As a child born and raised in the Okanagan Valley, being Filipina felt very much like a performance. My parents would spend hours practising in the basement before dancing the tinikling at a community event. My mother is an excellent seamstress, which ensured that my sister and I were fashioned into handmade terno dresses before trekking down Main Street, waving to people in the annual Peachfest parade. Other instances of performing that come to mind include a stunning black-and-white photo of my Tita Chita, my father’s eldest sister, participating in a Filipino fashion show in the west end of Vancouver in the late 1960s. It’s a photo of her in a beautiful, hand-embroidered dress with elegant butterfly sleeves with her hair upswept, effortlessly holding a fan adorned with sampaguita flowers. These sorts of events shaped my earliest knowing of what it means to be Filipina. There were other material objects in the house I grew up in that gestured to me, reminding me of a motherland far away. There was the capiz shell chandelier in the southwest corner; a teak carabao figure whose horn I broke and fixed with Elmer’s glue; baníg mats; baskets and hats made from bamboo, tilog grasses, and rattan.
I think about being Filipina as a tenderness rooted in one’s tongue. My family and I did not live in an urban centre where Filipino foods were readily available at Asian stores. I remember my father bringing a box of mangoes home from Overwaitea, sniffing and smelling each one as if he had won the lottery. He tried taking the mango seeds and planting them in the backyard, but to his disappointment, nothing came up. To this day, my father still saves the tops of pineapples and plants them in the backyard. He never loses faith or hope that maybe one day the fruit of his childhood might make an appearance. While no tropical fruit trees exist in my parents’ backyard, two Italian plum trees have been bearing fruit my entire life. For over four decades, my father has picked the plums and shared them with whoever came to visit. My mother dehydrates the fruit and makes plum chutney or plum fruit leather to give away to friends and family. I like to keep the seeds from the plums in a little jar by my writing desk. Those stone fruit seeds keep me grounded and connected to the place I was born, to the longevity of my father’s ability to grow food, and are a reminder that seeds germinate nostalgia and connection. The seeds also represent the generative nature of my father’s hands and heart in taking care of a small space that, year after year, continues to bear kamatis, upo, kalabasa, ampalaya, bawang, and many kinds of flowers. Only now do I reflect on how challenging it must have been for him to leave his home during Martial Law and to be uprooted from familiar food, tastes, and climates.
My tongue does not twist easily around Tagalog. My mother’s first language is Pangasinan. My father’s first language is Tagalog. My first language is English. My parents speak Tagalog at home but wanted me to be rooted in English. While I wish they had spoken one of their mother tongues to me while growing up, in this day and age you can take classes online. For most of the two-year pandemic, my Wednesday nights have been spent learning verb tenses, ligatures, monosyllabic roots, and those confusing markers ang/ng with other Filipinx in the diaspora searching for the sounds that connect them to the empty parts of themselves. Language is an expression of a world view, a way to share thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Part of me has always felt that something was missing because of this inability to convey myself in the sonics of language that surrounded me during my formative years. My mother’s language is still largely inaccessible to me, although I did Google how to say “I love you” (Inaro taka). I have a son, a stepson, and two nieces, who mostly speak English. I try to teach them the Tagalog words that I know and search for age-appropriate bilingual books for them. I want them to learn more about the Philippines, the diversity of the islands, the many languages and dialects, the folklore, the colonial history, and of course, the food. I didn’t learn anything, as there were no classes in primary, secondary, or post-secondary school about the Philippines. I don’t begrudge my parents for wanting me to adapt and assimilate into the mainstream. They were learning themselves how to find their way as new arrivants. But losing that connection and relationship with my roots and habitually not seeing myself reflected in media, pop culture, literature, and textbooks had an impact on how I view myself in relation to others. Sometimes I was the only racialized person in a classroom, or in a piano or dance recital. This had a detrimental effect on my self-esteem causing stress, anxiety, and feelings of being an imposter. I try to find examples of pop culture, books, and movies with Filipino characters so that my nieces, son, and stepson can feel validated and proud of who they are.
My mother was one of the first Filipina women in Penticton in the 1960s. She worked at the Penticton Regional Hospital for over thirty years. Beyond her labour, she is an active volunteer, a lover of birds and orchids, a talented seamstress, and an avid reader. As a child, I have memories of my mother exchanging leche flan and lumpia for whole salmon from her friend on the Penticton Indian Reserve. On a recent trip back to Penticton, my mother and I visited the Penticton Library and Museum. The permanent collection at the museum has changed over the last few years, highlighting more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band histories, languages, stories, and culture. My mother lamented the passing of her friend who used to give her salmon but saw her spirit in these initiatives to highlight more Sylix, Okanagan, and Penticton Indian Band ways of knowing and being.
When I was in junior high school, the book that made me dream about being a writer was a novel called Slash by Jeannette Armstrong. It is a powerful novel about the political realities of First Nations’ ongoing struggle for recognition of rights and land claims. It was a story set in a place that I was connected to and published on the Penticton Indian Reserve. It was a novel that opened me up to learning and unlearning what I know. This novel and author taught me about the power of literature and made me aware of systemic issues that are at the forefront of contemporary current events in so-called Canada.
My youngest son is First Nations (Witsuwit’en, Gitxsan, Ts’msyen) and Filipino. He likes to call himself Indipino, a combination of the words Indigenous and Filipino. He attends a trilingual elementary school (English, Gitxsanimx, French), although English and French are the predominant languages, and he is learning how to read. As a mother, I try to infuse daily life with Tagalog words that I know and recipes passed down from my mother and father. I often wonder what life is like for him, navigating different world views and ways of knowing and being. I think back to my own childhood and formative years of existing in the interstitial spaces of unbelonging. Not quite Filipino enough due to my inability to converse in Tagalog, and never quite Western enough, despite a lifetime of “Oh, you speak English so well!” microaggressions.
I reside in Northern BC with my family and circle back to Penticton as often as I can to visit my aging parents, despite the fourteen-hour car drive. My father turned seventy-seven this year and my mother is in her early eighties. I try to time our visits to coincide with the blossoming of the plum flowers and when the stone fruit is falling off the branches. Climate change, wildfire threats, and inclement weather have become a reality that impacts our planned road trips. Each time I visit, I return to the place that moulded me, and my kinship roles shapeshift from daughter to caregiver, to mother, to Tita, to Ate, and back again to daughter. Three generations eating food from the backyard, conversing in English and stitched-together Tagalog, and spiralling through the histories of our memories of one another. I am nostalgic for the smell of ponderosa pine trees in the thick of the summer heat. I feel grateful for the time my parents, my sister, my nieces, my son, and my stepson can spend together as we braid time and geography: past, present, and future existing in each other’s iterative and shared moments.