During my high school and college years, I struggled often with my identity. I’m Filipino and was born & raised in Southern California, but who am I: American? Filipino? Asian? Maybe a bit of everything? Or none?
I attended a dominantly white high school. In the first couple years, I wanted to fit in so it made sense to focus on assimilating further into American culture. During my junior year, I carpooled every day with my friend Greg back to his house. While I waited for my own ride back home, Greg's mom often whipped up some mean chicken enchilada dinners. Shout out to his mom. Whenever I eat Mexican, I get nostalgic flashbacks of her delicious ‘red sauce’ and the first couple bites of that crunchy yet moist cumin chicken savoriness. I appreciate her tremendously for introducing and sharing a cultural identity outside of my own through tastebuds.
When I started college at UC Irvine, I noticed I had done a cultural one-eighty. Here I was fresh out of high school, ready to sit in my first college lecture of about four hundred people. What did I notice? Asians, a lot of them. Filipinos too. One year later, even more Asians. And no, this was not because I was a biology major. Asians were everywhere, in every lecture hall. Even in the schools of arts and humanities. I guess that 50% freshman enrollment rate for Asians turned out to be hard fact. Like in high school, my mechanism for human belongingness kicked in as I began to build new (mostly Asian) friendships. Yet, my former American identity from high school still preceded this novel environment.
That put me in a weird spot, in a divide, a gray area of sorts. Even though America has progressed further as a melting pot of both good and bad cultural microcosms, I worked so hard to become "American" in high school. And college presented its own identity challenges: Do I form a hybrid identity or pick one over the other? And my girlfriend was Asian. Talk about identity crisis.
Fast forward a couple reflective years later and back from a long overdue trip to Manila, I realized that I couldn't choose one identity over the other; I needed to embrace all. Yes, I'm American and I relate to that better than culture in the Philippines. But I'm also Filipino by heritage and there is no reason I should ever suppress that because it's one of the vital parts of my unique self.
So who am I? I'm not just American, I'm Filipino. It's something I can honestly love now. You can call me "Kuya", a word in Tagalog for brother. In high school, I'd only eat sandwiches for lunch because any other kind of food was strange (speaking of assimilation and cultural suppression). Now, you'll find me devouring a gastronomic burger obviously with fries which is still American AF, but I'm proud to share with you some of Tita's famous chicken adobo, and lumpia, too.
