Mabuhay mixers!
Not to be that girl who just got back from vacation, but my recent trip to the Philippines really strengthened my connection with my mother tongue, Tagalog, and I’m not going to give that up now.
Today’s essay will be more about that trip, but before we get there, here are my latest Forbes Health stories:
Best Online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) Of 2023 (links to where my writing actually starts)
Today’s title, “Laging gutom,” means “always hungry” in Tagalog, a phrase emblazoned on T-shirts now owned by my mom, Anita; Derek; my sister, Cam; Cam’s boyfriend, Evan; and me, courtesy of my Tito Gus and Tita Tats.
Returning from any trip, you’re inevitably met with various forms of “How was it?” asked by various people. The typical, polite answer usually consists of one or two descriptive words; the trip was fun, amazing, long, okay, hot, exhausting.
When I got back from the Philippines, a two-week long trip bookended by a few days with my family in Los Angeles, I mostly answered “How was the trip?” with “beautiful.” I assume most people took that to mean the sights were beautiful, their minds instantly filled with tropical beaches. While that’s certainly true — the white sand beaches and clear, bright blue waters were stunning — I meant that the trip was beautiful in every sense.
It was a beautiful thing to reconnect with relatives I hadn’t seen in years, sometimes decades, since I was a “healthy” (read: taba, or fat) baby, and to connect with relatives I hadn’t yet met. It was a beautiful experience to walk around my mom’s university campus, to visit the Tita’s home in which my mom spent her childhood summers. It was beautiful to hear about how my Grandma and that same Tita would stay up into the night talking and giggling like two schoolgirls.
Another standard follow-up question regarding vacations is “What was your favorite part?” To this, I’ve given a few different answers: the historical sites we saw, the island hopping tour in Palawan, being at the beach resorts in general.
I gave various answers because I really couldn’t choose one experience over the other. And when I actually thought about what truly was my favorite part about the trip, the answer didn’t exactly lend itself to polite vacation chitchat. Because my favorite part about the trip, the most beautiful part, was simply being there in the Philippines with my family and among other Filipinos. The sheer comfort and relaxation of being surrounded by family and people like me is what has stuck with me the most. I didn’t have to worry about white people hogging spaces they feel entitled to, like the sidewalk or train cars, a battle I must wage any time I leave my apartment in New York. In the Philippines, I didn’t think once about how tall, skinny white folks might see or judge me. I was a Filipino among a sea of Filipinos. If any Filipinos judged me, or rather thought differently about me, it was more likely because I dressed and spoke like an American. Not because I was brown or short or curvy or nonwhite. Because we were all already all those things together.
The lack of anxiety and worry about judgment was such a stark difference to my daily life in America that I couldn’t help notice it. Couldn’t help but bask in that feeling of sameness, of a type of unity.
Of course, I do not look Filipino, as I am often reminded by friends, family members, strangers, so I knew that even though I felt such comfort being among who I thought of as my people, I wasn’t being perceived as a fellow. I probably wasn’t even being perceived as a Filipino American, no matter how much I tried to broadcast that I was with the group that included my Filipino mom and Titas. Once I realized that disconnect, I couldn’t ignore it. But despite knowing my feelings of camaraderie were one-way, I couldn’t get over the overwhelming feeling of being home, among so many others like me.
There’s so much more to explore about what we did and saw on the trip, and what it all meant to me, but as it’s the last day of August, this will have to do for now.