Back when he was young and gave a shit, apologies bounced off his tongue and sentiment beckoned from every hi and hug. Now it’s 2021, he’s thirty-six, and everyone comes to his party just to get pissed out of their fucking minds. He urks whenever he hears that word, community.
They revel; he lolls in the gardens sussing out the suspended snow. The way it hangs in the garden, as if atmosphere can sleep. Samantha, his agent, rented the house; perhaps the visitors believe he owns it. He lets them believe it. He is a performer, you know. YouTuber, blogger, tweeter-twit. The anti-intellectual video essayist who rails against hipsters, bobos, and academics. He thought he’d be cancelled by now. And he does get cancelled, every week at least. But the offers keep coming.
Marites, his frequent collaborator and confidante, calls him untouchable. (They both know how untouchable can refer to the caste outside caste — or the Noli — but neither points this out.) Why was he untouchable? Why was he the one chosen? He ponders this from the chilly winter-quiet garden. He was raised in Oahu, had lived in South Korea, and arrived in Canada with a traveller’s sense of language as something that designates a place. And when a place believes it’s bigger than it is, it turns into a bubble, an empty bubble that floats away. He, pinprick, could not help but pop.
He calls Samantha as he creeps closer to the frosted windows of the rented house (he checks: not fake frost, real frost). The phone in his ear protects him from having to go inside or from appearing creepy as he spies on his guests.
He met Samantha just a year before, after she saw his YouTube show, “The M-3” — a name that referred to his own Filipino, Chinese, and mixed white background with three Ms: Mango, Mongol, Mongrel. The byline: “The M-3 features three-second sketches. Some are about colonialism. Some are dick jokes.” He spoke to Samantha’s sharp, blue-rimmed glasses through his tablet screen, and their first conversation went like this:
I thought you’d be much more …
Crazy? Suicidal? Insulting?
Younger.
He liked that she didn’t even say hello.
I’ve been watching your video essays. I wouldn’t call them sketches if I were you. Sketches make people think of comedy, not colonialism.
Colonialism is comedy. Or is comedy colonialism? Hmm. That’s a sketch.
He had expected nothing from the meeting, and he told her as much, not with words but with rigid artistry. When making his sketches — and sketches they were — he had to be totally free. His method was no thinking, no planning (what Samantha later translated as his “biteable” style). He drew from life (an “about me” vibe). He would not hold back (a “chunky” attitude).
I have no inhibition whatsoever, he told her. I am a child. He heard her breathe, so he spoke for her: And being of the community, representing the things I represent, this could get me in trouble.
She offered him a contract. The next day, he posted a sketch featuring various positions of unprotected sex while he, the receiver, groaned in pleasure: Records in sales! Call my agent, she’ll set you up! They accept non-union performers! Twenty percent royalty on international markets! Here’s a chance to showcase your skills!
Despite The M-3’s verbatim quotes from her agency-speak, Samantha somehow got the show a six-figure contract for an hour-long episode for wide distribution on home streaming services.
Did you ever see those blips? he asks Samantha as he wipes his breath from the glass. He had, eventually, stopped calling them sketches. But not because of her.
The ones with the dog?
The dog? I don’t think we mean the same thing.
I’m very protective of my time.
That interview you set up. The DJ called my rise meteoric. Bugged the shit outta me. Meteors must stay away from planets. They are as much burning beauty as they are total devastation.
She clacks on a keyboard. As he expects, or as he hopes, she’s translating his nonsense into a systemic edit, hacking his words to pieces, running it through a mill. In the end, she’ll have a shiny plank to help build his image.
The premiere starts in ten minutes, she reminds him. Aren’t you going to make a speech?
I’m not actually inside the house right now.
You’ll need your community behind you. You know that.
This all just feels so set up. Wouldn’t they know what’s going on?
I think people just want to be seen. She goes over the concept again: The audience must be aware that the show isn’t really about you, that you’re just playing a toxic Filipino man. You’re just poking fun at your own background, not shaming it.
The self-hating buffoon.
Exactly.
An important fiction.
Well, okay then. She was never one to say goodbye either.
He pretends to stay on the phone, peering at his community through the frosted window. He hates the idea of a party in his name. Guests saying congratulations, sipping wine in his direction. Smiling. The celebration is Samantha’s event all over: at a house he’s never been in, with appetizers from a Filipino restaurant he’s never dined in. She knows the stakes, having seen the community feedback. He opts to stay ignorant about the market, the culture, the vibes. But he does know that of the thousands of fan emails he’s received since starting his YouTube channel, not one was from a Filipino.
He finds creative stimuli through the glass: cans of beer and glasses of wine and black hoodie jackets that are all identical besides the logo above the left nipple. Perhaps none of his guests saw his series on Vancouver. It began with three-second blips about Vancouver racisms: Cringe Racism, Watered-Down Racism, LuLu Racism, Prime Ministerial Brown-Face Racism, Bottom-Shelf Racism, Under-the-Table Racism, Japandroids Racism, Over-Prescribed Racism, Self-Care Racism. The videos’ popularity at millions of views each led to more: Vancouver, the Land of False Creek and Even Falser People; Vancouver, Our Only Identity Is We’re Not America; Vancouver, Where You Never Know Just How Much Rat Poo You’re Getting with Your Morning Granola.
Inside, the circle of people grows in circumference. Soon it will turn into an oval, then curve into the kitchen, and droop into the hall. None will leave the circle, however. Do they trust so well in its powerful chismis? Are they so afraid to turn their backs?
Sketch idea: the circle widens until it droops through the front door. People squeeze in and someone who drives a Tesla slips into the fireplace.
He sees Marites in the circle and remembers one of the many reasons he doesn’t drink: Chinese red face. Rosy cheeks give away mixed blood, then lack of knowledge, then inability to speak Tagalog, then a forbidden disgust for Christmas kitsch.
Marites spots him. She has the look of an erotic intellectual, a Sontag or an Arendt, though she is only a sessional film lecturer at the nearby hilltop university. She performed at her best for over a decade before she realized that the department would never promote her. They had her labour, her ideas, her art. Why would they pay more for it? Since this fact dawned upon her, her blood pressure dropped significantly, while her resentment grew like an oil spill.
Marites leaves the circle, probably to find him. He sees his own reflection in the window (creep-ass!) and walks back into the garden.
Of course they talk about him. And why not? He talks about them ruefully, in public, in sketches, in subtweets. The Filipinos, in their enclosures, he once said. Or maybe it was that series of blips he made about Filipinos being not-quite-Asian: Filipinos, the Mexicans of Asia; Filipinos, the Street Market Asians; Filipinos, the Off-Brand Asians. By the time Samantha encouraged him to ease off with the “challenging content,” he got away with one more: Filipinos, the deluded, the diluted, and the dead.
The further he paces into the garden, the more the house looks like a mansion. Like many Vancouver properties, someone probably bought it as an investment to rent out to up-and-comers like himself. An aspirational happiness loan.
Above the roof, the moon takes the rough shape of an axe poised to drop.
He imagines another sketch: spirits live on the moon and can hear all the unheard things. When a tree falls in a forest, they can hear it. When someone whispers a prayer to their palms, they can hear it. When someone offs themselves without a note, they can hear their last words. They can’t do anything about it.
In the garden of dead rose bushes, he feels the dread cold.
And here comes Marites, bringing him a glass of Diet Coke with loads of fizz. Her fingers graze the snow from the bushes as she approaches.
I thought this was your party?
I’m in character. Eccentric artist hides in the garden.
In negative five-degree weather.
Is it that cold?
Marites isn’t half, like him, but they both have scummy cheaters for fathers. When they first met, encountering time and again at readings and celebrations, their detachment from their cultures attached them to each other. Marites told him that you can’t be anti-colonial and still believe in white Jesus. He didn’t quite agree, yet the provocation struck ground between them, a place where they could play with the soggy dirt.
Most of his videos began as a joke between them, and sketch ideas flowed with the wine. They could intuit where the bubbles were and jab at them freely. It made the work raw, funny — couch humour flung to the touch screen. Their conversations about white Jesus led to his first sketch to go beyond three seconds: Gum. He plays a Filipino Catholic priest, a padre, who tells a young woman, Marites, that pre-marital sex will make her feel like a chewed-up piece of gum. She says she will definitely not have sex, but she still likes gum, because it tastes like semen.
Marites’s eyes settle on the empty field near the parking lot. You know what new snow always reminds me of? she says. A skating rink after hours, when the Zamboni slowly smooths out the ice, leaving everything flat, not necessarily to make it slippery or sleek again, but to erase the evidence of scraps and scrapes. Like no one has ever touched it, ever.
A Zamboni?
Right. You’ve never been to a hockey game. She looks at her phone. Aren’t you going to watch your premiere? Make a speech or something?
Not really.
You worked hard for this.
I worked less than a year for this. How long has Michael been making short films? How many Canada Council grants are represented in that house? Yet, I, the shitty YouTuber, gets the big deal.
You’re right. They probably think you’re a self-loathing narcissist. Oh no! So awful. Get over it. Anyone who holds fast to their integrity inevitably has ruptures. Doesn’t matter what institution, family, or community they’re in.
Her words just drip into the snow.
You’re sulking. You’ve got a sulking presence.
This was a shit idea. Filipinos will hate us more than anyone.
Well, first you gotta stop referring to us and them. We are Filipino, aren’t we?
Man, they’ll do us in for sure.
This party was Samantha’s idea, right? What did she expect?
I don’t know. She believes in my work, so I don’t get it. Why throw us to the wolves on the day of the premiere?
She gives him a look. Like a Sontag-Arendt smoker. Have you ever heard of an agent being cancelled? Or a talent agency? Or a book publisher? If anything happens, they’ll just fire you and look all the better for it. Nobody cancels the institutions that made us, not if they still want to be made.
And what about you? Do you think they won’t come for you?
You think I can’t disavow you in a second?
A sketch: this absurd fucking conversation, but just now Marites exhales a cloud of smoke and his phone-camera catches it crawling into the snow.
Through the window, he watches his streaming special begin. The title card on the fifty-four-inch mounted television states:
The M-3 Show Presents
The Most Filipino Streaming Special You’ll Ever Watch
Scene 1, he’s on stage in various thrown-together wigs:
Define a Filipino: a person who’s being all extra about being Filipino.
Define a Filipino: a mixed-race sell out who doesn’t look or act Filipino at all.
Define a Filipino: do you mean Filipina, Filipinx, Pinoy, Pinay, Pilipino …
Define a Filipino: wait, what’s a Filipino?
Define a Filipino: who in God’s name was Philip anyway and why are we all named after him?
Already, someone’s got their hand on Marites’s shoulder. What? He wants to scream at them. What?
He retreats back to the garden where the steady sound of his boots crushing snow reminds him of his mother crunching garlic. No, that couldn’t have been his mother. She rarely cooked anything but American frozen foods. Alas.
Cackles from inside the house. Not from the living room, where his special plays to a leaned-back audience, but from the kitchen, where a new circle has begun to form. What are they laughing at? The hors d’oeuvres? Is the lumpia Shanghai too thick? Can they tell he only moderately likes Filipino food based on his menu choices? Do they think the dinuguan is overselling it, with its dark blood and cartilage brew?
Another title card darkens the living room: Act Two, Losing Sight.
Someone cracks a joke. More jokes bounce around the room, none of it from the television. More guests leave to join the circle in the kitchen. More snark. More laughter. None of it near the TV.
Yup, he says to himself. There it is.
He looks up and sees the sky open from its sea of clouds. Stars like little torches like the end.
By act 3 of his premiere, the kitchen circle has widened through the living room and spilled outside, where a head-shaven spoken word artist freestyles over the television’s low volume. Smart phones rise, each with the face of the poet who speaks with a relaxed, surferesque drawl. His words coil through each listener:
The St. Louis Fair is where they made me, imagination.
Of the dog-eater Filipino.
Got nothin to do with me.
Sketch idea: an Igorot and an Ilocano at the St. Louis World’s Fair escape their enclosures and find each other near the Native American exhibit. They run away together, north.
I ain’t no zoo animal.
I’m Rizal, I’m Bonifacio,
I’m Gabriela, I’m Bulosan
The Igorot and the Ilocano decide that they will never be like the well-fed, subservient ones who wait in line for the dangled carrots of sympathy.
a new history, new religion
They run, and run, until they make it to Canada, true north. They live with Indigenous communities, the only ones who accept them. They huddle together and wait for the day the rest of us learn to bite better than we jump.
we plant our flag for the next generation
His ears overdose on the sounds of high-pitched whistles and applause. Someone has turned their camera around, and he sees his own face on it. More phones aim toward him. Finally, silence, as they wait for him to speak.
You’re an inspiration, he tells the poet. I mean, you inspire me. Literally, just now!
Inspiration? Inspiration to do what? To go on the Internet and spread fuckin’ bullshit?
Oh!!!
Yeah, that’s right you walk away! Fucking zoo animal!
Somehow, amid the laughter and finger pointing, he had the idea for his first how-to sketch: how to beat a motherfucker to death with his own Japanese-made thermos.
He circles the empty field bordering the parking lot, lulled by the crunch of his own pacing. His feet glide in ever-tighter circles, a clean wipe of every edge.
Noelani materializes in her usual bedraggled sweats and oversized hoodie.
Yo.
Hey. It must be hard being my cousin right now.
What you think? Ever since you moved out here, you always been a fuckin’ dick head. You think I ain’t used to your bullshit?
He watches the sky, wondering if that portal to nothing will open again.
What Apobakit always say? So what? Bodda you?
Fuck it, I’d give it all away to be ten pounds thinner anyway. Can you tell them to beat me so bad I can’t eat for a month? Aim for the stomach? Maybe the mouth, just to be sure?
Psshh, ever since you started blogging, it never been a secret: you the guy who hates himself. Everyone got these bubbles of self-doubt. You just let them grow, leave them alone long enough they turn to, like, a fuckin’ Nietzschean abyss.
He points out the smudges of vinegar on her brown jacket.
Fuck man, I can’t see a thing. Your eyes must got really dilated out here.
It is dark. Relatively.
Man, so, why won’t you, like, do something with what you got? Honestly?
Like what? Pull up a flag? Come, see the next Maria Clara Marie Sue!
How’s this for a story, right? Remember when you first moved out to live with us, after a year bein’ without a home, and you hated the snow? But one day I come home from work and you’ve gone out and shovelled the curb around the whole apartment building. Then you’re doing it every fucking morning. Why? Cuz you got thanked, right? And who thanked you? The titas, the workers who spent all day in hospitals and cafés and the last thing they needed was shovelling sidewalks. You set your alarm, got off your ass, and shovelled. And come March, you all bitchin’ to me, Noelani, cousin! There’s no more snow! What’ll I do now?!
He remembers holding the shovel, the weakness in his arms. The women, all two heads shorter than him, the oil on their face yellow from the lamppost light.
You write that story down. That one’s hot!
I can’t. That’s not me.
Bitch-ass, it fucking happened to you!
I mean, it’s not in me.
Cuz, you may not see it, but I got a Glock to your head right now. And by Glock, I mean a tweet. You think anyone who knows you doesn’t got a fuck-ton of evidence of all the stupid shit you done? Like you remember that night, two months ago? The last time you drank?
Oh no. That was —
— DO NOT say it was an accident, or a misinterpretation. You asshole. You better than that.
He picks up his Diet Coke from the ground. Heavier than before, its edges frosted with ice.
So what. I gotta do what?
Show us some love, that’s all. And you know, grow the fuck up. Quit being a fuckin’ man-child, shit. I don’t know.
And if I don’t?
Then I’ll feel real bad for your mom.
He drinks from the fizz and notices steam coming from his nose in bits of smoky pebbles. He follows them up, up to the pulsing stars. Another sketch idea comes.
In an eternal village, people begin to disappear. First one or two, then dozens, then hundreds. The villagers realize something must be happening back on Earth: someone has found a way to resurrect people, to kidnap souls from heaven and imprison them in their former bodies.
In the end, there are only a couple hundred villagers left, the ones whose bodies back on Earth were cremated upon their death. They’re more alone now, but they don’t worry. Their kin will soon return home.