This December, I’ll be visiting my family in the Philippines for the first time in seven years. I’m hoping to view the country with new eyes.

I've always felt pretty aware of my prejudicial notions about Filipino culture, society, people — and only mildly guilty for entertaining them. Growing up, I learned to regard the Philippines with a kind of benign contempt, always cognizant of its shortcomings, and therefore ever appreciative of the opportunities afforded me by American society.  But even as I got older and began to question these notions, privately testing their validity, I only managed to exchange one set of prejudices for another.  When my parents told me as a child, for example, that Filipinos had no culture before the Spanish came, I accepted that as fact; as a precocious teenager struggling to be objective and politically correct, however, I rejected this idea in favor of one that seemed less harmful (but was certainly no less prejudicial): Of course the Philippines had a rich culture before the Spanish came; they just don’t anymore.

Similarly, as a child I somehow concluded that Filipina women wanted so desperately to be white and western because they were, themselves, inferior; as a teenager I exchanged that view for one which regarded Filipinas as helpless victims of colonization. While the latter was an improvement, I was still very much an unwitting ethnocentrist.

Years of college education and life experience helped me out a bit but even as lately as a few weeks ago, I persisted in regarded the Philippines as an unfortunate, post-colonial society with little to offer me – and I persisted in regarding myself as apart from that society where I was uniquely positioned to judge them as an objective bystander.

And then, in a last ditch attempt to learn a little something about Filipin@ culture before my trip, I went to the library and checked out everything I could carry on the Philippines. The volume on top: Melinda L. de Jesus’s book, Pinay Power: Peminist Critical Theory , a collection of essays written by Filipina-American (pinay) women on identity and Filipina feminism (peminism).

[To illustrate another one of my long-standing prejudices, my reaction to discovering this book was, “Filipinas know what feminism is?!”]

Skimming through the introduction, I lingered on this passage which, in a few sentences, seemed to so perfectly and eloquently sum up a personal experience that I had never thought about critically, let alone articulated intelligently:

I’m about nine years old, and I’m sitting in the back of my family’s Ford LTD station wagon…I am suddenly aware of how our car moves through space and time…Then I notice the nothingness left in our car’s wake – how space and time rush in to swallow up where our car has been, every second of its motion devoured, leaving not one tracing….Somehow I connect this sense of motion and simultaneous erasure to my family’s history – how we operate in the very American “perpetual present,” eschewing any link to our Filipino past. I learn t forget that my parents have accents, that they speak a language I don’t know—a language they did not teach me. I learn than it’s better to be “here” than “back home,” that bad stuff happened during “the war.” And because my parents have so many dreams for my American future, I learn to distance myself from my history. When asked, I say, “My parents are from the Philippines, but I was born here.” So this is the American dream – living in the perpetual present, moving through life without a past, swallowed whole, invisible, but unable to deny the lingering ache of absence…

I devoured this book. [In another illustration of my long-standing prejudice, I was so surprised at how articulate were the native Filipina authors in this  volume, that I checked to see if it was a translation. It wasn’t.]

I identified with the author who grew up in the same city I did, ironically drinking up her descriptions of an arid, ashy landscape that previously only seemed a nuisance to me. I sympathized with the author whose father was  white soldier and whose mother was a dainty Filipina entertainer. I saw my experience validated in completely new ways.

Of course I had Filipino friends in the States, and American and Mestiz@ friends in the Philippines, most of whom shared a similar experience to mine. But we also all analyzed our experienced in the same, ignorant way, sharing the notion that Filipino society was kind of backwards, and that the U.S. was the place to be. As an adult, intellectually, I told myself that these were unfounded prejudices, that the Philippines suffered from the same post-colonial experience that I recognized, intellectualized, and accepted in other cultures – but my rational mind could never seem to completely overtake my early indoctrination.

My father, a retired Air Force techseargant, preferred the Philippines for our family because he found its relatively conservative culture conducive to raising children – especially girls. My mother, a Filipina who had “married up” (i.e. married white) in an effort to “marry out,” preferred the States. As a result, we moved back and forth a lot.

But while my time, my life, was divided up between two countries, cultures, and races, my loyalties were relatively straightforward – growing up, I always felt “American” and, therefore, implicitly white.

Only in the Philippines, though, was I ever regarded as such.

In the States, I’m Mexican, generally; Native American when I wear my hair in two long braids; Chinese when I wear my hair in two cartoonish buns on top of my head; Hawaiian when I’m tan; Inuit when my labeler is particularly creative; and, once, even Jewish.

In the Philippines, I’m “white” by skin color and social class, “mestiza” by race, and “American” by nationality/(presumed) depravity.

In either context: something of an Other – familiar with both places but at home in neither.

But while my identity was, in large part, determined by my location, my developing prejudices were not and, ultimately, they weighed heavier on the side of privilege. Informed by father’s light-hearted lampooning of Mom’s accent and his outspoken support of “benevolent assimilation” policies – as well as Mom’s staunch refusal to teach us her native languages, I learned (among other enlightened things) that while Filipinos were a hospitable people, they nevertheless lacked culture, initiative, and essentially owed their “progress” to the influence and involvement of the West.

At first these ideas meant nothing to me, living in the U.S., as I did. But in elementary school in the Philippines, my experience seemed to validate them. For instance, when I came home feeling discouraged and ostracized because my classes were taught in a language I didn’t understand, my father criticized the anti-colonial movement that sought to replace English with Tagalong in schools – why would these people want to move backwards? When I made my first friend, another Mestiza girl who was raised in the Philippines by her single mother and spoke Tagalog as a first language, my own mother disparaged her for being the daughter of a prostitute.

In this way, I learned that there was shame in my mother’s roots, and nobility in her desire to “rise above.” My father’s roots, along with his ideas and his talk and his color, I accepted — we all accepted — as normative.

Sadly, frustratingly, remarkably, these essays were the first critical evaluation of my experience that I had ever encountered. And sadly, frustratingly, remarkably, without these essays I had been unable to recognize or articulate my own situation. And yet even this moment was document within these pages:

“Once I could name my shame and recognize its constructed origins,” writes mestiza Melinda M. Pierce, “—recognize that the skeletons in my closet did not belong to me alone—I could reject internalized notions of superiority and inferiority, sort out my confusion, and find constructive methods for channeling my anger into proactive work.”

It would be an understatement to say that it prompted me to confront my own internalized prejudices; as I said, I think I’ve always been aware of them, even as I vacillated between acceptance and revolt. It would also be an understatement to say it prompted me to view the Philippines in a different light. In fact, essay after essay, voice after voice, prompted me to view myself in a different light — to regard myself, not as one privileged to stand apart from a postcolonial society, but as an unconscious member of that self-same postcolonial society.

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