I was asked to speak at the FAB 5 conference for the Manitoba Teachers’ Society. The conference is geared toward teachers in their first five years of teaching. It was fitting — they were starting their careers as teachers and I was starting my career in radio. The following is my keynote address and what I came up with.
My name is Jim Agapito.
I’m a Filipino-Canadian from the north end of Winnipeg. I spent the early part of my life living in a duplex with my entire family. I had two grandmas, two grandpas, five uncles, five aunts, three cousins, one brother, and a mom and dad all living in one home. To this day, I eat fast. Why? Cause if I ever wanted seconds from a meal, I had to make sure I could beat everyone, cause kids always ate first.
My aunts listen to pop and my uncles listen to rap — but there was always one uncle, my Tito Bong, who was into rock. He was the coolest. I don’t know what it’s like in other cultures, but Filipinos always have this wild and crazy party uncle. Mine was my Tito Bong.
So why am I mentioning this? Well, it has a lot to do with my personality and my unique perspective on life. My talk today is about diversity. I promise I’m gonna go the hella long way around about it. But I promise you’ll get a kick out of it.
I went to a private Polish Catholic School for Filipinos. I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. I know what you’re thinking. We teach in public schools. What the hell does this have to do with us? Well, the truth is, it has to do with diversity.
How many people here went to Holy Ghost School? I went to school back when they still gave the student the strap. Now I never got the strap. I did, however, have nuns smack the hell out of my hand when I was being bad.
It’s not something I completely understood, and it’s also something that never bothered me. Now I’m not saying it’s something I approve of, but I guess it’s something my parents were used to in the old country, so they had no problem with it. Yikes! (The truth is the nuns loved me.)
But I was one of those hyperactive little kids that was always goofing around. The truth is, I would be diagnosed with ADHD. How many people here teach young hyper children? Here’s my advice to you: give them a lot of love.
My poor mother, Yolanda, once asked the doctor to give my older brother Mark and I meds to chill us out. The truth is, after one day of being on meds, my mom said we weren’t the bundles of joy (or intensity) she was used to, so she just let us act like bundles of energy trapped in a jar with the lid slightly off. So amazing.
Growing up in school, all the kids played basketball. I don’t know what it’s like in other cultures, but playing basketball is one rite-of-passage thing Filipino kids did. It’s one of those things that your family watched you play, that you watched during playoff time, and that your titos and titas, meaning aunts and uncles, told you you stunk at if you were no good.
My mom was super protective of both my brother and me growing up. When we moved out of the north end and into the Maples, basketball was the one thing I was allowed to do. You see, my mom, like so many Filipino moms during that time, was hyper protective of her children. If Yolanda couldn’t see me playing ball in front of the house with my older brother, I wasn’t going out. My mom was always worried something was gonna happen to her little Jimmy Boy.
For a long time, my best friend in the neighbourhood was white. This was a super big deal for me. For the first seven years of my life, I was surrounded by Filipinos. No diversity there. Being friends with Derek gave me little glimpses into what it was like not to be Filipino. One of my best memories was surprising Derek with the kind of breakfast we Filipinos ate. It is composed of eggs, beef, or longanisa (which is Filipino cured sausage) and rice.
Filipino breakfasts are huge. You always feel a little bit of carb shock. So seeing Derek having nothing but cereal in the morning was super weird. He was always stoked to come over and have breakfast with us. I was always excited to have cereal when I could. It wasn’t until years later that I learned why this is a thing.
Traditionally, Filipinos don’t put cold things in their stomachs first thing in the morning. My mom convinced herself that I hated cold cereal. Truth be told, it’s because she never let me have it.
At age ten, these were the first inklings that I might be different from other people.
For example, Filipinos love sugar. Sugar is in everything. Heck, even our spaghetti, which I detest and nearly gets me thrown out of the culture, is on the sweet side. Why? Because of colonialism. Here’s a quick history lesson. The Spanish colonized us. Then the Americans. The Americans decided to take our sugar, refine it, and, after decades of buying it from us, said they didn’t want it anymore. Instead, they flooded the market with it, and then, when we got desperate, they got big business to come and buy it from us cheaply. Oh yeah, and because we had so much of it around, we would use it in everything.
And that’s my first lesson on diversity for y’all. I don’t know what it’s like now for you teachers. You’ve got the Internet, so kids probably Google stuff all the time. But for a wide-eyed, ten-year-old Filipino, I never realized that we were different. This was what my family ate, so I thought that this was what everyone else ate.
When I discovered that they didn’t, I tripped out. It led me to more questions. Questions I asked my mom. Questions she had no answer for.
It wasn’t until I went to another private school in grade nine that I really discovered that I was different.
I went to an all-boys Catholic school on the opposite side of town. It was so far that it was a two-hour bus ride back and forth. There were so many weird new things for me to get used to — not only was I not around girls, but kids were coming to school in BMWs and, sometimes, even their own cars!
I came from a working-class family. My dad worked nights for CN. He always made sure to drop me every morning at school. Up until grade ten, my dad drove an ’81 Ford Mustang. It was a shit box. It was covered in Urban Camo, meaning it was partly rusted out. On the very rare occasion when my mom would drive me, I came in a ’81 Caprice station wagon! Yes, it had the fake wood panelling on it!
Some of the rich white kids made fun of me. It is the first time I experienced racism. They used to say awful things like, “Your parents couldn’t clean enough rooms for a new car?” or “Did the nursing gig not pay enough for a new car?” It used to bum me out. It also got me into a lot of fights.
Now we Filipinos love food. We have an obsession with food and making sure we always have enough. What some of you call dinner, we call an appetizer. More on this later.
When you’re in the cafeteria and all your friends are buying lunches and stuff, you feel a little awkward carrying around a giant-assed piece of Tupperware with yesterday’s leftovers. Some of it was delicious food that my parents prepared that we didn’t want to go to waste. But imagine taking that out and some kid saying, “What the fuck is that?”
I felt sad that my mom carefully double packed something that I thought was a piece of heaven, but what others said smelled and looked funny.
That gave me a horrible complex. That’s when I begged my mom to buy me pizza pops and crappy sandwiches. I just wanted to fit in more. And boy did it suck.
I think my parents sensed something was up. They could tell that I was awkwardly asking to get dropped off closer to the school bell. So they did the unimaginable. They let me blast the most profane gangsta rap you could imagine rolling up.
And I mean real gangster shit. Like, I was playing Wu-Tang Clan’s Enter the 36 Chambers and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Brooklyn Zoo.” It was the bomb, and it wasn’t like I was coming in quiet. My parents let me blast it as loud as I could.
My parents didn’t want me to feel different. They wanted me to fit in, and that truly led to a bunch of issues I have now.
For starters, my parents never forced me to learn the language. Other than the swears, I didn’t know much. I could kinda fake understanding based on inflection, but really, I never spoke it at all. Which also kinda sucked cause you know family members were judging you when they stared, smiled at you, and talked in Tagalog.
Secondly, I was never forced to eat Filipino food. I am allergic to seafood. Imagine growing up in a Filipino household where fish and shellfish were in everything. My family, to this day, has a hard time believing that a Filipino can have allergies to those staples. It’s come to a point where they’ve tested my “hate for it” by putting trace amounts into everything. The moment my lip gets swollen or my eyes start closing is when they believe something is changing with young Jimmy Boy. But it didn’t stop them. It’s only recently that they’ve started taking this seriously.
The only thing we could agree on was fried chicken. Yup, Filipinos love fried chicken. It might be one of the most Filipino things about me. It came to the point where the only way my family could get me to come to the gathering was by ordering a big bucket of love. That love continues today and it’s even inspired me to get a fried chicken tattoo on my leg.
So why am I telling you this? Well, issues regarding food made me the odd one out of the family. They started to ask me questions like, “What kind of Filipino are you? Food is so important in our culture and you don’t want to eat?”
Now remember how I went to an all-boys Catholic private school? Most of my friends were Filipino; most of the kids from grade school transitioned there. My other classmates? Well, they were from all over, but a majority were white, and a majority played hockey, And remember how I told you that we played basketball? Well, I have news for you. I completely suck at it, but I still played because I wanted to be a part of something.
If you weren’t a jock playing either basketball, hockey, football, or volleyball, chances are you weren’t considered cool. I didn’t do any of those things, but I discovered something no one else was doing. Punk rock.
Keep in mind, my Tito Bong was a banger. He schooled me in so many hair metal ways. His favourite pastime was blasting heavy metal and vacuuming the house. He would crank up Maiden, the Scorpions, AC/DC, and Metallica so loud that it would rumble the house.
Sometimes our neighbour would knock on our door and ask if we could turn down the music. My uncle, sporting his jean vest and mullet, would tell him no and continue to clean the house.
I remember when he had to babysit both my brother and me. I was about nine at the time. Metallica was playing at the old Winnipeg Stadium. It’s where the Silver City is now at Polo Park. We weren’t going in. It was summer and my Tito Bong decided to park his car across the street in the parking lot. He bought my brother Mark and me two Slurpees. We proceeded to sit on two lawn chairs while he stood up and rocked out in the parking lot.
You have no idea what kind of influence that had on me. Here was a guy who was rocking out without a care in the world and not taking it from anyone. That’s amazing. Blew my nine-year-old mind. I thought he was the coolest.
So, remember how it took me an hour to get home? I had to transfer onto another bus downtown. In the dead of winter, I had to get warm, because Winnipeg is so freaking cold. There was a record store downtown called Music City. I would go in there to warm up. But downstairs there was this creepy alternative place called the Cellar. This place used to frighten me. In fact, I was always scared of the loud music and characters coming out of there. But I was intrigued. To me, it felt like the porn area of a video store. One day, I looked in. One of the guys in the store noticed me. “Young man, is there something I can interest you in?” he asked. I looked at him and said, “Ugh.” Keep in mind that this guy had a vest covered in spikes. He gestured to invite me in. I started looking around. The music that was playing on the PA was punk. I’ve never heard this kind of music before. I was pretty blown away because it didn’t make sense to me. Nor could I understand how anyone would even like this music. But it was exciting!
In the background was a videotape of music vids playing on VHS. It was Rancid, one of the most pivotal punk bands of the 90s. They fused punk and ska. I thought, “This is amazing!”
The weird dude that I thought was creepy based on his appearance was super cool. He wasn’t the intimidating person I thought him to be. His name was Andy. He’s now a schoolteacher. But at the time, he played in the Horribles, one of Winnipeg’s most legendary bands.
I wanted to put on headphones to check out some music. There were a whole bunch of records in the player and I went to the first one. Just as I was putting the headphone on, Andy stopped me. He said, “Young man, you don’t want to listen to that. You want to listen to this.” And the best part is, the band was local. They were political punk rockers called Propagandhi. The song I listened to was called “… And We Thought Nation States Were a Bad Idea.” It’s become an anthem in my young teen life. It was the beginning of an awakening for me.
Since I had no money, Andy hooked me up with cassette tape dubs and sampler CDs.
One day, he gave me a flyer to an all-ages show. It was like five bucks and I thought this was super rad. The only problem was, who would go and check this out with me? And that’s when I decided to play the songs for my Filipino friends at school. Their automatic reaction was, “What is this? Is this like some angry white music? Don’t you like hip hop?”
Of course I loved hip hop, but this was something different and new. This had an energy to it I’d never experienced before, and this newfound love for punk now made people question how Filipino I was for not keeping to the status quo.
You also have to remember that the Internet wasn’t a thing back in 1996. You couldn’t just go Google a topic or a musical band. You had to seek stuff out by physically doing it.
So here I was with stuff I cared about and no one to share it with. It was sad. I pretty much spent a good year feeling like a loner. And that’s when things started to go wrong. Eventually, I would leave private school. Things just weren’t working out. I chose to leave.
Now I’m not knocking the private school. That experience taught me a lot of things. But going to public school completely changed my life.
For starters, I met people from all different walks of life. And there were girls, so many girls! The awkwardness I felt talking to girls went away the moment Nicole asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her and her friends. That was rad.
And remember my best childhood friend that lived across the street? Yup, I was now going to school with Derek. The best part was, he was into punk just like me. I was beginning to meet new people who were into the same things I was, and school became fun. And I was acquiring an identity.
There was no class system here. It wasn’t a place where the jocks ruled. You had everyone — jocks, geeks, freaks, theatre kids, punks, kids from all walks of life. There was racism, but it wasn’t as bad as before. And the teachers in public school were super cool to me.
When I went to private school, a couple of teachers picked on me for being different. One teacher always made sure to pronounce my last name wrong. So many people in class would laugh and mimic it. To this day it pisses me off when someone purposefully gets my name wrong. I have PTSD from it.
Another teacher made sure to make fun of the stuff I was into. Here I was, a kid in high school listening to the best music on Earth. And he made fun of me for not understanding why I’d write an entire essay on Minor Threat and being “straight edge.” If you don’t know what straight edge means, it means to abstain from drugs and alcohol. It was rebelling against the cultural norm. It was punk as fuck. It was cool to be different. Although I didn’t identify as straight edge, taking a stance on being different in society meant a lot to me.
That started this me-against-the-world attitude that took me a long time to shake. If no one understood me, screw it, I would just rebel. So I had a really hard time talking to teachers. Academically, I was pretty sound. Attitude-wise, I was a lot of trouble.
It wasn’t until one public school teacher called me on my shit. They didn’t treat me like a child, but like an adult. That started a dialogue. They were willing to listen to me. This taught me that you can trust people and give them a chance.
It made high school a lot better. I felt accepted for who I was. People come from all walks of life, in all sorts of shapes and sizes. That’s when I decided to seek out more people like me. That’s when music became a big part of my life.
For me, wearing a band T-shirt was a gigantic cultural badge saying, “This is what I’m about.” That was what was cool about the punk scene — it was usually made up of outcasts. People from very diverse backgrounds who weren’t accepted into “normal society.” It didn’t matter if you were straight, gay, Muslim, Christian, black, brown, or white. You just had to be a good person and like the music and the message.
Punk got me into vegetarianism, putting me inherently at odds with Filipino culture, which is pretty meat-heavy. Remember the local band Propagandhi that I was slightly obsessed with? Well, let me tell you something about that band. That band taught me a lot about politics and vegetarianism.
It was my eighteenth birthday, and I had just graduated from high school. To celebrate, my lola bought a KFC feast with all the fixins’. She looked at me and said “k’ain na,” making a gesture with her hand to put food in my mouth.
I turned to her and said, “Lola, I’m a vegetarian now. I don’t eat meat.”
She looked at me confused. “There’s fried chicken there. Go eat some before it gets cold.”
“No, Lola, I’m a vegetarian, no more meat for me.”
My mom looked at her and said a couple of words in Tagalog.
“If you don’t like my food, you don’t eat,” my lola said. I could almost see the steam rising from her head.
Lola was already angry with me because I didn’t eat a lot of Filipino food and this just angered her even more. For the next ten years, she tried to entice me with fried chicken, but I held my ground.
So how does Propagandhi play into this? Imagine being a seventeen-year-old watching animals being slaughtered on a constant video loop before entering the concert venue. Yes, that was a thing at punk shows growing up. That alone traumatized me enough to not touch meat for a decade.
But imagine being part of a culture that doesn’t accept your lifestyle choices. My lola nearly threw me out of the family. My parents thought it would be something I’d grow out of quickly, but they were wrong.
I was officially the outcast of the family.
I ended up moving to Ontario. I studied journalism. I also got way more into drinking and drugs, which drained my already limited income.
I loved alcohol. I loved it so much that I pretty much drank daily. That led to many bad decisions.
Alcohol is something that turns me into a “sailor on shore leave.” Trust me, it’s not pretty.
Today, I stay away from it.
My mom was hyper religious growing up. She rarely drank. However, around Christmastime, she would drink some awful sparkling champagne called Baby Duck. She’d get extra funny as the night progressed, belting out Christmas carols or dancing around with some yuletide flair.
Now let’s fast forward to my mid-twenties. After several years away at college, I wanted to bond with my mom. Before I left home at nineteen, my mom was strict and a stickler for rules.
Keep in mind these rules were self-inflicted “decency” ones. That meant no drinking.
Well, that was about to change. When I went away to college, I became a heavy drinker, amongst other things. When I returned home, I introduced my mom to red wine.
My mom can keep it under control, something I can’t do. My drinking led to other bad things, like drugs, which I’d rather not get into.
At my lowest point, I was buying a loaf of bread and going to the college cafeteria to make condiment sandwiches. Sandwiches made of relish, ketchup, and mustard, packed between two slices of white bread. Appetizing, huh? It got to a point where I lost nearly thirty pounds due to bad nutrition. My college professor expressed concern, my friends said I was turning grey, and a nurse friend was convinced that I had scurvy. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
Luckily, Christina, a close friend I knew from Winnipeg, started inviting me over for dinner with her family whenever she could. She always made sure I took something home with me.
Kids can have a lot of pride. The home situation isn’t great or maybe the family is too poor to afford food. And no one likes charity. I certainly didn’t. But the fact that my professor would bring me extra sandwiches, and that Christina would invite me over for dinner on a semi-regular basis, saved my life.
I know that many of you carry extra granola bars and go out of your pocket to help people in need. Keep doing that — little gestures can affect the way someone thinks about life.
For the next five years, I honed my craft as a storyteller. I travelled the world with bands, documenting their lives and shenanigans for terrible pay.
Until a bombshell hit me. My Uncle John got cancer.
My Uncle John was Ukrainian. My auntie Linda, or Dada, as I call her, married a Ukrainian man. Filipinos have a thing where we adopt people in our lives into our family. Since my grandpa died when I was eleven, Uncle John kinda became like my grandpa because he was the same age my grandpa would have been.
Dada and John had no children. He made sure to teach me some of the Ukrainian traditions he thought would be important, like what’s done around Christmas and Easter. It came to a point where Karpaty’s, a Ukrainian deli in the north end, knew me and always had an order ready for my Uncle John.
My aunt died of cancer when I was nineteen. Since my parents didn’t have a lot of money, she wanted to make sure I could go to college, because she said I had a gift for storytelling. This is why I decided to study journalism.
Uncle John was very close to my dad and mom. When he got sick, my dad took early retirement to help care for him, even though John was too stubborn to ask for help. That’s just how my family rolls.
When I found out about Uncle John, I packed up my life in Toronto and headed home.
The next couple of months became anchorless. I moved in with some buds, and I started working a job in a telemarketing firm.
One day my friend brought home this gigantic American Film Institute desk reference book. It was about eight hundred pages long. I just devoured it, reading it in between stints of caring for my uncle and working. It became a Bible for me.
One day, in 2005, I mustered up the courage to email a producer at the National Film Board of Canada. He responded, and we met. I told him I had a documentary idea.
The idea was to follow my wrestling-obsessed friend to meet wrestling icon Vince McMahon. He already had a history of getting pictures with wrestlers and this would be the “pièce de résistance,” so to speak.
He proceeded to tell me that I didn’t know what I was doing. At the end of the meeting, I said, “I don’t care if you believe I can do it or not, I’m still doing it.” Remember, I’ve got this me-against-the-world attitude. The punk world, which was my community, was so used to being DIY that I just expected people to say no if I ever asked for help.
As I walked out the door, he said, “Listen, this world is hard. You need to learn certain things about it. But if you show up on Monday, maybe there’s something you can learn.” And that became Monday, and Tuesday, and soon every day for about eight months.
Finally, a diversity initiative emerged to train ten filmmakers across Canada to make their first documentary feature through the National Film Board of Canada. It was highly competitive. I ended up being one of the ten chosen out of eight hundred applicants.
My parents thought that I was wasting time. They didn’t understand why I was devoting all my time to filmmaking. They wanted me to do something practical like become a nurse or go back to school.
Then, two days before I was set to leave for Montréal for a week to start workshopping my film, my dad called me and said I had to go see Uncle John right away, because he didn’t have much time left.
My Uncle John shooed me away from being by his side all the time. “You’re a young man, Jim,” he said. “You gotta live your life.”
I spent the evening with him in palliative care. He was not completely lucid because of all the pain meds he was on, but he gave me one of the most encouraging speeches ever.
My family may not have understood what I was doing, but he did. He told me that in life, people are always going to be against you. They will always bring you down. They will say that you’re living a fantasy and bring up all sorts of reasons why you can’t do it. They are going to say you will fail because of race, age, or social class. But here’s the thing. You’re a fighter. You always have been. So when you start your career making films and telling stories, you’re going to be great. He said he was proud of me.
Uncle John died the next morning.
My dad asked me what I wanted to do. Should they have the funeral now, or should they wait for me to get back?
I didn’t want my Uncle John to come back from the grave and haunt me. So I went to Montréal and started my career as a documentary filmmaker.
During that time, I met Métis filmmaker Ervin Chartrand, who remains a close friend. We both wanted to tell stories about people who didn’t have a voice, especially kids.
That’s where this project came along.
It was called “Live/Life from 95.”
It was a co-production between the Winnipeg Arts Council and CBC Manitoba. Here’s the art council’s description of the project:
The WITH ART program matches artists with community groups to collaborate on art projects that explore ideas and issues and give voice to community. The filmmakers worked with the youth of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba to create a hip hop video and a documentary of the process.
IRCOM, located at 95 Ellen Street in downtown Winnipeg, is a transitional housing complex and delivers social and recreation programs to newly arrived refugees and immigrants to Canada. Over 250 new immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Liberia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan live at IRCOM and access their programs — over half of whom are under the age of 18. Navigating their new environment is challenging and some youth become vulnerable to gang-related activities. The goal was to offer opportunities for more productive activities and creative growth.
The artists, Jim Agapito and Ervin Chartrand, worked with the youth over an extended period and together developed a project that reflected an artistic style and content that was relevant to the youth. The filmmakers brought in Wab Kinew and Dammecia Hall who mentored the youth in hip hop writing and dance as well as other professional artists and craftspeople to create a high quality rap video and documentary of the process. The youth were able to decide what they wanted to communicate and in what fashion, making it a unique and personal, as well as a universal, expression of life in a new land.
This was filmed in 2007. One of the kids is Jamshaid Wahabi. The other is Dagmawit Fekede. We wanted to run an after-school filmmaking program. At this point, I had made a lot of music videos for some big-name clients across Canada. Lots of my work was featured on MuchMusic at the time.
Ervin had just come off of making a music video for our good friend Wab Kinew, the current leader of the Manitoba NDP. Wab was a rapper and wanted to teach the youth how to rap.
Newcomer gangs around the Immigrant and Refugee Centre of Manitoba, or IRCOM, were at war with Aboriginal gangs. As a former gangster, Ervin knew bridging his culture with the newcomer could help bring better understanding.
Here are two extreme opposites. Dagmawit was a girl who wanted to make a better future after leaving poverty in Africa. Jamshaid’s father was killed in the war in Afghanistan. He was ostracized at school for not being able to speak the language well. He joined the African Mafia gang.
In the end, we were able to make the music video, and the kids were able to watch the video screened at the Mayor’s Luncheon for the Arts. The city also played their video and documentary during moonlight movies at the Cube, which meant so much to these kids.
Dagmawit went on to get a full scholarship to Ryerson University. She studied journalism and went into the world of publishing. That was a success! She told me that our program taught her the possibilities of storytelling.
Jamshaid Wahabi was shot and killed outside the Citizen nightclub in November 2019. For years, Jamshaid tried to steer himself in the right. Every time he got out of jail, he asked if he could put me as a reference for jobs he was applying for. I said yes.
It just goes to show what kind of impact you can have on someone. While I’m not a teacher per se, I taught these kids. I have no idea what it’s like to be a refugee, but I know what it’s like to be poor and to struggle. I had a bond with these kids, so much so that they trusted me years later to help guide them with their futures. That’s an example of the difference you can make in your students’ lives.
While I was helping these kids with their lives, my own life was out of control. My addictions were getting the better of me. Because of drugs and alcohol, I put on a lot of weight. I had lost all connection to my family and my culture. I was in freefall. That’s when I got into boxing and met Roland Vandal. He was a person affected by addictions and trauma. I made a documentary on him at the time that I was sorting out my own trauma and addictions.
His parents were alcoholics. He had been sexually abused by a boxing coach. His brother also abused him. He turned to gang life.
He had lived an extremely hard life. But you know who he thanked to get him to the other side? His school principal, Mr. Bodding.
Roland now spends his time giving back to the community. He’s on the board of the Red Road Lodge, a shelter for men in downtown Winnipeg. He’s running two foster homes and teaches boxing to many at-risk youth and champions at Stingers Boxing Club. I’ve been helping him with that for many years.
Roland got me clean and sober. After I finished shooting the documentary, I binged and ended up in the hospital. Roland convinced me to go to rehab and straighten my life out. As of this year I’ve been six years clean and sober.
But I’ll say this: I’ve had a strange relationship with alcohol and drugs. I ended up in the hospital and my doctor told me to stop, or my body would start shutting down. Plus, it was bad for my mental health. I was a mess for a while. I was a high-functioning alcoholic and drug addict.
Lots of it stemmed from feeling like an outsider. I joined the punk rock / music scene because I wanted “family.” For a long time, that puts you at odds with your culture. I felt like I wasn’t “Filipino” enough for my family and Filipino friends. In reality, they always accepted me. It’s something that I got over and I’m glad I can have a conversation about this now with my mom.
In my experience, Filipino culture doesn’t talk about addictions or mental health issues, but they should. My family might not want to ever talk about it, but they know it’s there and they’ve come to terms with it, and that’s put my heart at ease.
So that’s the road that led me to this podium today.
When people hear that I am a filmmaker, they say, “That’s great! As a person of colour, you get so many opportunities presented to you and you’re killing it.” It feels like a backhanded compliment. I want people to understand that, despite my race and background, my work is just as good as anyone else’s.
Yes, I want to give voices to many diverse cultures and people. But that entire argument fuelled the “me-against-the-world” argument. I was so convinced that I had to fit in that I forgot what it’s like to be a Filipino living in Canada.
Because no matter how much I try to fit in, all I have to do is look in the mirror and see that I’m not like everyone else. I’m Filipino. I am BIPOC. I forgot the very essence of what it was to be BIPOC. My voice in the community matters. That disconnect to my culture fucked me up. I was constantly trying to be just Canadian. But I’m a Filipino-Canadian.
The road back to my Filipino culture has been the journey I’ve been on since I got sober.
My first stop was trying to understand what bakla (roughly translated into English as “gay”) culture was through my friend, the talented photographer Ally Gonzalo.
Growing up, friends and family members from my community made fun of baklas. As a straight man, I wanted to educate myself about being a gay Filipino in a homophobic and racist society.
As a storyteller, my agenda is to give voice to people from diverse backgrounds. This was perfect. I knew a lot of people in my community would be prejudiced toward this film. Some would cite their religious beliefs, while others wouldn’t want to talk about anything to do with sex.
Some of the people featured in this project were coming out to their families and friends for the first time. And what this project helped me do was start a path to discovering my own culture and identity.
At this time, I was teaching film at the University of Manitoba. I was an instructor. The fact that I was teaching filmmaking at a university blew my mind. I had been at the job for a decade. But when the pandemic hit, I lost my job and was forced to find work elsewhere.
That’s where CBC came into play. Although I’ve made many documentaries for them in the past, I’ve never been a journalist working in the news department. I was also in a medium that was new to me: radio.
I had long been struggling with the fact that my lola, or grandma, called me a bad Filipino. Now, not only are Filipinos digging the show, but people from all backgrounds are telling me how much they relate to it. It’s starting a dialogue, which means a lot, because I know I was the unlikeliest person to wave the flag of Filipino culture.
Recovering Filipino has had over a million listeners on CBC Radio One. It’s been downloaded around the world thousands of times. It’s the first time a Filipino host is hosting a show on Filipino culture on Canada’s public broadcaster. It’s brought my family and I closer, and it’s made people from other cultures want to ask questions they might have been afraid to ask, both about Filipinos and their own cultures.
We live in a world where things have become so black and white, but it doesn’t have to be that way. My podcast is a way to encourage people to embrace differences. It’s also offering audiences — especially younger Filipino-Canadians, who may feel disconnected from their heritage — a history lesson.
And it’s exactly what you teachers do for so many students. You give them important lessons. You get the opportunity to mould the minds of young people everywhere.
They’ll spend more time with you than most people in their lives. So do me a huge favour: please teach your students how to empathize with people who are different from them — different for whatever reason.
I applaud all of you. You have one of the hardest jobs out there, but it’s also, I think, the most rewarding. Thank you.