It isn't everyday
that a person wakes up with the realization that for his entire life,
he'd been living in absolute unawareness. It isn't everyday that a
person looks in the mirror and for the very first time sees not only
a face but also a world of intertwining cultures, complementing passions
… a hidden affinity for Filipino adobo. Such deep comprehension
is inexplicable, a stay-at-home culture shock of such overwhelming
clarity you'd half expect to experience it traveling to the Buddhist
temples of Tibet or on an expedition through the indigenous villages
of the Amazon, not in the room of the gaudy hotel in the middle of
Las Vegas.
I grew up Irish. I grew up with the smells of mashed potatoes and
butter permeating my crib, and the taste of oily Marmite slathered
thickly onto bread. I survived my Irish relatives as they plucked
at my cheeks and remarked in their feathery accents, "My goodness,
the little rascal shot up like a bloody weed," and I watched
wide-eyed as my uncle flawlessly recited W. B. Yeats after his third
Guinness. Trips to Ireland were traditional, and I visited the country
at least once a year, sometimes sacrificing days of school for days
of Aero chocolate bars and black pudding. Most importantly,
visits to Ireland always coincided with visits to Trinity. When I
began to think of famous alumni I thought not of T.S. Eliot from Harvard
or Poe from the University of Virginia, but of Samuel Beckett and
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker and Oliver Goldsmith. Just as Trinity was
synonymous with education, so too had it become synonymous with my
desire to explore further into my Irish background, a bastion of knowledge
that would open even more doors into my heritage.
When the news arrived that I would be traveling to Las Vegas for a
Filipino family reunion, my feelings could've been described as …
almost vague indifference. Indifference towards a culture with which
I never had any direct experience made the prospect of seeing my entire
Filipino family an overwhelming one. I thought I'd feel like an outsider,
one who had so firmly accepted his European background that he would
only be able to experience the reunion objectively, his identity removed
entirely from the event. But what I felt, what I saw, was much different
from what I had anxiously expected.
I was Asian. In that oversized dance room, I didn't just see Filipinos
carousing to the Village People's YMCA and arguing over kitchen recipes
in Tagalog; I saw family. I wandered through the sounds of
cacophonous folk songs and the sight of Filipinos getting happily
tipsy from just one bottle of beer, not as an outsider, but as an
Asian, someone they accepted willingly as if I was one of their own.
In my own mind, I had believed myself to be Irish. But to my family,
they saw me as a Filipino, albeit one still unfamiliar with the depth
of his background. I realized there, in that stuffy, uncomfortably
hot ballroom, that these people not only represented an entire culture
but an integral part of myself I had been blind to.
After that reunion, I realized that I wasn't only Irish but Asian,
as well. I realized that a part of me had been hidden, a part I had
been denying to others and myself. As a result, I plunged headlong
into the search for understanding of these two backgrounds that were
not in conflict with each other but instead built off one another.
I needed to understand Magellan's effect on Philippine indigenous
culture to the Irish influence on English politics, study their histories,
explore their colonial pasts, not in the context of the world, but
of myself, my place in it. This need led to my interest in political
science, not because I wanted to learn more about the world, but because
of the dichotomous cultural aspects of my own life. And it was from
this initial spark I became fascinated with other cultures outside
my own bicultural heritage, a fascination that brought concrete results.
I won a scholarship to study Japanese culture in Oita, Japan for the
summer. I was moving from the stability of the familiar to the challenge
of the new and different, discovering skills for a planet that has
become smaller, global and therefore interconnected.
And all this … in the room of a gaudy hotel in Las Vegas.
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A long time ago and in a place far away, in a state of mind probably
similar to this, Grandpa Cornelio (Faigao) dribbled poems about starry
nights in sleepy Romblon towns and other things.
