginia just a tad more difficult.
After unloading everything we owned from the train, we stepped into the historic town of Sanford, Florida. This felt nothing like Old Town, Virginia. Why is it so hot in January? What’s with all these palm trees? (Oh, heck. Hugging that one was a really bad idea. Mom, help. I look like a porcupine.) Is it really true that it never snows here?
A couple months after settling into our townhouse in Casselberry, the state decided to give us a mighty warm welcome and earnestly baptized us in the spirit of the 2004 hurricane season. When we didn’t learn our lesson, it gave us 2005. I like to think that, after it realized we weren’t leaving any time soon, Florida took a deep breath and gave up.
We spent much of that first summer without power, playing board games and surviving off the kindness of community. One of the neighbors worked at a grocery store and brought home the entire stock of meat products. We fired up the grill for the steaks and got real creative finding ways to cook chicken adobo for our newfound friends. Every time someone asked how we were doing, my dad would chuckle and say, “At least we don’t have to deal with the ice.”
Eventually the power lines were fixed, the streets cleaned, and life returned to its frantic work-eat-sleep routine. My sister and I had to get used to doing our homework instead of playing Monopoly. Not even homeschoolers are free from the almighty hand of the Schedule.
Throughout the next year, our family spent a lot of time on the road listening to the same three audio dramas: The Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, and The Legend of Squanto. My dad’s job required him to oversee all 67 counties of the state with mail-in voter registrations. To pass even more time, my sister and I memorized the counties in alphabetical order and used it as our government homework. Alachua, Bay, Baker, Bradford, Brevard… I want to say Charlotte, but my memory gets spotty around C. Like most things from that time period, I’ve erased that list from memory.
I never realize how much I’ve changed until I look back. Most of us don’t. I don’t like remembering who I used to be because it gets in the way of who I’m trying to be. The past is full of regret, the future full of doubt, and the now is where the two decide to play patty-cake with my anxieties.
Speaking of —
“The Civil War was fought over states’ rights and slavery would have been abolished within a few decades even if the Confederacy had won.” I didn’t learn this one from my parents, per se. I would have learned it just by walking outside and breathing in the air. I’d never seen a confederate flag before, but here they were, hanging at a church’s window and sticking out of muddy pick-up trucks like giant TV antennas.
I don’t remember how many churches we visited that year. After awhile, they all start to look the same. Southern Baptists, Methodists, even some non-denominationals. They all had the same hymnals, didn’t they?
I do remember one street, however. There were two churches, both Southern Baptist, occupying the same stretch, holding service at almost the same hour, probably able to share the same parking lot. I couldn’t understand what the point was. It’s not like one is McDonald’s and the other is Wendy’s, I wanted to tell my dad, so what’s up?
But while we were parked on the side of the road, watching church members file into one of two doors, I started to notice the trend. White people to the right. Black people to the left.
“Dad, which one would we go in?”
“Either one, I suppose.”
I remember asking an older man about it once. We had been sorting registrations by whether or not they were properly filled out, and I was getting bored. He told me there was the right side, and the wrong side. I wasn’t sure what he meant exactly, but the conflicting narratives were getting extremely disorienting.
According to him, one side was the Gods and Generals crowd. On this field, General Robert E. Lee was a g*ddamn American hero. He was the compassionate slave-owner, the dignified Christian fighting for a necessary evil. Eccentric, but ultimately kind. He was the role model of Southern Pride and romantic, antebellum pastures. Lee was the kind of gentleman you invited to your mama’s picnic for a couple glasses of Arnold Palmer and half an apple pie.
The “other” side wasn’t painted in the brightest light. They were the result of no-good, pre-liberal liberal Northerners trying to strip away our rights, our guns, and our christened identity. They had no respect for the working class. Couldn’t tell you what the right ball joint on a truck was or throw a proper fishing line across the pond. Those living in the city were the result of an indoctrinated academia, set on destroying the very bedrock of the Judeo-Christian society our founding fathers birthed us.
Despite being a Virginian, much of this was new to me. How naïve was I to believe the Civil War could never be anything more complicated than a matter over slave ownership. Being an impressionable young man from a place more city than country, of course I bought into this new narrative. I looked around the room; of course I wanted to belong.
I still do. Even today, I’m not sure they’re completely wrong.
Part Three
“Sometimes I feel like a white boy
trapped in a brown boy’s skin.
I wear rolled button-ups and,
if someone offers me a draft,
I never say no. . .”— untitled poem, 5/27/15
I don’t take my oldest dog for her last walk until at least midnight. I like the dark hours. They’re the perfect time to pray without formality. At that time of night, I say things like “how are you, Dad?” or “I fucked up today.” Florida evenings are quiet, the air is almost cool (though always humid), and, most of all, I can be alone. Besides, at that point I was working shifts that lasted till one or two in the morning. I couldn’t really walk my dog earlier even if I wanted to.
But one night, home early, I decided to make an exception. I wanted to take a long stroll, so I left a couple hours early. I picked up the red leash (the purple’s no good; the clasp is broken) and put on my running shoes.
Five minutes out the door and I spotted two young guys leaning against each other as they stumbled down my street. I walked to the other side and let my dog take a squat. My earbuds were in, drilling Kendrick into my skull, so I didn’t realize they had crossed over to my side of the road until I looked back up. Okay, weird, but that’s fine. I could still walk around them.
One of the guys mouthed something to his friend, side-eyeing me, and the other laughed. The ruse was up. I couldn’t keep ignoring them. I ripped out one of my earbuds.
“What’d you say?” I spat the words out, jabbed the drunks in their faces with a couple well-timed syllables. I’m not the nicest person to be around when I feel inconvenienced.
The guy who first opened his mouth smirked. “Take it easy, bud.”
I turned to the other side of the street. “If you don’t have anything to say, I need to keep walking my dog.” I started to put the earbud back into my ear.
Before I did, I heard these words: “Look at that little brown bitch walking another one.”
I cut the walk short and went home, punched a mattress till my knuckles bled. I don’t walk before midnight anymore. I don’t take out my earbuds.
Part Four
The day I attended my first Filipino festival, I felt my heart leap into my throat and get stuck right around my Adam’s apple. The last time I’d seen this many brown people in one place had been at a relative’s birthday party before we moved states. I wasn’t used to not sticking out in a crowd. I’d forgotten what it was like being able to hide myself in the open.
I tagged behind my mom, clutching onto the back of her shirt, as we weaved in and out of the crowd. She spat rapid-fire phrases in Tagalog I had never heard before. We bought a roll of tickets and exchanged them for over-priced lumpias and pancit. On the stage in the middle of this sprawling brown tent-city, a team of dancers performed tinikling, a folk dance in which we incorporate bamboo sticks, a naturally loud metronome, and calloused ankles.
A few hours in, my dad asked me — the quiet one of his kids who hated crowds and loud noises— if I’d like to go home. I stared deep into his eyes and whispered, “Can we stay?”
Whenever I’m around other Filipinos, my heart still skips a beat, but more out of fear than excitement. I wonder if it’s obvious I don’t speak enough Tagalog to prop up a two-sided conversation. I feel ashamed for having only ever sung karaoke two times in my entire life. Sometimes I think the only thing keeping me connected to my roots is the fact that I do so much damned research into Visayan and Tagalog mythology.
Whenever I talk to friends about being Filipino, one of their first reactions is that I must be good at hosting parties and cooking food. I’m willing to pretend that the latter of those things is true.
A Filipino party works like this:
The host invites everyone to their home for a large communal meal. The time slot given is always both inaccurate and flexible. If someone told me to come at four in the afternoon, I’d interpret that as “door’s open at two, and you can come any time in the next six hours.” If they’re sleeping, oh well, the door’s not gonna be locked anyway.
After juggling a handful of conversations with a handful of chatty relatives, I always bee-line to the table as quickly as possible. The questions never end at the buffet table, but it’s much easier to pull off an impolite, silent nod with a burning lumpia stuffed into the pockets of my cheek.
“Do you have a girlfriend yet, anak? Is she a Filipina?”
“Halika na! You’re a growing boy. Eat more. Fill your plate.”
“Ay guapo. Look at those fingers. Why didn’t you become a doctor?”
I want to be proud of my Filipino heritage. I want to pretend I’ve read poetry by the revolutionary, José Rizal, in its original language; that I’ve traced my family tree further than a couple great-grandfathers who fought for the mayoral control of a village in the mountains. But the truth is, I haven’t.
And I’m not.
The truth is — the real, hard break-my-teeth truth — is that I grew up in a predominantly American (and white) culture. Filipinos are constantly praised for being cultural chameleons; we’ve taken on that identity and we’ve built our pride around it. After more than 300 years under Spanish rule and almost 50 with the U.S., we’ve developed into a people that has gotten good at assimilating. A friendly people. A resilient one.
I am haluhalo. A cultural mix-mix of ingredients poured into one scrawny body. I’m reminded of it when one of my students asks me why I sound so weird when I say the word “comforter,” when a friend I’m video-calling says I sound black when my camera is off, when a professor at school says I speak English surprisingly well. (Thank you! I was born in Alexandria. I suppose they speak pretty good English there too.)
My relatives are the quintessential models of immigrants turned Navy officers and nurses. Our earliest traditions are too steeped in the Pacific for us to be considered true Asians, too westernized for us to be considered islanders. Hell, the closest thing we Filipinos have to remembering culture is the oldest living Kalinga mambabatok (traditional tattoo artist), Apo Whang-Od, and now her entire village has been turned into a tourist trap of beer cans and littered plastics.
I’m glad to be Filipino, don’t get me wrong. But some days, it’s hard finding reasons to be proud of being one.
Part Five
My last semester in college was a weird time for me. Prior to graduating, my life consisted of this picture-perfect, step-by-step template of what I wanted to do, where I was going to go, and how I wanted to get it done. The only variable I hadn’t accounted for in my little homegrown simulation was the who of it all; it never crossed my mind that who I was before college might be drastically different than the person that came out. Any 5-, 10-, or 20-year plans I had formulated went straight to the recycle bin once that little error code distorted all my brain files.
During those last-semester, late-night hours, when I had a business proposal or spreadsheet due the next morning but had to wait on fellow group members to email their parts, I spent a lot of time reading governmental history. Sometimes I think I would have been more productive had I chosen to go into politics. I know for sure I would have been angrier — at 12 years old, I sent a very strongly worded prayer to God telling him I’d be willing to do anything so long as I didn’t have to do that; my feelings remain mostly the same — but politics have always been one of those few topics I actually felt competent in.
It was during one of these sessions that I stumbled into the phrase revisionist history. That rabbit hole led me into things like Lost Cause ideology, a scathing history of the 13th amendment and privatized prisons, presidential assassinations, the failures of Andrew Johnson, and more. A lot more. I stopped tuning into TV news and cracked open history books. I shut off talk radio and read the typo-ridden journal entries of the Lincolns and Roosevelts.
None of these men were very exemplary people. Many of the idealized, romanticized alabaster statues I’d visited as a kid had suddenly become very real, very broken human beings. They all, in some way or another, taught me a very important lesson:
Everyone’s racist in their own way. Especially me.
Somehow, reading about these figures in the past forced me to confront my own biases and prejudices. Not only when it came to race, but with all sorts of determining factors. I came to the uncomfortable realization, for instance, that I had become extremely cynical against the church. It’s something I struggle with to this day. I love Jesus, always will. But it’s a constant, daily battle for me to love his church.
When I turned that lens inward, I found a lot of bitterness directed at my own put-upon identity as well. My entire life I’ve low-key rebelled against being Filipino-American. I’ve never dated a Pinay; I’ve never had any desire to become a nurse, doctor, or attorney; I don’t even eat the last grains of rice on my plate.
Scandalous.
I realized this attitude had blinded me to parts of myself and my family I never wanted to believe were true. As much as I complained about being ignored, I had done the same thing to my own culture and my own history. Had I turned into all the things I claimed I detested?
One night I decided to do something about it. After she’d been up for 36 hours watching serialized K-dramas, I sat down with my grandmother and asked her to tell me what she was like at my age. She told me there were some stories she didn’t like thinking about, but she told me them anyway.
In the world I pictured through her words, I met a young woman with gigantic dreams get beaten down because she couldn’t speak English without an accent. I saw a promising nurse get relegated to the status of second-class citizen on a bus, at a water fountain, in a cafeteria line. I watched a hopeful immigrant raise four kids without teaching them a lick of Tagalog — they had told her it would make it harder for them to be accepted. Finally, the unflattering statues I had set up of my own family came crumbling down, and I saw them as the hopeful, broken human beings they truly were.
I think there’s a reason it’s so easy for me to imagine the past in black and white. On some subconscious level, it offers me a layer of distance. It allows me to buy into some mythological bullshit that certain massacres really were justified by Manifest Destiny, that the lives of those we’ve named parks after matter more than the ones we’ve turned into rubble at the foot of Mt. Rushmore; or that my great-grandfather was nothing more than an egotistical, womanizing scum of the earth.
For all I know, that might really be all he was. Maybe there’s nothing more to him. But thinking of him that way is never going to teach me anything. If I truly don’t want to become him, I first have to realize the similarities I already embody. If I want to change my present, I can’t keep ignoring my past.
Who knows? Maybe ideologies really are black and white. But I no longer have the luxury of believing people are.
Part Six
In March of 2016, I accompanied one of my best friends on a cross-country road trip from Houston, Texas to Zelienople, Pennsylvania. He had decided to move in with his grandparents and finish school in PA; I had decided the best way to deal with a recent break-up was to forgo all other commitments in my life and tag along. At the time, a spontaneous road trip seemed much healthier than drinking beer and eating ice cream every night.
All I had to do was tell myself this was self-applied therapy.
The winding, detour-ridden trek took us 5 days. Because I like statistics, I’ll rattle off a few more:
— 2000 miles.
— 31 road hours.
— 11 states.
— 4 bridges.
— 1 splinter.
— 0 bar fights.
This particular friend and I share a long-running inside joke. My friend is a very white, 6'5", God-blessed Texan. I am a scrawny, 5'6", second-generation Filipino-American. While in Kansas, as we got off I-35, a mutual friend of ours told us he’d only seen the back of our heads and thought to himself, “Who is the large white giant and his Mexican wife?”
It’s not always a hit with the people around us.
The first part of our trip, we spent half the drive just trying to get out of Texas. We started in Houston, one blue island in a sea of red, and ended in Kansas the same day. On our way there, we had stopped at a Buc-ee’s, the super-center of gas stations and convenience stores. We also took a 45-minute detour into the boonies thinking it’d only be a few minutes out of the city.
Other highlights included half a dozen sex shops, all proudly claiming to be the biggest one around for miles; a place that was literally half gas station, half hotel (it seemed like the entire backside of the hotel portion had never finished construction, left with nothing but protruding iron rods and black tarp); this one bathroom with a barred window in the stall that gave us sketchy access to the outside of the building.
On the second part of the trip, we started running out of jokes. For one thing, we were tired. We rushed through Missouri (which is easy to do when you only come across one rest stop in the entire state), and made our stop in Kentucky. We grabbed beer with some friends in Louisville, but didn’t stay out too long. We slept earlier than usual, hoping to get out and moving before the sun was up. We only talked when we had to.
The other reason remained almost entirely unspoken. Almost. On maybe the fourth day of the trek, we stood by the truck to shield ourselves from the wind, hands in our pockets as gas snaked into the truck:
“This is the whitest town I’ve ever been in…”
“Yeah.”
“It’s pretty weird…”
“Yeah.”
For a whole bagful of reasons, our lighthearted commentary took on a slightly more dismal tone. The clouds grew darker, the drive got quieter. We traded out YG for Johnny Cash on the radio and continued the drive.
The last leg of the trip was both the hardest and most scenic. While in West Virginia, we visited the New River Gorge Bridge. Almost hidden in the Appalachian mountains, this bridge is the third highest vehicular bridge in the U.S. At one point in its far-reaching history, it was the longest.
We had only planned on sightseeing for half an hour. But, thanks to a large splinter that had gone through my entire right thumb, courtesy of the flight of stairs pictured below, we ended up staying for three.
After failing to get the entirety of the wooden stake out with my vampire teeth, I swallowed my pride and asked the park employee at the front desk if she had some form of needle and a lighter. Fortunately, she had a full first aid kit and much more experience with removing splinters than I did.
Always hungry for a good story — and seeing as we had nowhere to go for the next couple hours — I started to ask her questions about her life while my friend took a long nature walk in pursuit of decent data access for his phone (my phone’s data had gone dead as soon as we crossed the state’s borders).
Outside of a few particular details, I’m sad to say I don’t remember much about our conversation. I vaguely remember she was wearing a green shirt. She had been part of the Peace Corps for a couple years and she’d lived overseas in India once. Outside of those trivia pieces, most of the specifics remain fuzzy. Maybe she wore glasses?
What I do remember is how strikingly normal the conversation was. How she was the first complete stranger I’d met in the past three states who asked a minority’s favorite question, “where you from?” and didn’t immediately follow it up with, “I have a ‘friend’ from there.” Until, and even during, our conversation, I hadn’t been able to pinpoint exactly what it was that made me so uncomfortable during the rest of the trip, what about her made it different.
Now I think I know. I think it was her eyes.
When that lady and I met eyes, I didn’t feel the obligatory pressure to look away. There was no suspicion lurking behind a cloud, no assumptive statements expressed through her pupils. She talked to me like a person. She didn’t need to say, “I don’t see color” for me to believe she wasn’t some form of racist monster. Because she did see color. Maybe she even appreciated it. She asked me about my culture, whether I spoke the language, if I ever wanted to visit the islands.
In other words, she noticed things. She noticed the brown of my skin, the splinter in my thumb; heard the lisp in my voice and the regret from my break-up. This was a far cry from the gas station employee a day ago who had jostled my shoulder and got halfway through an apology before narrowing his eyes and saying instead, “You’re not really from around here, are you?”
This woman in a green shirt didn’t just see an out-of-place brown kid. She saw me.
Looking back, the worst part — the one I’m deeply ashamed of — is the fact that it took me halfway through the conversation before I saw her too.
Part Seven
The day before Hurricane Irma, my family walked beneath Florida’s yellow eye with countless other families towards a small hill of tussled sand.
“Bring your own shovel. Twenty bags a family. Sand’s FREE.”
We walked to the deposit farthest from the entrance, thinking there might be more room there than anywhere else. There wasn’t. I handed the shovel to my dad and got down on my knees to hold open the first bag. It took us a few seconds to fill it, twice as long to figure out how to tie it. After getting through half a dozen, I think we both realized we should have brought water. We kept on anyway.
While we filled our bags, we noticed some of the other people around us having a hard time of it too. To our right, a father had brought his boy along, maybe less than 10 years old; behind us, two mothers were helping one another while their kids attempted to fill a bag with an over-sized shovel; in front of us, one lone dad asked us to keep watch of his bags while he fetched his truck to load them.
Once my dad and I had finished filling our bags, we locked eyes. I could tell we were thinking the same thing. He asked the dad with the boy if they needed help filling their bags; I helped the lone dad carry bags to the bed of his truck; my mom helped an older couple tie knots. When the heat overwhelmed me, Lone Dad saved my life and gave me water.
At one point, a woman turned to my mom, eyes wide with surprise. “We went from someone trying to steal our bags to someone helping us fill them.” The lady smiled from beneath the brim of her hat. And then, in less than a breath, her voice grew hushed and she glanced over her shoulder. “You know, I think it was that black couple.”
The emphasis there was hers, not mine.
At about 7 years old, I had my first fight with the person I thought was my childhood bully. He wasn’t really — we didn’t know each other nearly well enough — but at that age, I didn’t know the difference.
One day my sister and I were playing on an in-door basketball court. I, the hopeless optimist who dreamed of being the first 6-foot-plus, Filipino-American, professional NBA player, was shooting lay-ups in what I thought was a very, very cool fashion. My sister, who held no such aspirations, was “dribbling” a ball by dropping it on the sideline and then picking it up after she had clearly quadruple-dribbled.
I had turned to check on my little sister, like any big brother should, and saw my imagined arch-nemesis rip the basketball out of her hands and send her falling to the ground. She landed on her behind and I saw tears poke out the corners of her eyes. Without a word, the other kid turned away and dribbled towards the net at the far side of the court.
Boy, oh boy, did that light a fuse.
I kicked my own ball away from me and ran after him. I didn’t really like my sister at the time — to be honest, I found her overly sensitive and clingy — but no one was allowed to treat her like that except me because sometimes she deserved it. I ran in front of him while he was taking a shot, forcing him to look into my eyes despite being a good two heads taller. He was, rightly so, very confused. Without a word, I shoved him as hard as I could and knocked him onto the ground. I then bent over him, twisted the ball out of his hands, and ran it back over to my sister.
“Hey, here’s your basketball back.”
“That’s okay,” she said, not even looking at me, now occupied with her shoe strings or something. “I didn’t want to play anymore.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Memories of my childhood are pretty spotty, but I do remember spending the next couple years nervously awaiting retribution. (Eventually, I moved to a different state and could stop worrying that someone would sneak into my window while I slept.) I think the worst I ever got from him that week was a cold shoulder. The lady at the sand pit got the same.
Part Eight
Later that year or the next, I found my true bully, the one that would follow me for the rest of my life. It found me one late Summer afternoon and scared the ever-living hell out of my parents. My mom walked into my room and found me screaming into a pillow, beating my tiny fists against my chest.
“Son, stop.” Mom held my arms against my sides and, when I wouldn’t, wrapped me in a hug. “Please stop. Tell me what’s wrong.”
I bit my lips and looked down at my ragged shirt. I think this is what I said,
“I’m so angry all the time and I don’t know why.”
Since then, I have never stopped being angry.
This is probably my best kept secret. It’s not quite the same sort of explosive rage that controls Bruce Banner. I don’t have some inner Hulk trying to claw itself out; I’m not capable of spitting out bullets. The anger I’ve bottled up is cold, restrained, tempered into a tool that I’ve learned to take out only when I really need to get shit done. I’ve gotten good at hiding that anger behind a smile.
Who am I angry at?
Nowadays, no one in particular. I suppose it must be some form of character growth. My latest sources of ire tends to be impersonal in nature, like “systems of injustice” or “structures built on ignorance.” I’m not perfect of course. Every so often, I’ll get in a near bar fight with someone who can’t keep his misogyny in his pants, or call out someone on their misunderstandings of culture appropriation, but for the most part I don’t actively seek these fights out anymore. I may have been born angry; doesn’t mean I have to stay that way.
Some of these stories don’t end well. Once on a college campus, shortly after Treyvon Martin had been shot in the neighborhood right next to mine, I had to look into the eyes of a man who didn’t register me as human — someone who had diminished me to a role where I couldn’t even be his enemy because to say so would admit some level of equality. When that happened, any safe space built for logic, statistics, and facts fell away.
I felt that familiar urge arise in me, but this time to beat my fists against someone else’s chest. Instead, I spent a lot of that semester punching brick pillars, bit of an upgrade from ragged t-shirts and worn-out mattresses.
When someone like that strips me of all my defining features—my skin color, heritage, beliefs, anything that makes me uncomfortable cog in this world of Us vs Them stratagem, fake news, and political demagoguery — there is still one thing they can’t take away. It is the one thing that gives me a voice, a tiny bridge in the gap between us that forces us to acknowledge that the other is still a human being.
My stories.
Lately, I’ve chosen words as my weapons. Cutting words, yes, but also kind words. Honest ones. I’ve used them in conversations at coffee shops and fishing holes; late night talks by firelight and laugh-induced wrinkles the next morning. Listening without judgment, loving without condition. I found that Puerto Rican immigrants need to share their experiences just as much as Bible Belt coal miners do. I’m as grateful to suburban moms trading me for Florida Man tall tales as I am to small-town barkeepers’ patience with my city-boy yarns.
Anger on its own never got me far. It was an insufficient tool — devoid of clarity to confront my past, powerless in making any real or meaningful change in the now.
I want to understand the world, but I have to start with one person at a time. I have never been to the Philippines; I don’t know if I’d feel more at home there than any of the other places I’ve been running from. But maybe — maybe by listening to new friends tell me their stories, by noticing and seeing strangers, by sharing experiences— maybe maybe maybe I’ll see some small remnant of the islands in my city. Maybe learning to love others is the answer to accepting myself, to knowing the face of God.
I’m trying to turn these slow-burning embers that have for so long fueled my anger into a tangible love. I’m trying to open my fists. I can only hope it is enough. I must at the very least try.
Part Nine
Sometime between eleven and twelve years old, I had these romantic notions of running away from home.
One night, I waited until my parents were asleep and slipped out of bed sometime past one in the morning. I bent down, pulled out my red backpack, and grabbed the $200 I had stashed in a shoe. I’m not sure what my plan’s end-state was. At that age, I figured I could get a cheap train ticket or hitchhike it back to Maryland. Like all other things, even running away was simpler back then.
I never made it past the front door. I remember staring at the brass lock on the door and a great, horrible fear glued me to the spot. Suddenly, my brain told me I was too tired for this. It was an inconvenient time. I could always work myself up to it some other night. So I turned around, threw my bag back underneath the bed, and went to sleep.
The next morning, I walked to the kitchen and ate the eggs my mom made for breakfast. When those warm yellows filled my mouth, all angry red thoughts of leaving home fled from my mind.
When I move next year, it’ll have been thirteen years of wanting to leave Florida. I’ve gotten close before. But, every time, I found a new reason to put it off. For a while, that reason was school. When I took a year off from college, the reason was lack of finances. Nowadays, I still have reasons for staying; I still get scared of that brass lock. But the curiosity burns too strongly. I’m at a chapter in my life where I need to see what’s on the other side of the door. I don’t think I could forgive myself if I left it closed any longer.
My entire life, I’ve loved airplanes. Not always the physical flying metal tube itself, but what it represents. When I moved to Florida, airplanes represented to me a chance to run away. The chance to visit unknown places, to escape. But I think there was something else there, something that I had really only experienced almost twenty years ago when my dad first showed me how to fly.
When confronted about the madness of their endeavor to create such a machine, Orville of the Wright brothers said this:
“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who, in their grueling travels across trackless lands in prehistoric times, looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through.”
I’ve spent enough of my life wanting to run away. I’ve spent enough time looking at doors and seeing only the brass locks. I’ve spent enough time not making decisions because I was full of fear, rage, or — dare I say — apathy.
Today it’s not enough to punch a mattress until my knuckles bleed, to cut open a couch and pull out its ribs or dissect another person’s half-digested ideas of me and crucify him in front of his peers. That’s not freedom. That’s not justice. It’s self-pleasuring narcissism.
At 23 years old, I don’t beat my own chest anymore. Sometimes when I write, I go to a dining room table that’s older than I am. It’s a good table. There are cracks in the wood where I had stuck pens and letter openers at 8. The burgundy is beginning to fade from when I had tried to redeem myself by sanding it down and staining the wood at 15. Other times, I write at a local coffee shop. I order two coffees — one hot, one cold — and sit on a bench by the window that stretches along the entire wall.
Most nights, however, I sit in what can barely be called a bedroom.
On one side are all my books, the only organized part of my life, lining two bookcases that line the wall. The majority of space is taken up by Middle Grade and Young Adult speculative fiction, but there are also a couple shelves for creative non-fiction, half a shelf for books written by friends, a section bottomed out for giant history books and commentaries, even one dedicated to what I call Weird Philosophy and translated poetry.
On the other side of the room is a bed without a frame. Most of my instruments have been shoved into the closet with my clothes and all my story notes lie scattered across the floor as I try — for what’s now the fourth year and eighth-ish draft— to figure out the ending of a problematic MG fantasy novel I’m writing. Anything else I own is in a box.
After donating my hair earlier this year, a well-meaning lady told me I finally looked like a man. So I’m letting it grow out again. Probably going to let it manifest itself into a man bun. Yes, it’s been a divisive topic among friends. I pretend not to care.
Most days, I am wearing a blue button-up made out of a weird blend of cotton and polyester. It’s the same shirt I climbed a mountain with, the same one I took on a boat a few weeks ago, the same one I went paddle-boarding at the Pacific Ocean in. I have taken this shirt with me on all my road trips, wore it in some of my first business presentations. I use this when I’m building things, when I’m writing, or just when I’m out and about. It’s definitely not as nice as it was the first time I wore it.
It means a lot to me though. I love the memories it comes with. I still wear it when I need to feel confident, when I want “adventure in the great wide somewhere.” It’ll probably be the shirt I wear when I feel ready to ask a girl on a date again and the shirt I wear when I move to a new home next year.
By the door are my grandfather’s leather shoes. He gave them to me a few years ago, when my feet weren’t yet big enough to fill them. They fit perfectly now. I have used them for many things. They’ve seen the carpeted floor of a conference room and the rubble of a long, dirt path. I’ve worn them in airports, bars, and churches.
Unlike other parts of my life, all these things are pieces and parts of my life and my identity I can choose to take with me. This room is full of things I’ve picked to define who I am. My hair is a part of my body that I can grow out or cut without consequence. My shirt and these shoes are something I have the privilege of putting on or taking off. I’ve made room in my life for all these things— loose buttons, grease stains, and all.
After all these years, I think I’m finally learning to live with the un-chosen bits and pieces as well. I no longer try to scrape off the scent of opos and salamats. I no longer hide my love for protest and hip-hop music. I no longer apologize for eating rice with every meal.
I don’t yet know if I’m proud of the heritage I’ve been given — the anger it comes with, the generational sins I will never stop wrestling against— but, every day, I am finding new things to be grateful for. In the early morning, I have even become comfortable getting dressed in my own skin. When I step out the door to walk my dog, I can look up at the night sky, breathe in the stars, and smile.
“Ay salamat. Thank you, God.”
