For Christmas last year, my mom gave me a Tagalog language learning book. Published in 2005, it’s likely outdated by now. She must have gotten it for a great bargain at a used book sale, which is how she tends to source most of her books, yet this gift was of incommunicable value to me.
Amidst the process of college and scholarship applications, I was just beginning to find my ability to say that I was Filipino, rather than the usual line of, “My dad’s side of the family is from the Philippines.”
The first steps on this journey were skittish. I felt that my identity needed to be defended, a treasure that could easily be stolen from me. That year, a Korean boy my friend dated called me “fake Asian.” Meanwhile, I was trying to make sense of personal stories my father would tell me about the racism my relatives faced in East Texas before the new millennium. I was learning about the Bataan Death March and trying to see my own face in the slideshows shown in class. I was beginning to feel odd that upon learning about my heritage, responses from my peers were generally something like, “That explains why you’re so smart,” or “I could definitely tell,” or “I had no clue! Can you say something Filipino for us?”
It was senior year of high school, and a statistics study session slowly devolved into a friend and I commiserating about the shortcomings of Duolingo: there was no Tagalog course for English learners. She was the only Filipino person I knew outside of my dad, his brother, and my own siblings.
“My mom can teach me,” she said, “but it’s not really the same, because she just gets upset when I get things wrong.” She mimicked her mother scolding her in Tagalog, telling her to do her homework.
I laughed, but I wondered who would teach me Tagalog if the clandestine little owl in my phone couldn’t manage it. At 16, I believed that my father was my only bridge to understanding my Filipino heritage, and at that time, I hadn’t spoken to him in months.
In the years that yawned between my early adolescence and late high school years, the police were frequently at the bottom of our cobblestone driveway. They would come when called either by my 13-year-old self or maybe a neighbor. Memories failed to form in that existence of survival, or perhaps from the lack of memorability of these rapid visits. Officers would routinely say that with no evidence of injury, they couldn’t do anything for us.
Our family lived at the top of a steep hill in a copse of trees. In our neighborhood, all the houses were built differently: A-frames nestled with rustic cabins, avant-garde lawn ornaments and brutalist lighting alongside classic red bricks. Yet despite their design differences, one thing united all of these—ginormous windows to look in on their inhabitants. Years later, I would imagine these windows as a dollhouse view into our traumatic life at the hands of an abuser.
I was 15 when we left that house in a flurry of haphazardly packed boxes. I remember staring at my collection of teen dystopian fiction, trying to discern which ones I should pack into a box of shoes I had thrown together, half without their right pair, and having the uncanny feeling that I was stuck in a bad dream and couldn’t wake up. It was a school holiday; my father was at the office. We were meant to leave in secret, only he turned up hours earlier than expected. The police were present again and stood idly by.
One day, when I was 12 and my family fled for a couple of hours to a nearby IHOP until my father’s temper could cool, he pleaded with my brother and I both to stay behind with him, that he loved us, that he would change.
I was still a child. I’d felt helpless and echoed the words I remembered my mom serenading over my siblings and I again and again as our world was wrenched apart. “We’re just going to go away for a little bit, to have lunch.” His face had morphed into a screwed-up visage of sadness.
“Alright,” he’d said, “take care.” It felt unnatural, like I was a client at his office and not his young daughter.
There were lots of food-based metaphors we used for that time. It was like “walking on eggshells” or “living inside a pressure cooker.” Any one odd thing—a poorly loaded dishwasher, some adolescent sass—could send us running for our lives like rabbits scattering from a fox who just remembered his carnivorous hunger.
Who would teach me Tagalog? I couldn’t call upon my father to do it.
When I was a young child, my father would talk about distant cousins he knew and remembered from his own boyhood who still lived in the Philippines.
The Philippines was always spoken about this way when I was growing up, with a reverence and importance like it was some far-off mythic country like Narnia or Asgard. I imagined turquoise blue waters that glowed at night, lush greenery cascading down a mountainside. This image was quickly disintegrated once when I was old enough to account for the correct amount of Ps and Ls into a search engine bar. It disappeared altogether when I got an Ancestry.com account in high school and learned that my lola had hailed from a sprawling metropolitan region, not some Disney-Pixar landscape.
In a way, even she had been morphed in my mind into something ethereal: a woman unspoken of, shrouded in mystery and left in the darkness of untouched grief. I wrestled for a long time with the belief that if my lola had lived a couple of decades longer, if I’d just had the chance to grow up with her in my life, maybe the answers would have been easier to find. Or even: maybe my father wouldn’t have been the way he was.
In any case, where these cousins of his were now, he never seemed to know, and their names were never made clear to me. I started college, and as my years of research progressed, I became increasingly frustrated. I felt that somewhere out there was a winding family tree who belonged to me in the same way that I belonged to them, the ones who could tell me stories of what my grandmother did not just in life, in times of sickness, but what she was like as a girl. Had she loved stories like me? Was she smart? Prone to bouts of insomnia? Creative? Curious? But instead of a glowing thread leading me to a sense of belonging, I was met with cold, gray walls.
I started to hunt for things that I could hold onto, that I could control. In ninth grade biology class, bacteria became for the first time something I could wrap my head around as a tangible thing. From then on, every time I suspected I was sick, I would spend hours in front of the mirror examining my tongue for the telltale furry whiteness towards my uvula, indicating an unwellness that can only spread. If such signs did exist, I would grip my toothbrush and forcefully scrape my mouth until the soft parts felt raw. This would cure me, I thought, and I could control whether or not I would fall victim to sickness.
And if there were no white spots on my tongue, I would stare into the mirror until I could convince myself that surely there was some bacteria there. I’d scrub at nothing, at everything, trying to take back the control I didn’t have as a kid.
At 22, there are moments when communication between my father and I picks back up again.
Why do you keep letting him back in? the voice in my head berates me.
And in return, Am I not allowed to want a father?
Who will teach me Tagalog? Isn’t that my birthright?
Me. I will teach myself Tagalog. I will lean on the work of all the others before me, the ones who have cleared the path of fallen trees and destruction, and I will plant wildflowers along the way.
