My family has a funny quirk when it comes to speaking with each other. Well, I’m not sure what you’d call it — others might call it a quirk, which I would agree with. Nonetheless, I can say that somewhere, somebody along the line made a decision, and to this day I can’t point any fingers or determine who exactly decided that we would do this. Six-year-old me certainly did not have an explanation for when this came up during a class activity about birthdays.
It was September, so school had started fairly recently, and I was probably trying to make a good impression on the other first graders in my class. Talking about birthdays sparked a memory of my mom rhyming off our weekend schedule, and I raised my hand to offer my input.
“My Tita Bernadette and Uncle Nestorio both have birthdays this weekend,” I shared in excitement. I remember that my teacher gave me a bit of a perplexed look. She replied, “Thanks for sharing, Alexa, that’s great — but exactly what is a tita?”
Okay, maybe it wasn’t that dramatic, and I can’t remember if those were her exact words. And honestly, that teacher was fantastic, and I have fond memories of that class. However, that moment felt like an end-of-the-world embarrassment for shy little me. At the time, I obviously didn’t have the words for the feelings I had; looking back now, I realize that being othered (intentionally or not) made me feel a plethora of feelings that I couldn’t express as a six-year-old.
All because someone taught the cousins to call the aunts Tita, but decided to stop short of teaching us to call our uncles Tito. (Don’t listen to any of my titas and uncles, by the way — they didn’t try hard enough to make Tito a thing.)
I knew that, like all families, my family had quirks; my family was a bunch of larger-than-life Filipinos living in Ottawa, Canada’s frosty capital, so I felt that our quirks seemed to stick out more than others’. I, my sister, and many of my cousins were “born here,” as I say to the busybodies — both of my parents were under eighteen when they immigrated to Canada from the Philippines with their families in the mid and late 1970s. Neither of my parents really encountered other Filipinos growing up, and many Filipinos that they did meet had lost their native language, speaking English to integrate with their friend groups in Canada. At a certain point, my mother forgot the language completely. It was more important to blend in, to assimilate.
While growing up in the late 1990s and 2000s offered a higher level of multicultural acceptance, I still found myself in awkward situations where I couldn’t explain the way I spoke and the words I used, especially with my family. See, another quirk about my family is that none of the cousins can speak Tagalog fluently, but we use just enough key words to confuse the average English speaker. Our family’s conversations growing up were peppered with Tagalog and Ilocano words, with what felt like no rhyme or reason. I used to not understand the difference between Tagalog and Ilocano and, up to a point, did not realize that my dad spoke the former with his family and my mom spoke the latter with her family. Didn’t even notice! In my household, we were throwing a bunch of words together as we pleased, since it got the point across anyway. Besides that, I like to joke that knowing the curse words in Tagalog is good enough in itself.
My family, like many other Filipino families living in Canada, lives this unintended, but quite common, “hybrid” life of languages. I believe that this stems from wanting to fit in and belong in Canadian society, as well as from an unconscious shame of being Filipino. A visible other, an ethnicity guessing game associated with nannies and nurses, the idea of being Filipino in Canada has changed as my parents and I have grown up. I am a firm believer in the idea that the language you use shapes the world around you — having grown up with Filipino words tossed with English all around me, I am all too familiar with this hybrid life of languages. I was surprised to discover that this was more common among Filipino-Canadians than I had previously thought, showing me that we should be collectively embracing this as a part of our identity and community.
Some of the first Tagalog words I learned were words that referred to body parts. This made some early childhood encounters a bit strange, but I think most people were willing to gloss over the particular words I used, given the context. I don’t think any supervising adults or friends wanted to risk having me explain my special word (but yeah, I probably did mean to say “vagina”). These words reinforced the fact that my body was Filipino. Dark unruly hair and tanned skin made me feel so different from my classmates and peers. The same shame of being Filipino that my parents felt growing up once they got to Canada, that was what I started to feel from a young age. The idea of the body, and by consequence my own body, was a reminder that no matter how Canadian I acted, people would always see me as a Filipino first.
One might think that coming across other Filipinos would remedy feeling down about fitting in. But as a kid, I felt almost more ashamed when meeting other Filipino kids. I threw up a defensive wall if language was ever mentioned; I didn’t know how to deal with not knowing Tagalog, I didn’t know how to respond to kamusta na, and I was nervous about finding another space where I didn’t belong. Nobody really addressed this formally either — at best, meeting other Filipino kids happened in one of my lola’s random friends’ basement at a party. On our way home, I would casually tell my parents about the other kids and their language levels, but it was never made to be a big deal. My parents shrugged it off and I was encouraged to do so too. I got the impression that it was better if I knew as little as possible.
In fact, as I got older, my parents started to focus on prioritizing my learning of French. Living in Ottawa, which straddles the Ontario/Québec border, my parents believed that learning French would benefit my career possibilities (something they considered greatly as I turned twelve). I was on board, as some of my titas and uncles knew French — my dad’s family actually landed in Québec first, and one tita used to say tabarnak so often I thought it was a Tagalog word. I have reaped the benefits of being educated in French and have had jobs using French; I even worked in Québec for a short period of time. My French, though nothing special, is still what I would consider much better than my Tagalog. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to know as much Tagalog as French, and I wonder why my parents might have thought that learning French would impede my capacity to learn Tagalog. Again, there was this underlying shame of being Filipino resurfacing — as if to deem our language inelegant and not worth knowing.
With this unconscious shame, I drove headfirst into a direction that panicked my parents: English literature and the arts. Language had become so important to me, and I was bent on diving deeper. We had so many arguments — all of the arguments — about it. I got my wish, but truthfully, it felt like I was digging for something missing; I was feeling incomplete and didn’t have the words to describe how I was feeling, even to myself. A component of literature is knowing history for context. At times, in certain texts, I could see a glimpse of my ancestry, but it was never at the forefront. I read and studied so much about the histories and cultures of what my ancestors would consider the world’s biggest bullies. And still, it took much more time and coming to terms with myself before I realized that the most healing would come from connecting to my roots — exploring my family history and, very slowly, considering the idea of learning Tagalog.
I don’t actually place blame on anyone for not making the Filipino language a priority in our family. My family’s experience of being immigrants and first-generation Canadian had a quiet impact on their Filipino identity. Joking that the kids didn’t want to learn the language or saying that we were too lazy to commit to learning, I think subconsciously, was our family’s way of trying to save the next generation from being othered in the same way they were when they were growing up in Canada. Knowing how they struggled and couldn’t put their feelings into the right words, I want my generation and the next generation of Filipino-Canadians to be able to share our experiences, no matter what language they speak, no matter which words they choose (but, extra points if you toss in putang ina mo). There are so many of us living these hybrid lives of languages, starting to feel comfortable with exploring our Filipino roots, desiring to feel more connected to the homeland.
I believe we can heal by realizing that we can exist without shame in this in-between, hybrid life. We can embrace this as part of our collective identity as a community. I’ll be over here with my titas and uncles, waiting to welcome more people into this strange club.