Prism of Rice

Ginto: Ginto: From Yellow to Gold

When I was little, my teacher from Filipino school told our class a story about baking. Once upon a time, God really wanted cookies. And so, as one does, he went ahead and made some. Unfortunately, while God was very good at being a divine and loving entity, he was not so good at checking the timer, and his first batch ended up completely burnt. Have you ever wondered why some people have dark skin? Well, blame God’s baking. God didn’t have much luck on his second try either—the cookies were raw, creating fair-skinned people. But finally, God perfected his baking skills (and his timer-checking), and voila! A perfect batch of beautiful, golden-brown treats. And those cookies, my teacher said, were Filipinos.

I’ve gone back to this story countless times. I’ve told it to my friends, to people I’m trying to get to know, to complete strangers; this story opened my college application essay. It’s a cute little anecdote that’s laughably problematic, ready to be used and then brushed aside. Because while I had always laughed at the idea of Filipinos being “golden” and put on a pedestal, it was only reCeci Villaseñor edited by Emma Chun designed by Am Chunnananda

cently that I began thinking about what it actually means to be “golden-brown”—neither yellow nor brown, but something in between.

Here are three facts about me: My name is Cecilia Quisumbing Villaseñor. I’m Filipino American, and I’m from Acton, Massachusetts.

Acton is a little town around twenty minutes from Boston. It’s your standard upper middle class suburb with good public schools that draw people (read: Asian immigrants) in, my parents included. As of 2018, twenty-five percent of Acton’s population, and almost all of its minority population, is Asian. 1

The fourth fact about me is that almost all of my friends from high school are Asian American—Chinese American, that is.

Growing up, I was usually content to just be “one of the Asians.” Sure, maybe my last name was more than one syllable long and sounded Hispanic. Maybe I was always more comfortable with a spoon and fork. I still ended up with the Huangs and the Xiangs and hung out at their houses, dandanmian slipping from my chopsticks. I knew that I was different, but it didn’t really matter. We had a lot in common: we were grade-driven, we never partied, and we bonded over being “generically Asian.”

Sometimes it was a little lonely. Most of my friends and their families spoke Mandarin, so I couldn’t chat with their parents or relatives, or even know what they were talking about when a side conversation broke out. When I was in fourth grade, I even asked a girl on my bus to teach me Chinese so I could finally understand what my friends were saying. In eighth grade, our social studies class did a unit on Chinese history and religion, probably because of the large Chinese American population. Given the seemingly single-digit Filipino American population, I realized then that I’d never get that moment of sharing my culture with my peers in class. When my high school history class glossed over American colonialism in the Philippines—a fairly easy opportunity to include Filipino voices—it all but confirmed that feeling.

Looking back, these memories of not fitting into the Asian category I had defined for myself jump out at me, but at the time, they were mere blips. Being “yellow” felt like a given, and my friends and I had bigger things to worry about, like getting into college. It’s only when I got to Vassar that I began to question whether I could call myself an Asian American.

Here are some fun facts I discovered while doing research this year: The majority of Filipino Americans identify as Roman Catholic. 2 The Filipino American ethnic group is currently the second largest within the Asian American racial category. 3 And—this is the really fun one—in a study of over eighty Filipino Americans living in Los Angeles, where participants were given five choices to describe their racial background (White, African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, or Pacific Islander), only about half of the Filipinos in the study chose “Asian” as their racial identity. 4

2. “Asian Americans: A Mosaic of Faiths,” Pew Research Center, July 19, 2012, https://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaicof-faiths-overview. 3. Xavier Hernandez, “Filipino American college students at the margins of neoliberalism,” Policy Futures in Education, 14, no. 3, 327, https://journals. sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210316631870. 4. Anthony Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 75. There’s a lot to unpack. Let’s start off with the history of colonization in the Philippines. 5 In 1565, Miguel López de Legazpi established the first permanent Spanish settlement, beginning the period of Spanish rule in the Philippines. Spanish colonialism had a profound impact on Philippine culture, changing its clothes, political institutions, and even language, to name a few examples. 6 In 1902, after the Spanish-American War and the Philippine-American War, American colonization began. 7 Like Spain, America had a huge influence on Filipino culture, especially since the US implemented the American educational system in the Philippines. 8 As a result, being Filipino has always meant reconciling different cultures, even before immigration to the US.

On one hand, you could argue that because the Philippines is a country in Asia, Filipinos are therefore Asian. On the other hand, you could also claim that Spain’s legacy makes the Philippines and its culture decidedly different and un-Asian. Filipino culture is also extremely Americanized, further distinguishing Filipino Americans from other immigrants. Situating the Filipino American identity is tricky, to say the least.

This weird tension between being and not being Asian American is what I began to experience after coming to Vassar. For one, the campus felt a lot whiter than Acton. The first few people I met were

5. Gregorio Borlaza, Carolina Hernandez, et. al., “Philippines,” Encyclopædia Britannica, last modified December 20, 2019, https://www.britannica.com/place/Philippines/The-Spanish-period. 6. Leslie Bauzon, “Spanish Influence on Language, Culture, and Philippine History,” University of the Philippines, 1991, http://filipinokastila.tripod. com/FilSpa.html. 7. “Philippine-American War,” Encyclopædia Britannica, published October 24, 2016, https://www.britannica.com/event/Philippine-American-War. 8. John Lambino, “Political-Security, Economy, and Culture within the Dynamics of Geopolitics and Migration: On Philippine Territory and the Filipino People,” (discussion paper, Kyoto University, 2015), 11-12, http:// www.econ.kyoto-u.ac.jp/projectcenter/Paper/e-15-004.pdf.

white, and I quickly surrounded myself with nonAsians. (I’ve realized that if there was a sitcom based on my friend group here, I’d definitely be the token person of color.) Unlike with my friends from home, I felt like I had to actively identify as Asian American. But that label, of course, became more complicated after coming into spaces that felt more East Asian rather than just Asian.

Colorism also has played a huge role in this ambiguity. Mestizos, or people of mixed race, were associated with power. Spaniards inherently had this power, being the colonizing force. And, due to their trade relations, Chinese individuals were understood to have economic power in the Philippines. 9 To this day having lighter skin implies superiority within the Filipino community and is a reminder of interracial relations of the past. “Full” Filipinos, however, are “brown” and have darker skin.

Until this year, I’ve always considered myself yellow. When I told my parents this over Christmas dinner, they reacted poorly: “We raised you better than that! You’re brown!” I still don’t know how much they were joking. It’s true that they raised me to think a certain way about color—when I was little, I used to tell people that my dad was coffee, my mom was milk, and I was milk coffee. I never would’ve called myself brown, though, despite seeing my skin as a shade of brown. At my high school, that term was reserved for those of Indian descent, or maybe those who were Latinx. Besides, when I went to a party over the summer, a guy (who, incidentally, is half Filipino, half Chinese) told me I was too light to be Filipino. My place on the yellow-brown spectrum remains very unclear to me.

Whether because of my culture or my color, the tension of ambiguity, of not being able to fit easily into a label, is always there. Even my name can’t be neatly categorized: “Quisumbing,” which is my mom’s last name, comes from the Fukienese pro

9. Joanne Rondilla, “Colonial Faces: Beauty and Skin Color Hierarchy in the Philippines and the U.S.,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 32 https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/etd/ucb/text/Rondilla_berkeley_0028E_12807.pdf. nunciation of “Guo Sun Ming” (郭荪明), reflecting Chinese immigration to the Philippines. “Villaseñor” is clearly a remnant of Spanish rule. I carry that tension with me every day, right on my Vassar ID.

Here’s another fact: Filipino students from geographic locations in the United States where there are large concentrations of Filipino Americans “are distinctly racialized as gang members, criminals, and deviants.” 10 In fact, in a comparative study of eighty Chinese and eighty Filipino high school students in California, Filipino students recalled “a persistent pattern of being criminalized and school staff assuming they lacked academic potential.” 11 And unfortunately, many Filipino Americans, and Southeast Asians in general have lower socioeconomic status in the US than their East Asian peers.

These facts, fun and not fun, are what I learned when I decided to write my final paper on Filipino Americans in my civil rights class last semester. It felt like a privilege to learn more about people like me in a formal educational setting—something I had never done in my time at high school. It was empowering to suddenly have the knowledge and language of academics to describe my experiences. In a way, it validated the persistent feelings that crept around in the back of my mind: that Filipino Americans were somehow different from the Asian American monolith, that Filipino Americans thus needed to be included in the discussion, and that when our class ventured into model minority and affirmative action territory, it was even

10. Tracy Buenavista, “Issues Affecting U.S. Filipino Student Access to Postsecondary Education: A critical Race Theory Perspective,” Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 15, 121, https://doi. org/10.1080/10824661003635093. 11. Buenavista, “Issues Affecting U.S. Filipino Student Access to Postsecondary Education,” 122.

more necessary to have Filipino American representation.

Yet, I feel uncomfortable arming myself with these facts. For one, I’m definitely not the type of Filipino American these studies are talking about: probably from the West Coast, lower middle class, within a large Filipino community. The idea of having so many Filipinos near me is kind of baffling—the only Filipinos I know are people I’ve met through my parents’ friends or at Iskwelahang Pilipino (IP), the nearby weekend culture school. And imagine having Pinoy stores! When I visited Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto, I was amazed by the existence of Seafood City, which is essentially the bigger, Filipino equivalent of H Mart, complete with its own Jollibee, a very famous Filipino fast food chain. In Boston, if we have a Jollibee craving, we have to make a pilgrimage to New York City.

I say “we” like I think of myself as part of the Boston Filipino community, or even the IP community. In some ways, I am: my parents are extremely involved in the school and have both taught classes before, I play in the rondalla, a musical ensemble of traditional instruments, and I can understand some Tagalog (emphasis on “some”). But for the most part, I feel pretty distant from IP. I barely graduated from the school because my attendance was so spotty (I usually was at ballet rehearsal or a debate tournament instead), and so I missed out on learning about Filipino culture and bonding with my fellow Fil-Ams. Rondalla is enough of a connection for me to call the IP kids my friends, but it’s not enough for me to be included in their hangouts. When I do get invited to whatever party’s being thrown, I feel lost among the people line dancing, the beloved Bruno Mars’s “Treasure” blaring through the speakers.

I’ve clung on to being Filipino and using that identity to explain why I feel different, but sometimes, I don’t fully feel like I am a Filipino American who has lived “the Filipino American life.” I’ve been incredibly privileged to have been brought up the way I was, but the question lingers: How can I insist that the Filipino perspective be considered when I don’t feel enough like a Filipino American to share my own experience?

What strikes me when I go back and reread my college essay is how tidy it sounds. Limited to 750 words, it’s a very cookie-cutter piece—start with an anecdote, talk about some bigger issue, leave with a vaguely optimistic resolution. “I feel golden,” I concluded after gushing about how I wasn’t alone in learning to embrace my Filipino identity.

Reading that essay makes me sad. It makes me sad because I know how conflicted I felt writing it. It makes me sad because I was lying when I said I felt supported by the Iskwelahang Pilipino community. It makes me sad that I thought I had to, and that I could, finish with a neat ending, even when I hadn’t come close at all to understanding myself or my identity.

I’ll always be proud of being Filipino American, but will I ever fully grasp what that means? Probably not. Maybe that’s not what’s important anyway. Maybe it’s about learning more and trying to reckon with what that knowledge brings. And maybe it’s through that process of digging deep and sifting through whatever comes up that you find gold—ginto.