Dear America

by Jose Antonio Vargas

  I didn’t know how to play sports like flag football. The one time I did agree to play, I rushed to the wrong side of the field with the football in hand while my classmates, led by Sharmand, screamed, “You’re going the wrong way! You’re going the wrong way!”

  I didn’t know what not to talk about. When asked to talk about my favorite pet, I spoke about my dog Rambo, the only pet I ever had. I told my classmates that Rambo was named after the Sylvester Stallone movie series, and I said that the last time I saw Rambo was hours before Mama’s birthday dinner, before Rambo was killed, adoboed (the popular Filipino version of stew), and served as pulutan—an appetizer. My classmates were mortified. A couple of them started to cry. I later explained that, in the Philippines, dogs can serve as pets and pulutan. (And, no, I did not take a bite of Rambo. I was too distraught.) When I was growing up in Pasig, part of the capital city of Manila, whose poverty-ridden slums house four million people, dogs and cats were fed what was considered leftover food—whatever was left from lunch or dinner, usually rice, bones from chicken, pork, or fish, skins from mangoes, bananas, guavas. I’d never heard of “pet food,” never saw an aisle in a grocery store dedicated to food specifically for cats and dogs. One of my earliest memories in America was walking up and down the pet food aisle at Safeway, so transfixed and bewildered that I stopped one of the clerks. “Why does the dog food and the cat food cost more money than the people food?” I asked. The clerk answered with a long, hard glare.

  America was like a class subject I’d never taken, and there was too much to learn, too much to study, too much to make sense of.

  And I was excited to share everything with Mama. Long-distance phone calls were expensive. If I was lucky, I could talk to Mama once a week. Writing letters, first in longhand and later using computers at school, was cheaper. Writing letters to Mama was also a way to soothe us both, to ease the pain of our separation before we were reunited again. She was supposed to have followed me to America by now, but there was a delay in her paperwork. I had to wait some more.

  On the first typewritten letter I sent Mama, written in my sixteenth month of living in America, I wrote:

  What’s up! How are you guys doin’? I hope all you guys are doing fine as well as I’m doing here with Lola, Lolo and Uncle Rolan. I just hate the weather here sometimes, it’s too cold, I’m freezing! We even have to use the heater to keep us warm.

  I wanted to show Mama that I was adapting to the language—the what’s up?–you guys–how are you doin’? of it all. The first American student who ever spoke to me was Ryan Brown, his face covered with what I later learned were “freckles.” When he greeted me by saying “What’s up?” I responded, “The sky.” I quickly realized that the English I spoke in the Philippines was not the same as American slang.

  The letter continued:

  It’s really hard to be a 7th grader. It’s like every week, we have a new project due! I’m getting crazy because my schedule is so tight. I go to school Mondays to Fridays from 7:58 a.m. to 2:24 p.m. I go to Tween Time Mondays to Fridays from 2:30-4:30. On Fridays, I go to Newsletter club until 4:30. I walk home, eat, on Tuesdays I take out the garbage and take a two hour nap and do my homework, I have plenty of homework! As usual I joined many school clubs like Tween Time, Drama, School newsletters. I think it’s really so cool that I got to use a computers a lot. In the Philippines, I didn’t even had a chance to touch a computer. Here in our school, computers are everywhere! Every room there is a computer. We can’t write anything without a computer!

  Over time, America had become more than a class subject I was trying to ace. America was an entire experience, and I wanted to do all of it.

  It’d been more than a year since Mama and I saw each other. I knew she was sad because I was sad. Anxious. The only way to make her happy was to make sure I didn’t seem sad and to get good grades. Besides, I realized that being good at school—making friends, talking to teachers—was a way of blending in. Being accepted at school felt like being accepted in America.

  Last quarter, I even got a Gold Honor Roll, I got 4.00, the perfect grade!

  As a single mother, Mama leaned on her closest friends, especially my godmother, for help. My godmother’s family was a part of our family. Over time, as I got busier at school, it became more difficult to keep in touch with everyone. I tried.

  I already wrote my daily life, how about you guys!? Are you all doing fine? Every night, I always pray that may all of you be in good health. I really miss all you guys! There is nothing more important than all of you! How’s Ninang [godmother]? Is she doing fine? How about Ate Grace [my godmother’s niece, who was like a sister to me]? I heard that she’s graduating next year from high school. Does she have a boyfriend now? I hope not. Tell her to please write me. How about Tita Josie [my godmother’s sister], Tita Nancy [my godmother’s other sister] and Lola Elvie [my godmother’s mother]? Tell them that I miss all of them and tell them that I won’t ever forget them!

  Gotta go! I love all you very, very, very, very much!

  Mama recently mailed me this letter, which I sent her more than twenty-three years ago. As I read it now, I don’t recognize that young boy. What happened to all that love and longing I felt for the family and friends I’d left? Separation not only divides families; separation buries emotion, buries it so far down you can’t touch it. I don’t think I would ever love Mama again in the childlike, carefree, innocent way I loved her while writing that letter. I don’t know where that young boy went.

  4.

  Not Black, Not White

  “You don’t really look Filipino,” Eleanor, the pretty girl in glasses and pigtails, was telling me. Born in the Philippines, Eleanor’s family had emigrated to the U.S. around the same time my family did.

  Our arrival in Mountain View coincided with a historic change in the state’s demographics. Between 1990 and 2000, the years I attended California public schools, the state’s Latino and Asian populations each grew by more than a third. Meanwhile, the state’s white population dropped by almost 10 percent and the black population more or less stayed the same—a statewide trend that would closely mirror the country’s racial makeup in the following decades.

  Crittenden Middle School was a microcosm of this irreversible movement. Like California itself, Crittenden was a minority-majority school where no single racial group had a plurality. In the early to mid-1990s, between thirteen hundred and fourteen hundred students from fifth to eighth grade attended Crittenden. About a third were Latinos, mostly Mexican; the other third were Asians, most of whom were Filipino, some Vietnamese and Indian; and the remaining third were split between white and black students. Many of the Mexicans and Filipinos were descendants of farmworkers who moved to Mountain View to work on the apricot, peach, and cherry orchards after World War II. A decade later, a Mountain View–based company called Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory first developed the silicon semiconductor devices that gave Silicon Valley its name.

  Like many Filipinos in the Philippines, I grew up listening to Michael and Whitney, but I didn’t know Whitney and Michael were “black” or “African American.” And I didn’t know that Julia Roberts and Macaulay Culkin were “white.” In the Philippines they were just Americans.

  When it came to the subject of race, my fourteen-year-old immigrant brain couldn’t process it. I knew I was Filipino; that much was clear. But I didn’t realize I was “Asian,” or that Chinese and Korean and Indian people were “Asian,” too, and that because I was Filipino, I was both “Asian” and a “Pacific Islander.” Calling people “Hispanic” or “Latino” was perplexing to me, partly due to the fact that people assumed I was Hispanic or Latino because of my name. (My stock answer: “My name is Jose because of Spanish colonialism.”) Are people labeled “Asian” for geographic reasons, because we came from the “Asian” continent? But, if it was about geography, shouldn’t “Hispanic” and “Latino” people be called “Americans”? According to the maps—and to the Miss Universe pagean
ts that I watched religiously as a kid—“Hispanic” and “Latino” people were from Central and South America. What was the difference among these Americas? People come from the Philippines, from Mexico, from Egypt, from France. As far as I could tell, “white” was not a country. Neither was “black.” I looked at the maps. Are people “Asian” and “Hispanic” because Americans started labeling people “black” and “white”? Did America make all of this up? And whenever I read anything about race, why are “Asian” and “Hispanic” capitalized while “black” and “white” are not? Where do you go if you are multiracial and multiethnic?

  I’ll never forget the day of the O. J. Simpson verdict. I had no idea who Simpson was. But most of my classmates seemed to know, and most everyone had an opinion on what he did and why he did it, including my teachers, all of whom were white. On the day of the verdict, Mrs. Wakefield, who taught social studies, stopped the class and turned on the radio so everyone could listen. When Simpson was acquitted, the school erupted, the reaction spilling from the classrooms into the quad. It was the first time I saw race physically divide people. Black students cheered the outcome, white students jeered it, and Latino and Asian students—who made up more half the school—looked at each other, wondering which side to join. This dynamic—Latinos and Asians seemingly left out of the black-and-white binary—would become a dominant question in my life. Where do I go? Do I go black? Do I go white? Can I do both?

  “You’re not black, you’re not white,” Mrs. Wakefield told me during one of our afternoon chats. An elderly white woman, she walked around campus with chalk all over her hair, with oversize eyes that could see more than what you were willing to share. Mrs. Wakefield was the first teacher I developed a friendship with.

  “Consider yourself lucky.”

  I didn’t. I was just mystified. But what was becoming clear—and what I started internalizing during my years at Crittenden—was that race was a tangible, torturous, black-or-white thing in a country where conversations about how you identify and whom you represent largely fall into two extremes. Nonblack, nonwhite people had to figure out which side they fell on and to which degree.

  In my early formative days in America, while observing my classmates and watching TV and movies, I learned that race was as much about behavior—perceived behavior, expected behavior—as it was about physicality. “Don’t be too white,” I overheard my Mexican classmates tell each other. “Why are you acting so black?” my Filipino friends said to one another. None of the comments sounded complimentary. Sometimes the comments from my nonwhite, nonblack classmates were as negative toward “white” people as they were toward “black” people. Too often I stayed silent because I didn’t know what to say.

  I wasn’t sure how a Filipino was supposed to look, or where a Filipino was supposed to fit.

  5.

  Filipinos

  Filipinos fit everywhere and nowhere at all.

  We are the invisible of the invisibles, a staggering feat considering that the worldwide Filipino population stands at 115 million: about 105 million live in the Philippine islands (making the Philippines the world’s twelfth-most-populous country, just below Mexico); and an additional ten million are scattered across a hundred countries, most whom are permanent legal residents or citizens of one of those countries. Of the ten million overseas Filipinos, more than 3.5 million live in the U.S., making us the second-largest Asian group in the U.S. Even though one out of five Asian Americans is Filipino, many of us don’t identify as Asian. Our Filipinotowns aren’t as visible as Koreatowns and Chinatowns. Wherever we are and however we self-identify, non-Filipinos have an interesting way of identifying us. Even though our jobs are as varied as our people—we’re nurses and lawyers, artists and professors—most people I meet seem to think of us as servants. Apparently, we are among the most sought-after group of domestic workers. I’ve lost count of how many times someone told me, apropos of nothing, “You guys make the best nannies and maids.”

  Perhaps that’s because Filipino culture, while proud of its singularity and eccentricity, is so malleable. Adaptability was essential for surviving 420 years of emotional and physical ravages.

  A colonial history, in brief: The Philippine islands were “discovered” by Spanish colonialists who ruled them for more than 370 years until the Americans, desperate to expand their economic and political reach, craved empire. The United States declared itself the rightful “owner” of the islands for some fifty years. In his book In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, historian Stanley Karnow characterized my birth country’s colonial history as being “300 years in the convent, 50 years in Hollywood.” My grandparents embodied this unshakable colonial-imperial reality. Both devout Catholics—the Philippines is the only predominantly Catholic country in Asia—Lolo learned English words and phrases by listening to Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in jukeboxes, while Lola preferred Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald.

  Some of my Filipino American friends joke that Americans only remember Filipinos when they need us to house their naval fleet and fight their battles. Consider the fate of Filipino soldiers who fought the Japanese during World War II. With the promise of U.S. citizenship and full veteran benefits, more than 250,000 Filipino soldiers fought under the American flag, playing a crucial role in achieving victory. Shortly after, the Rescission Act of 1946 retroactively took away these soldiers’ status as U.S. veterans. The message was clear: your service didn’t matter. It took more than sixty years to rectify the injustice.

  From the outset, this codependent and abusive relationship has been complicated by race and skin color. During the Philippine-American War, white American soldiers in the Philippines referred to Filipinos as “niggers” because of their dark complexion. When Filipinos first arrived in California, in the early to mid-1900s, confused Americans placed them in the same ethnic category as Mongolians. In California, local authorities imposed antimiscegenation laws on Filipinos, and Filipinos had to drive out of state in order to marry white women. Throughout the Great Depression, white Americans claimed that Filipinos “brought down the standard of living because they worked for low wages.” Many hotels, restaurants, and even swimming pools displayed signs that read “POSITIVELY NO FILIPINOS ALLOWED!”

  Still, if the Philippines was America’s “first real temptation,” as Mark Twain wrote, then America, given its imperialist history, also became a temptation for Filipinos eager to escape poverty and provide for their families. After all, if Americans could come and claim the Philippines, why can’t Filipinos move to America?

  Colorism cuts deep in any colonized country, and I was born to parents who were considered the mestizos (light-skinned ones) in their own families. I am the only child of Emelie Salinas and Jose Lito Vargas. Shortly after they got married, it became apparent that they had been too young to wed, much less have a child. From the start, their marriage was subsidized by their parents. My father was one of nine children; his mother, Dolores, was the second wife of Ramon, a businessman in the capital city of Manila. I don’t remember ever meeting Ramon. My mother was the only daughter of Teofilo and Leonila, a lower-middle-class couple in Iba, a rural barangay (town) in Zambales, an agricultural province dotted with unlimited rice farms and the sweetest heart-shaped mangoes you’ll ever taste. To this day, when I see mangoes at grocery stores I am reminded of Iba. All over Zambales were beautiful rivers with crystalline waters where we bathed and washed our laundry. Teofilo was a high school dropout; Leonila did not make it past sixth grade. My parents separated before I learned to speak, and, if family lore is to be believed, the first words I ever spoke were “Lolo” and “Lola.” As the first apo (grandchild) of Teofilo and Leonila, I was treasured, treated as if I were their own child.

  If you lived in Zambales at the time, there were three primary ways to get to America: (1) join the U.S. Navy; (2) marry a U.S. citizen; (3) get petitioned by a relative. Lolo’s younger sister, Florie, fell in love with an American who served in the U.S. Marin
es. They married, and Florie headed to America in 1963, becoming a U.S. citizen by 1966. When Florie asked Lolo if he wanted to come to America and bring his family, Lolo did not hesitate. Across the developing country, which was mired in political corruption, people believed that going to America was the golden ticket to better jobs, better wages, a better life. Because of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended decades-long racial and ethnic quotas and favored family unification, Florie was able to file a petition to bring Lolo to the United States. The wait took more than a decade. In 1984, when I was three years old, Lolo and Lola left Zambales for California.

  The only things I’ve ever gotten from my father were his name and his thick eyebrows. By the time Lolo and Lola left, Papa had abandoned Mama and me. For as long as I can remember, Mama and his parents cared for me. Since she was the daughter in the family, who was expected to marry and have kids, Lolo told Mama to drop out of school so her younger brother could go to college. (Lolo could only afford to send one kid to school.) Mama left me in the care of relatives as she looked for odd jobs, which were hard to find for a woman with no college degree. After a while, Lolo and Lola told Mama to stop trying to find work and focus on raising me. They began supporting us. The Philippines is one of the world’s largest recipients of remittances; Lolo and Lola were among the estimated 3.5 million Filipinos in the U.S. who would send monthly remittances that the Philippine economy could not survive without, creating a culture of consumerism and a cycle of financial dependency that I was part of before I even knew who I was.

  As a toddler in Iba, before Lolo and Lola emigrated to America, I grew up in a house made of cement and wood with a makeshift bathroom. Running water was precious in the provinces, and we cleaned ourselves, including bathing, using the tabo system. Tabo are vessels used to take water from a timba (pail). That way, water is not wasted. (Before the Americans took over, coconut shells served as tabo. Americans introduced Filipinos to plastic, and plastic tabo were born.) Once Lolo and Lola moved to the U.S., Mama and I moved to Pasig, in the capital city, living in a rented apartment with running water—paid for, of course, by Lolo and Lola.