Each time I come home to the Philippines I am met first with a sensation like dissolving. Each year, my plane touches down in the middle of the night, and drifting into the crowd at baggage claim I come to the realization that I am no longer the exotic face; shoulders and tongue relaxing, I drop my American accent and revert to my native language. For five years, I have been living in the United States, and it has begun to feel more like home to me than this country I now visit for just one month a year. Still, surrounded by strangers with familiar faces, faces like mine, one cannot deny that this is the feeling of homecoming.
A week later, Adam makes his own touchdown at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport. For him, coming to this place means to be seen, means that his white skin and blue eyes mark him, in these rare moments, as someone other. The first time he came to visit, he had asked, is this how you feel all the time? Now, as we drive home, he kisses me and tells me how familiar it all feels.
I think of this rhythm my life has gained from flying back and forth across the world, how I thought I would be alone in this. I think about this man and how he has come to share that rhythm for the past two years.
He kisses me, and tells me about a man he met at the San Francisco airport. I told him I was visiting my girlfriend in the Philippines and he said, ‘Why would you do that to yourself? You’re too cute for that.’ He thought you were some mail-order bride. I told him it wasn’t like that.
He kisses me. I almost want to pull away, but I don’t know how to explain why.
In history class, Filipinos are taught to be grateful for our Western colonizers. After all, without the Spanish, who would have delivered our beloved homeland into the embrace of Catholicism? Who, but America’s own General MacArthur, would have liberated the Philippines from the Japanese and ended the horror of World War II?
To be thankful, to be indebted—this was the history of my country. We gave them our land, but they gave us religion. We gave them our soldiers, our women, but they gave us our freedom.
Coming to America for the first time, I was thankful. Just like I was taught. I was thankful to the university that had accepted me, given me a U.S. visa and a place to live in Boston. As a college freshman, I quickly became friends with two girls who had been born and raised in New England, and embraced my identity as “the exotic one” of our group. After all, wasn’t I?
At parties, feeling men’s eyes on me, I would turn to these two friends and say, listen, it took me 20 hours on a plane to get halfway around the world to this party. I’ll be damned if I don’t use that to my advantage.
When a man did finally come up to me, often the first thing they said was excuse me, where are you from? I always wanted to know what they thought first. Their ignorance was a game to me. If they guessed right, I gave them my praise. Either way, they got my attention.
The first time I made love to an American man, he whispered to me, I love the color of your skin. That was the first time I had ever felt less than myself, only loved for my appearance, and I wondered if that made me someone different.
Over the years, I would meet men who told me they loved that I was foreign, men who loved me in spite of it, men to whom it only mattered when I told them stories about my past. But you’re so…American, they would sometimes say, and I would agree. I would tell them how I changed my name and my accent when I arrived. When you looked different, spoke different…sometimes different was the only thing other people could see.
The summer I turned nineteen, I started dating a man who only ever referred to my race by occasionally calling me “Hello Kitty.” He enjoyed hearing my stories about growing up in the Philippines, but other than that our conversations revolved around music and psychology, our shared course of study. One day, after six months of dating, he used my laptop to check his email. There on the screen was a love letter from his girlfriend in China, whom he’d said he had broken up with almost a year ago.
It was the proof I needed to solidify an idea that had been hibernating in me since I came to America: the fear that, as a fetishized being, I was easily replaced, competing with all the other Asian women who I was told looked just like me. In this case, I was the replacement. I was Hello Kitty, and so was this man’s girlfriend, and to him there was no difference.
I met Adam during my final year of college, the year I would have to return to the Philippines after finishing my undergraduate degree. I had successfully done what I had come to Boston to do; now my visa was being terminated, and I would have to leave the life that had taken me five years to build.
But then I applied to a graduate program in Boston, which gave me a new student visa and allowed me to stay in the U.S., at least for a little while. Adam and I now live together in an apartment with a view of the city skyline. He has visited the Philippines with me three times. We have graduated together, and traveled the world together. He taught me how to snowboard, I taught him how to cook. He was there for me the day I spoke to my mother for the final time.
In our kitchen now, hanging above our dining table, there is a collage of pictures, postcards, magnets, ticket stubs, memories upon memories stacked over each other in layers. In each picture, we are touching: an arm around the shoulder, hand brushing hand, our cheeks together. Reaching for each other. Even in those times when we have been half a world apart, we have reached and found ways to come together.
How could I communicate this to the man he had spoken with about me at the San Francisco airport? How, even in my own country, could this incident remind me that I was so different?
In the car, I watch the airport’s looming silhouette shrink smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror. I think about the summer Adam and I went to New York and saw the musical Miss Saigon on Broadway. Loving that musical, I told him then, had been a large part of my identity since the first time I saw it at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, when I was eight years old. Back then, I had never before seen a person who looked like me in so grand a production, never witnessed such talent as Lea Salonga had beneath those spotlights, her voice reaching out to the American soldier who had abandoned her and her child in a slum. On that grand stage, spotlights gleaming, it was easy to believe the tragedy of that story was but a testament to the magic of the theater. In the final scene of the musical, Kim, dirty and sobbing, surrenders her son to the arms of the gleaming white American family she is sure will give him a better future. Then she kills herself.
Was this how that man at the airport saw me? To him I was Kim, was Hello Kitty, was the woman in the sorry state, either desperate enough or conniving enough to be loved. Never deserving of that love.
This is the single story forced down the throats of women like me by countless movies, operas, TV shows — even my country’s history books. It is the story I tell myself on those days I am forced to remember that America is not my home.
These days, I try not to imagine who will steal my love from me first: another Hello Kitty, or some faceless blonde head more deserving of that love than me. It is an irrational fear, I know, but one that I have yet to shake. I turn my American accent on and try not to miss that feeling of dissolving. I remember that, unlike what I was taught about my country’s independence, my relationship is not a debt. It is not something I owe to anyone.
As an Asian woman, I find that I am often asked to second-guess myself; to forgive and understand others before I am allowed to defend myself. Like the actresses who win the role of Kim in Miss Saigon, my bliss is entangled with my oppression. But I am hoping that, like history, this is one story that can be rewritten. I tell people it is owed to me. I will make it true.
As an Asian woman, I find that I am often asked to second-guess myself; to forgive and understand others before I am allowed to defend myself.
Wow. Agreed. There are a lot of ways that intra-Asian relations are tense and fucked up but I think this is something that resonates for Asian women living in America regardless of how our ethnicities interact with each other.
Thank you so much for sharing this. It resonates.
I am not Asian, but I have a subtle accent, and people ask me where I am from when I don’t want them to. It is frightening that my identity is always glued to this stereotype cardboard cutout.
I am an international student from Russia, and I get compared to mail-order brides a lot. I don’t always know how to respond. It is so unfair.
Beautiful writing about a challenging experience. Thank you!
I love the description at the very beginning about how your shoulders and your tongue relax – it would never have occurred to me, and now I will have to check and feel if my tongue is relaxing…
beautifully written, all the way through – thank you
This is what I come to the Toast for, gorgeous writing that lets you see through someone else’s eyes and, maybe makes you a more empathetic and compassionate person. Thank you.
a man who only ever referred to my race by occasionally calling me “Hello Kitty.”
I have read this line more than a dozen times and still cannot do so without stabby eyes
a man who only ever referred to my race by occasionally calling me “Hello Kitty.”
I have read this line more than a dozen times and still cannot do so without stabby eyes
“As an Asian woman, I find that I am often asked to second-guess myself; to forgive and understand others before I am allowed to defend myself. Like the actresses who win the role of Kim in Miss Saigon, my bliss is entangled with my oppression. But I am hoping that, like history, this is one story that can be rewritten. I tell people it is owed to me. I will make it true.”
Damn.
Also, I too feel stabby about “Hello Kitty” guy.
The nausea caused by the Hello Kitty detail. The closing remark about Miss Saigon, and claiming what’s owed you…
This piece really matters.
Not because it helps anyone who doesn’t experience this to be more compassionate.
No. Right here on this page, the experience of being exociticised IS the default. Thanks for claiming it as so. It’s healing for so many of us.
I have lived this story, but as a Filipino man. The early upbringing in admiration of our white saviors, the starry eyed introduction to the American Promised Land, the young revelry in getting attention from others, the gradual understanding of how dehumanizing it was to be fetishized, the general taint that comes from people who love you but have been programmed by their culture to say things that demean you. I know and believe that the female experience is its own package of BS, but I felt resonance here as well.
It is a journey, and we all go through it in different ways. I will say that one thing that was somewhat helpful for me was bonding with other Third Culture folks who were going through similar things, and knowing that it wasn’t lonely. It’s not even a Filipino thing or an Asian thing necessarily, and that many of us who love across boundaries have to put up with the various ways our models of love don’t fit expectations. We all have a right, at the end of all of this, to be loved by another for who we are, and not what we are.
“…either desperate enough or conniving enough to be loved. Never deserving of that love.”
This is the most eloquently I’ve ever heard this put. Beautifully written piece. Thank you so much for sharing. I am also a minority and experience similar “otherness” but most of my friends from high school were Asian women, and I have seen that Asian women have a particular struggle. You really put your finger on it; said it far better than they were ever able to, and certainly better than I, as an outside observer, ever could.
Your relationship with Adam sounds healthy and supportive, and I’m glad that after so many bad experiences you’ve found true respect and humanity in someone’s treatment of you. The distrust we learn after a lifetime of objectification and ill treatment can be difficult to overcome when faced with an exception, but it sounds like you are managing to overcome it and I really admire that!
This is a really beautiful piece, although I am really quite angry at that man in the airport, how fucking rude! Who thinks that kind of comment is appropriate?
Its funny how much I can relate to the experiences of someone from the other side of the world to me; I also have a moment in the airport when I go home where I just enjoy being around people who sound like me; I don’t look ‘foreign’ in the UK, but as soon as I speak it singles me out as ‘Not from here’, although people struggle to place my accent. When I first got here I found I was more considered when I spoke, I had to stop and think how I was going to sound saying something. I also talk very fast, so although my accent isn’t thick, people struggle to understand me, so I have to consciously slow down. When I’m home I kind of enjoy letting myself speak naturally and allow my accent to come through more and not have to deal with people not understanding what I’m saying.
The fetishism of ‘foreignness’ is not something I have to experience (much, there’s a small bit of it but its more what people expect my personality to be like over what I look like) but I’m really sorry you have to deal with that and I’m glad you’ve found a good relationship (and it gives me hope that I might find a relationship where I’m not ‘That Irish girl’)
This is a really beautiful piece, although I am really quite angry at that man in the airport, how fucking rude! Who thinks that kind of comment is appropriate?
Its funny how much I can relate to the experiences of someone from the other side of the world to me; I also have a moment in the airport when I go home where I just enjoy being around people who sound like me; I don't look 'foreign' in the UK, but as soon as I speak it singles me out as 'Not from here', although people struggle to place my accent. When I first got here I found I was more considered when I spoke, I had to stop and think how I was going to sound saying something. I also talk very fast, so although my accent isn't thick, people struggle to understand me, so I have to consciously slow down. When I'm home I kind of enjoy letting myself speak naturally and allow my accent to come through more and not have to deal with people not understanding what I'm saying.
The fetishism of 'foreignness' is not something I have to experience (much, there's a small bit of it but its more what people expect my personality to be like over what I look like) but I'm really sorry you have to deal with that and I'm glad you've found a good relationship (and it gives me hope that I might find a relationship where I'm not 'That Irish girl')
This is such a wonderful essay! It reminds me of some of the issues raised in a different context here on the toast a few weeks ago by an essay, which I have been thinking about since it posted: http://the-toast.net/2015/11/19/adoption-and-toxi… . The connection being the part about how the narrative of salvation for squeezes out any space for other feelings, such as anger, for example, or even just ambivalence, and demands only (silent) thankfulness.
It’s such a harmful story wherever it pops up, and I’m glad you’re challenging it.
Best of luck. This was engaging, touching and clear.
“This is the single story forced down the throats of women like me by countless movies, operas, TV shows — even my country’s history books. It is the story I tell myself on those days I am forced to remember that America is not my home.”
Ohhhhh my gosh I have very similar feelings about living in the UK as someone from a former British colony (Singapore) – I’m in my final year of university in London and although I love London with all my heart and my plan is to try and get a visa to stay on and work here, I can never really forget how this country was built on shitty colonialism and imperialism (and this city was the centre of it). Even if I end up living here for a while (which I would love to do!) I feel like this country is never going to feel 100% like home, and in a way I don’t want it to? Like it would be Assimilating Into The Colonial Motherland or something (I don’t really really feel like that, but I do make sure to maintain a healthy resentment towards all vestiges of the British empire)
"This is the single story forced down the throats of women like me by countless movies, operas, TV shows — even my country’s history books. It is the story I tell myself on those days I am forced to remember that America is not my home."
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