Nonfiction from NER 44.4 (2023)
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nce upon a time, there was a girl named Purita and a boy named Nepo, and according to legend, they would be married three times:
—once, in stuffy administrative offices in the Philippines, by a bored city clerk concerned more about the paperwork than nuptial bliss;
—once, in an ornate Catholic Church, on the foggy edge of the San Francisco Bay;
—once, on soft white sand by a bustling boardwalk, under the flashing cloak of
casino lights.
But first, we need to talk about their noses. For this, I have to tell you another tale, one that dates back thousands of years. Once upon a time, according to legend, a merchant moored his skiff along the shores of the Philippines, peddling a peculiar ware: noses. Large and small. Straight and hooked. Pointed and flat and every combination thereof. The first Filipino, often referred to as Juan, so let’s call him Juan, was given the choice to purchase the first nose in all the world, before all other people in lands far away. Juan, who had exquisite taste, chose the best one, the nose anyone would choose first, a nose shapely and powerful enough to compel mad kings into war. Juan imagined he would give this nose as a gift to his people. The world would know Filipinos possessed the most beautiful noses.
Only Juan lost the nose. By accident, or foolishness, who’s to say? According to legend, he scoured the coastline, awaiting the merchant’s return. By the time the merchant arrived, after sailing the seas, visiting lands far away, he had only a single nose left: the flattest one.
The legend of the first Filipino ends with a self-deprecating joke, yet the story reveals how the Filipino people have acquiesced to a world that deems their noses inferior. To this day, many of the broadcasters, actors, and hosts on Filipino television have light skin and straight, surgically beautified noses.
In the faraway land of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, my grandparents had a cable box that picked up channels from the Philippines. One of their favorite programs was a game show where, as I remember, the light-skinned, classically handsome hosts tempt the brown-skinned, flat-nosed contestants with cash figures, asking if they would risk the money for a mystery box, which could contain anything. The keys to a Mercedes, a trip to an island resort, a baby goat.
My grandfather would shout at the screen, cash! My grandmother, kaha! He wanted the security of legal tender, she the thrill of a surprise. I would watch with them in their sunroom, an enclosed patio with a floor of green-and-white checkered tiles, six sliding glass doors, and a high ceiling cut with skylights flooding the room with sun. The patio housed a playing-card table strewn with pink-and-white mahjong tiles, a collection of potted plants, and an eight-foot tall calamansi tree that foamed white with flowers each spring before swelling with green and orange gumball-sized fruits.
Back then, I was too young to learn the rules of Filipino mahjong or to enjoy the sour juice of the fruit halfway between a kumquat and a lemon. Instead, I guzzled cans of Coke and used the mahjong tiles like Legos to build spaceships and towering skyscrapers.
I didn’t know much about my Filipino side; I wasn’t yet conscious of flat noses and the effects of centuries of colonial rule. My grandparents had immigrated to America in the 1950s, a generation before I was born, when my grandfather enlisted in the US Navy with the promise of citizenship. After a few years in Guam, then a short stay in northern California, he was posted permanently in Philadelphia. Their children—the generation before me—grew up across the Delaware River in the suburbs of South Jersey. All were given an American education. They worked hard. They attended college. They married white partners.
That’s where I enter this story. I am a third-generation Filipino American. My mother was born in Guam, my father in Tennessee. We assume he, like other Appalachians, is of Scott-Irish and mixed Protestant European descent, but no one truly knows. His family history remains the greater mystery.
When I was young, I never thought about race. I understood I was half Filipino,
but I didn’t comprehend how that was different from my white friends who were half Irish or a quarter German or my best friend who was Black, his mother from Kenya, his father from Newark.
Everyone was mixed, it seemed to me. I was no different. Half Filipino, half white. Above all, American. In my mind, definitely not Asian.
One day, when I was seven or eight, after baseball practice, another dad asked mine if he had knocked up a Chinese lady. My father laughed off the question, unperturbed, but that night, I stared in the bathroom mirror. Did I look so different? I had my dad’s light skin, his unruly hair. My eyes might have been somewhat narrow but no more than the yellow-eyed bully in A Christmas Story, and that guy was definitely white.
I was white. Right?
That’s when I realized the answer was no. That’s when I first noticed the flatness of my nose.
Twenty-five years later and I am still not exactly sure how my nose shapes who I am. I am halfway between two ethnicities. I am both, at times. Just as often, I am neither. I am the product of two generations of assimilation. In fact, my wife is white—Italian, Irish, Scottish, or something—which means our children will be mostly white. But at eight weeks and three days, an ultrasound reveals so little. Just a small white speck pulsing with life. At eight weeks and three days, you cannot tell anything about how your child will look. Will their hair be smooth or curly? Eyes green or brown? Nose straight or flat?
Our family does not speak much about the past due to a combination of not knowing and not wanting to look back. Many stories have been forgotten, eroded by time, like sandcastles by the sea. I have been attempting to preserve what remains through research and reconstruction before the stories are lost, whitewashed or erased. I know more than I did when I was seven or eight, playing Jenga with mahjong tiles, but I admit most of what I do know comes from a paper I wrote in high school nearly twenty years ago. The assignment asked us to write about our heroes. I chose my grandfather and Arnold Schwarzenegger, two immigrants who hustled their way to achieving the American Dream. I interviewed my grandfather in the patio, at the mahjong table, beneath the shade of the calamansi tree.
—
Once upon a time, in the 1950s, there was a girl named Purita and a boy named Nepo, and like most young people who had survived the Japanese occupation, a guerilla war of resistance, and an aftermath of crime and corruption that cut across the seven thousand islands of the Philippines, Purita and Nepo fell in love.
Like most legendary love stories—Paris and Helen, Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Jasmine and Aladdin—Purita and Nepo came from different worlds. Nepo grew up in a nipa hut, a house raised on hardwood stilts with bamboo walls through which the wind could naturally flow. Purita was raised in a bahay-na-bato, built with Spanish tile and brick walls adorned with ventanillas, sliding panels located underneath the windowsills for cross-ventilation.
At eleven years old, Nepo was too young to fight when World War II reached the white marble shores of San Fernando, a city that lies along the northwestern seaboard of the largest island of the Filipino archipelago. Nepo watched his father, uncles, cousins trudge off to war, while he stayed home in the stupid chalet, with his baby siblings, as if he, too, were a baby. He had no desire to go to school only to learn English words as useful to him as chickenfeed. He dreamed of exotic lands, like Hawaii, New York, or the Las Vegas Strip, where he could become filthy rich.
Every night, Purita dreamed of Baby Jesus. The third and youngest daughter of a civil servant, she did not endure the daily woes of a country ravaged by war and the lingering fog of global depression. That was, until the Japanese assumed control and installed a puppet state. Her father lost his job, and the family could no longer afford to keep their noble brick home—nor their youngest daughter. They sent Purita to live with her aunt.
Nepo found adventures in the streets. He dropped out of school when he discovered he excelled at guessing the dots on dice, the suits of playing cards. He found himself spending his days on the streets among young men with hardened attitudes to compensate for being deemed too feeble to fight. By twelve, Nepo learned to tell dirty jokes to diffuse tension and to use his fists when disrespected. He was a hustler.
Purita was a devout Catholic. Raised by her most religious aunt, she spent every Sunday surrounded by the beauty of stained-glass windows, sanctuary lamps, and golden statues of Baby Jesus. She loved the homilies, the sermons, the sacraments. Most of all she loved the gospel songs. Those who sing pray twice, Father Filip declared. Purita sang beautifully, and she did not need anyone to tell her; she could hear it herself. Singing was when she felt closest to God.
Like many legendary love stories, this one has a tragic backdrop. By the start of World War II, the Philippines had been under control of a foreign power for four hundred years. Before the Japanese occupation, the United States had controlled the country since 1899, and before that Spain since 1565, when soldiers from New Spain (modern day California) conquered the city of Cebu.1 The United States gained control after victory in the Spanish-American War, but rather than recognize the Filipino insurgents’ long fight for independence, the US declared sovereignty over the country, and the insurgents turned their ire toward the Americans.2 Three years later, 4,200 American soldiers were killed along with 20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000 civilians from violence, cholera, famine, and concentration camps.3 The Philippines became an unincorporated territory of the US, the largest overseas colony. English became the primary language of government, business, industry, and education.
Fifty years later, after Japan surrendered control back to the United States post–World War II, the Americans must have taken one look around the war-torn country and thought, nah. America ceded sovereignty in 1946.
What followed—war, occupation, decades of dependency—left the country in a financial and food crisis. As depression and desperation deepened, Nepo suffered through teenage years of scrapes and bruises, restless days, nights of hunger and regret. He could guess the dots on dice, but no one had money to lose. At the age of seventeen, his luck had run out. He stumbled into a church, seeking penance for his sins, solace from the hustler’s life.
He came that first day for God. He returned the day after for a girl.
—
On the day I interviewed my grandfather, my grandmother declined to participate. I cannot recall where she was on that day. Knowing her, she likely escaped upstairs to pan-fry pancit noodles for me or bake ensaymada, a pillowy bun glazed with butter, coated in sugar, and sprinkled with shredded cheese; my grandparents preferred Cracker Barrel sharp cheddar. I never found that strange when I was young, and to this day, I still find the best things combine different cultures.
Both my grandparents were skilled cooks, but my grandmother had more patience, kneading the dough until the skin glistened. Her patience developed, I think, from necessity. Unlike her husband, English did not come to her naturally. She spoke softly, smiled calmly when someone did not understand her. Even for me it was impossible to always understand her—until I did something reckless like toss a tennis ball inside and break her gilt-framed photo of Baby Jesus, in which case she would scream at me with words I did not know but quickly understood.
I never thought much about language when I was young. Everyone in our family speaks English. Even the eldest of the previous generation—my aunts and uncles—know only a few Ilocano words, like maag (fool) and kilikili (armpit). This is common for immigrant families in America. Speaking English is expected, part of the process of assimilation, like using Anglicized names and subscribing to dominant cultural norms, like using a fork and not your hands to eat fried rice. I have since learned there are different categories of assimilation, different ways different cultures interact. Cultural integration is when the minority group adopts aspects of a dominant culture while still retaining their own, like eating pancit and pizza indiscriminately.4 Acculturation occurs when the minority group blends the two cultures, perhaps altering both, like Pan-Asian sweet buns topped with Southern-country cheese.5
When I was younger, I did not have the terminology to describe what was happening around me. I didn’t think to call it anything, not the least assimilation.
That was just our family. A curious mix. As we aged, our strangeness abated. Pancit
became a specialty, ensaymada, a rare treat.
Sometimes, assimilation is just assimilation. Over the course of a few generations, the ancestral culture simply disappears.
My grandmother did not join us on the patio on the day I interviewed my grandfather, but I have picked up pieces of her stories over time. I imagine her telling me these stories, if she spoke better English, or if I spoke Ilocano.
—
He was a heathen, Purita knew, by the way he snatched the body of Christ from the priest’s hand as if grabbing for a cracker. Why did he keep coming? Keep staring at her? Keep sitting closer?
After casing the room, Nepo noticed the congregants held hands during prayer. If he chose the correct seat, he realized, he could hold the hand of the angel. On the first Sunday, he sat next to a man who believed in God but not in baths. On the second Sunday, a child with a thumb swollen and red from being wedged in his cheek throughout the homily. Only on the third Sunday was he seated next to her.
How could anyone sing with this heathen breathing down their neck, Purita thought. Look at him: rising oafishly, elbows out, huddled over the hymnal. He knew not the words, the rhythms, the pauses of the songs, and he kept flitting his eyes at her, as if checking if she was appreciating his performance.
Nepo did not know the words, but he knew one thing: he could sing. He didn’t need anyone to tell him. He could hear it himself. He sang—
—Like a wounded dog, Purita thought. Gravelly, hoarse, and off-key. So deafening she could not hit the high notes. And yet, there was something about the way he belted out the words, without shame, filling them not with grace but a longing that contained an intensity, perhaps even beauty. There was something loving in the heathen’s heart. During the Lord’s Prayer, she did not let him take her hand; she reached out and took his first.
In 1947, the United States signed a military base agreement with the newly sovereign Philippine Republic.6 In exchange for military protection, the Philippines granted the United States the right to retain military bases in the country and to recruit Filipino nationals into the US Navy with the promise of citizenship, money, and adventure.
Nepo gazed at the docks of Manila Bay, where the warships looked like slumbering sea monsters, readying for conquest. For months, he trained in Manila, and when his first assignment arrived, he learned he would be stationed in a faraway land called US Naval Base Guam. Before he could depart, Nepo had to convince Purita to marry him.
Over their short time together, Purita had learned to love Nepo. His unruliness and his tenderness. She did not object to marrying him. She objected to marrying a heathen.
Nepo agreed to get baptized. Eventually. Each time an opportunity arose, he invented an excuse. Training exercises. Poker matches. Father Filip gave him creeps.
Before he could get baptized, time ran out. Purita had to make a choice.
Doubt crossed her mind. Maybe there would always be a next time. Maybe he only claimed he would get baptized. Maybe he only proposed so he wouldn’t be alone. Maybe he didn’t believe in God at all.
Doubt. She had so much doubt. She had to take a leap of faith—and as she placed her trust in Jesus Christ, she placed her trust in Nepo Abiva.
In a municipal hall, Purita wore a plain dress and Nepo a white linen jacket. According to legend, they were married for the first time, under law, by a civil servant bored and young enough to be their classmate.
A few weeks later, husband and wife boarded a ship bound for shores 1,500 miles east.
—
In my grandparents’ enclosed patio, there was a wood-paneled microwave dotted with banana stickers atop a coffin-sized stereo from the ’70s. In the microwave, we would warm ensaymada for breakfast, which, as a child, seemed no different—no more Filipino or foreign—than jelly doughnuts.
Did you know the first Asians in America were Filipino? I didn’t. I had never been taught that. Men from Manila arrived on the California coast possibly as early as 1587 aboard Spanish galleons, as crew members and slaves.7 Some of these “Manila Men” escaped. They formed one of the first Asian-American settlements in the outskirts of New Orleans.8 They lived in nipa huts built on stilts above the murky bayous and marshes they fished.9 The settlement, named Saint Malo, existed as a self-governing community until 1893 when a hurricane destroyed the village. The survivors assimilated into the wider New Orleans.
There is no official documentation that tells the story of Saint Malo. The village
could have been forgotten to time. Instead, the story has been passed down through
generations in oral histories.10 But as sea levels rise, the marshlands of Saint Malo erode. In 2019, the Philippine-Louisiana History Society received approval for a historical marker to tell the story of the first permanent Filipino settlement in the United States before the land was lost to the sea.
I imagine it is difficult to live, as the Manila Men did, outside society. I have always considered my grandparents’ choice to assimilate a no-brainer. They bought a house, two cars, thousands in government bonds. Their children landed desk jobs with retirement plans. I benefited immensely myself. I was the first to earn a JD in the family and likely the first PhD, too.
My question is not whether my grandparents made the right choice in coming to America. My question is whether it was a choice at all. This question led me to the history of Asian immigration in America. Once upon a time, after all, in 1924, all immigrants from Asian countries were banned in this country.11 Naturalization laws at the time also declared you had to be a free white person to enjoy the privilege of citizenship.12 Over the decades the law was in effect, it was challenged by immigrants seeking citizenship; the Supreme Court litigated the very meaning of being American.13 In Ozawa v. United States, the Court acknowledged precedent that held that the term “white person” indicates the “Caucasian race.” While there were “debatable grounds” of what constitutes Caucasian, the appellant, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese graduate of Berkeley, was clearly not Caucasian and therefore ineligible for citizenship.14
The Court reversed this decision three months later in United v. Thind. Anthropologists of the time suggested Asian Indians were Caucasian. The Court rejected the debatable grounds test and adopted a test of common knowledge—and according to common knowledge, the appellant, Bhagat Singh Thind, an Army veteran of World War I, was clearly not white and therefore ineligible for citizenship.15
Common knowledge never came easy for the Court. The definition of free white person stumped the justices in cases involving Arabs and Armenians.16 To help them decide, the court looked for visual conformity to the average white US citizen.17 In other words, to determine whether you were eligible for citizenship, the Court applied a test of performance assimilation.18 The highest court in the land declared that to become American, you have to look American. Assimilation became a Constitutional standard for citizenship.
These are things I never knew. That’s why I am telling you. The only way to shape our future is to understand the absurdity of our past.
The end of World War II brought reform to immigration laws—though a skeptic might suggest such reform resulted less from changed hearts and more from the embarrassment of having your president incarcerate over 100,000 Japanese in internment camps while waging a war against fascist oppression.19 Gone was the “free white person” restriction, and instead of a total ban, the new act allowed annual quotas from Asian countries—though a skeptic might point out how the restricted number created a de facto preferential system, placing undue importance on labor qualifications and educational background.
One country carved out from the quota system was the Philippines. Under the Military Bases Agreement of 1947, Filipinos were the only foreign nationals who could enlist in the US Navy without first immigrating. This was a continuation of practices that started after the end of the Spanish-American War, when the Philippines became a US colony.20 Filipino men were recruited as servants and houseboys for officers—jobs Americans were unwilling to take.21 The 1947 agreement formalized this traditional relationship; most Filipino enlisted men were assigned the role of steward, cleaning officer quarters and serving meals in the mess. Filipino men who enlisted were eligible for naturalization should they serve honorably on active duty during a declared conflict. A proponent of the agreement might say it gave young men the choice to escape poverty, to become a US citizen, to pursue the American Dream.
A skeptic might point out how the agreement was a continuation of colonialism, how for most young men, there wasn’t much of a choice. It was to scrape the shit off white officers’ toilets or starve.
—
Nepo was assigned to USS Boyd, a Fletcher-class destroyer. Instead of loading cannons or launching aircraft, as the non-Filipino seaman did, he cooked and cleaned and shined the shoes of senior officers. Never before had he felt so demeaned. Back home, he commanded a crew who obeyed his orders, and now he was cleaning the quarters of men who treated him like their maid. For Filipinos, being admitted to the Navy was supposed to be like hitting the jackpot, but for Nepo, the jackpot was carrying the jockstraps of white men.
For the first time in his life, Nepo had to make himself believe he was just as good as these other men, all while gaining their begrudging respect by taking their pocket change in poker and making them laugh with well-timed jokes. He practiced his English to pronounce important words without an accent. Words like yes sir, no sir, ante up, and tiny pecker.
The dream became a job. He did it for the pay. For the security. For his family.
On Guam, Purita gave birth to two children. A daughter named after the mother of God and a son named after an ancient Roman general. As Guam was, and remains to this day, a US territory, Mary and Julius Caesar became the first US citizens in the family.
After four years in Guam, Nepo was stationed in Alameda, California. The first thing he did in mainland America was buy a 1963 red Corvette. Only, with his commitment to the Navy and his time away at sea, it was Purita who mostly drove that muscle car.
For the first time in her life, Purita cursed God. The car terrified her. And as she
drove all across town—to the grocery store, the school, the doctors’ offices—every yellow light made her hold her breath, every pothole made her pray for the Lord’s forgiveness. She drove, clutching the wheel with two hands, a foot on the gas pedal, another on the brake, close to tears, her children piled obliviously in the passenger seat.
While Nepo learned the intricacies of English on battleships, Purita learned the language by singing lullabies to her children. She had never been comfortable with other languages. She could recall the arrangement of the letters, could hear the sounds in her head, but when she attempted to speak, the words unraveled on her tongue. Americans struggled to understand her, she knew, and she could only smile and repeat herself, as the full extent of her deepest thoughts, her deepest self, remained locked away in her lonely mind.
Her children’s command of the language soon exceeded her own. English was the only language they understood, the only language taught in the house, for in California, Ilocano would be as useless to them as chickenfeed. Like the Americans who could never understand her, Purita realized, at times, neither could her children.
Purita learned to communicate through cooking. She recreated Filipino dishes—pinakbet, boiled vegetables with fermented anchovies, and sisig, grilled pig head with fried onion and chicken liver—in a desperate attempt to ensure her children’s mouths resisted the allure of chicken nuggets and cheeseburgers, even as her own husband’s mouth could not. Food became a connection to home, along with God.
Every Sunday, Purita drove the Corvette to church. Jesus would bind her family together. Jesus would know from where they came, from where they would yet go.
Except for the heathen, of course.
Nepo had no desire to spend his thirty days of leave planning a wedding. He wanted to spend his time playing poker, fishing, chasing his children on the beach. They were married already, what was the point?
They were married, yes, Purita agreed, but they had never received the sacrament of holy matrimony. They had never sealed their union, never made their life together indissoluble. She asked him to fulfill his promise to get baptized.
Nepo, of course, resisted. He needn’t dunk his head like a baby. Monsignor O’Malley gave him the creeps.
Purita put her foot down. No more excuses. Because if there was a heaven, and she believed there was, she did not want to be as alone there as she was here. And if he expected her to drive around in a car that could kill her—and this is the part that changed Nepo’s mind—then she expected him to meet her in heaven after living out his long life.
At St. Joseph’s Basilica, beneath stained-glass windows and a bell tower, Purita wore a white wedding dress and Nepo a black tuxedo. According to legend, they were married for the second time, on a foggy day in the Bay Area, by a Catholic priest, before their children, and under God.
A few months later, Nepo was reassigned to the USS Ranger. The aircraft carrier departed San Francisco Bay in 1964 for a declared conflict, the Gulf of Tonkin and the Vietnam War.
—
On the day I interviewed my grandfather, I cannot recall if the calamansi tree bore flowers or fruit. Sometimes, in my memory, the white flowers glow golden in the evening sun. Sometimes, the tree droops with full green fruit.
In the summer, after moving the tree outdoors, our family would cover the playing card table with a white tablecloth and set out a strange consortium of cuisines. Pancit noodles and mac and cheese. Pork lumpia and meatballs. Garlic rice and potato salad. At these family meals, everyone spoke English, half had flat noses, and not one of us had ever heard the Legend of the First Filipino or Juan’s curse.
The generation before me—my mother, my aunts and uncles—grew up in America in the 1960s and ’70s. My mother says she never encountered any discrimination growing up. I always found that hard to believe. I encountered discrimination growing up in the 1990s and 2000s—I was told to go home and get my green card during a middle-school hockey game, called Nakatomi by the upperclassmen on the high school football team, laughed at by dormmates in college when I claimed to be American—and my skin is not as brown as hers, my nose not as flat.
You have probably heard of passing. People pass for white for various reasons. To fit into the majority, or to avoid segregation and discrimination.
But what happens when you can’t pass? What happens when you have a flat nose?
The term covering was developed by Yale Law Professor Kenji Yoshino. He argues that everyone covers as a condition of society’s implicit request to downplay our differences.22 Women at the office are asked to act like men. Queer people to act straight. Non-whites to act white.23
In the 1960s—when the generation above me was growing up—a new stereotype of Asian Americans emerged. The model minority.24 A people who pulled themselves up through hard work, education, and an emphasis on math and science. The mainstream press, including the New York Times and the US News & World Report, ran stories of Asian American success.
Recent scholarship rejects the model minority as a myth,25 a fictional tale developed to argue for the benefits of assimilation and to say that other racial minorities could achieve the same success if they stopped protesting, put their head down, and worked hard.
Myths are often fiction, and myths are often believed. The model minority myth helped perpetuate the new stereotype, as the children of Asian immigrants, growing up in the 1960s and ’70s—like the generation before me—saw a path to success and acceptance. Many learned to cover. To conform to mainstream norms. To distance themselves from the immigrant experience. To don leather jackets and bell-bottom jeans.26
Not all. Let’s not perpetuate the myth. Many Asian Americans preserved their languages, prioritized fidelity to their culture over fitting in. Some didn’t. Some spoke English at home. Some ate fast food. Some gave their children American names. Some chose to sacrifice a part of themselves to build a safer future.
Is that a choice? Or is it no choice at all? That’s what I can’t answer.
I have always imagined my grandparents graciously accepted America’s bounty, grateful for everything the country had given them, a home, a steady paycheck, a way of life, a powerful economy, a stable government, a place for their children to go to college, to forge careers, to have children of their own.
Now, I can’t stop imagining what was lost so I could be born.
—
Bob Hope’s traveling show boarded the USS Ranger on Christmas 1967. On the airship carrier’s deck, he sang and danced with Raquel Welch, Elaine Dunn, and Miss World Madeleine Hartog Bell. Sailors joined them on stage. In their Navy blues, they gyrated their hips and swung their arms and danced their patriotic asses off. You can find the footage on YouTube.
Nepo didn’t dance on stage; he was down three levels in the mess, cleaning up after Bob Hope’s crew, or in the rec hall, hustling white boys on the poker table, wearing a gold chain cross around his neck not because he was newly baptized but because it looked badass.
The paychecks and the pocket change were nice, but the money could no longer make up for the months he went without seeing his family. Five months felt like five years, sizable chunks of his children’s lives he would never get back. But he had a plan, a path to a rich life. He put his head down, worked hard, and hustled. The money was not for him, he told himself, whenever he felt the euphoric rush of outwitting white boys, of separating a man from his money.
The USS Ranger participated in combat operations throughout the Vietnam War. The ship suffered a single fatality, when a fuel line broke and a fire erupted in the machinery room. Ranger earned thirteen battle stars before returning to homeport in 1976 for good. The ship would be decommissioned in 1993, and in 2017, scrapped in Brownsville, Texas.
In 1976, Nepo retired from the Navy after twenty-two years of service. The amount of time needed to max out his pension. That had always been the plan. The government of America paying him for the rest of his life. After he retired, he became a US postal worker—to start the clock on a second pension. While the job seemed like an adventure—navigating the roads, come rain, come snow, come gloom of night—it became just a job. He had to find adventure elsewhere. This time he found it in the most unlikely of places, in the backyard of his South Jersey home.
He dug the dirt up first. Filled in the dark soil with tomato seeds and leafy upo plants, a Filipino squash. Around the perimeter, he planted apple trees and cherry trees, and he hung on them, like ornaments, sticky plastic fruits, to catch aphids and flies. He kept a slingshot on him to protect his plants from squirrels and rabbits, and he had a tawny owl stand guard when he was gone. In his garden, Nepo learned to deal with the unpredictable weather, hot in the summer like the Philippines, cold in the winter in ways he had never known. He built a sunroom to house sampaguita flowers, aloe vera, calamansi trees, and other living things from home. His garden became a daily challenge for him, and a lifelong mystery. The plants never stopped growing, but in his garden, time seemed to stop.
As Nepo’s life changed, so too did Purita’s. Parental duties now divided, she no longer had to drive her children to doctor’s offices or record stores. She focused on what she wanted, and what she wanted was to cook. To her delight, her children, now teenagers, began to crave more food of the Philippines. She sated their cravings with kare-kare, tomato oxtail stew, and arroz caldo with ginger and toasted garlic. She did not know if their children’s palettes evolved by a miracle of God or if their mouths were portals to her homeland. She didn’t know. It didn’t matter. She cooked.
Time doesn’t stop. Like their plants, her children kept growing and soon spent more time away from the house, at the homes of their American friends, the Cherry Hill Mall, or Billy Joel concerts. Before it seemed possible, her children left for cities and colleges, desk jobs and lovers. After years of a full house, Purita no longer had a household for whom to cook.
With no more mouths to feed, Nepo bought a 1992 Mercedes-Benz 400E. Jet black, leather seats, car phone, burl-walnut trim, with a 268-horsepower engine that Car and Driver called barely tamed ferocity. He drove the luxury car to only two places: the church and the casino. Every Sunday, he prayed for good fortune, and every Friday, he bet it all away. At the blackjack table, he found an opponent not readily outwitted, not easily separated from its money.
At the casino, Purita played the slots. Feeding the white slips into the flashing machines beneath the blinking lights felt like the gameshows she watched on her cable box. Each pull of the lever, every spin of the reel, offering the thrill of a surprise.
One night, with odds astronomically low, Purita lined up wilds and Nepo guessed the right card. They took their winnings, and instead of saving it, spent it all on a suite at the Showboat with a wet bar, a whirlpool, and an ocean view. The next day they paid a Filipino priest to preside over a beach ceremony—because if you ignored the world-famous boardwalk, the smell of deep-fried funnel cake, and the seagull’s screech, you could almost imagine standing barefoot on white marble sand.
And so, on the Atlantic City beach, Purita wore a yellow sundress and Nepo a Hawaiian shirt. According to legend, they were married for the third time before a priest, in formal white vestment, under the flashing casino lights.
—
Each summer, I helped my grandfather drag the potted calamansi tree from the sunroom to the outdoor deck. The tree was eight feet tall; the pot too heavy to lift. You had to tilt the pot on edge and roll it slowly to the sliding door. In my earliest memories, my grandfather would squat beneath the tree, and I would stand above him and steer.
Our roles changed eventually. I would power the tree outside with legs thickened from the football field, and he would hover above, back stooped, tugging the branches this way and that, hollering directions. Clockwise. No, other clockwise.
By the time I finished high school, I moved the tree on my own. My grandfather would sit at the mahjong table and watch, shouting commands only if I was close to knocking something over. His doctor had banned him from strenuous activities. A lifetime of lumpia, fried rice, and Burger King had caught up to him, destroyed his kidneys. As the calamansi tree shed leaves each year, my grandfather shed life. The sinewy, sun-kissed man who I had interviewed on the patio only a few years prior had shriveled into a man with no muscle at all.
Here’s the thing about that interview: I lost the typed transcript long ago. A file on a computer long disposed. Try as I might, I can’t remember the questions I asked, or the finer details of my grandfather’s answers, or if the calamansi tree remained inside or out.
Now, at thirty-four, and midway through my PhD coursework at the University of Cincinnati, I keep copies of everything I write. Emails to myself. Backups on the Cloud. I hate losing drafts, any little detail, the frustration of needing something I once held but did not think to preserve.
That’s one of the primary powers of storytelling. Preserving knowledge in narrative. Stories may not always be real but they contain something real nonetheless. Stories have other powers too. They force us to imagine the world through other eyes. They reveal to us who we are by showing us what we can feel.
Stories can also help us reclaim what was lost. African writers have used fiction to resurrect historical stories lost to colonial rule.27 In Hawaii, the Kanaka Maoli use narrative poems imbued with ancestral beliefs to resist colonial narratives.28 Contemporary Filipino writers, too, are taking back folklore from colonial influence by rewriting the country’s legends and myths.29 According to Filipino legend, for example, aswang are evil, shapeshifting spirits. During the day, they take the form of beautiful women, and at night, they grow wings and fangs and suck the embryos out of pregnant women.
According to whose legend? The portrayal of aswang as devil-like creatures could have been edits made by Spanish colonists to evangelize the Indigenous people. The country’s legends and myths might be severed from their ancestral origin, the true stories long forgotten, collectively erased after four hundred years of colonial rule. Perhaps the stories have more meaning than commonly understood: the deities more than incarnations of the devil, the legends more than self-deprecating jokes about flat noses.
My grandparents’ sunroom was sold, along with the rest of their house, after his funeral. The garden is gone, the fruit trees cut down. Only the calamansi remains, sitting in a sun-filled corner of my uncle’s South Jersey home.
—
When I was three or four, my grandmother would pinch my nose and pull. A futile attempt to elongate the bone, to stretch the cartilage, to rid me of Juan’s curse.
I still don’t love my nose. But I recognize, in many ways, my nose connects me to an ancestral home I have never visited, a culture I long to preserve.
In my search for more connections, I bought a calamansi tree off the internet. I placed it in the kitchen of my Cincinnati apartment, by a bay window. But the tree must not get enough light. Instead of growing tall, it became gnarled, stunted. The tree never flowers, produces only a handful of fruit. My wife and I splash the sour juice into our morning tea.
We were married—only once, so far—in a casual ceremony in the forested hills
of the Hudson Valley, before a small group of friends and family. Most of the wedding guests were white, but after a few cocktails, a strong contingent on the dance floor had brown skin and flat noses. My grandparents didn’t make the trip. That was 2018, the year my grandfather passed, after living out his long life.
The first time I told my grandparents about my then-future wife, my grandmother asked if she was Filipino. I realized my grandmother probably wanted one of us—any of her many children and grandchildren—to end up with a Filipino, to have children who looked more like her, flat nose notwithstanding. But like the previous generation, we all married white people.
She would never say so, but I imagine that my grandmother wondered, from time to time, about all she had sacrificed. She probably wondered, during her darkest days—living out her life on my parents’ couch, watching Mass on her cable box, waiting to join her husband in heaven—if she made the right choice—marrying the heathen, leaving home, moving to America—before reminding herself that it was no choice at all, for look at all she had gained.
—
Many children never get to meet their great grandparents; for you, my child, it will be no different. You will not have direct access to your ancestral culture. In all likelihood, Juan’s “curse” will end with you. And maybe you will choose to ignore that part of yourself, your ethnic identity far removed, like a distant relative with no impact on your daily life. But maybe one day, you will, like me, yearn to know more. Maybe the best your mother and I can do, maybe the best any of us can do, maybe our responsibility as those who come before, is to give you a choice, by dwelling not on what was lost but by taking the scattered shards of half-forgotten tales and filling in the gaps with our own imagination, preserving for you, and for all those who come after, the legend of your ancestors’ lives.
—
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Purita and a boy named Nepo, and according to legend, they were married three times . . . ■
ENDNOTES
1 . M.C. Halili, Philippine History (Philippines: Rex Book Store, 2004), 77.
2. Britannica, Editors of Encyclopedia. “Philippine-American War,” Encyclopedia Britannica, August 31, 2022.
3. Spencer Tucker, The Encyclopedia of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars: A Political, Social, and Military History (United States: ABC-CLIO, 2009), 477.
4. David K. Abe, Rural Isolation and Dual Cultural Existence: The Japanese-American Kona Coffee Community (Germany: Springer International Publishing, 2009), 17–18.
5. Nicki Lisa Cole, “Understanding Acculturation and Why It Happens,” ThoughtCo., 2019, https://www
.thoughtco.com/acculturation-definition-3026039.
6. L. Eve Armentrout Ma, “Treaty or Travesty?”: Legal Issues Surrounding the U.S.-Philippines Military Base Agreement of 1947–1992,” The Journal of American-East Asian Relations, Vol. 10, No. 1/2, 2001: 93–121.
7. Eloisa Gomez Borah, “Filipinos in Unamuno’s California Expedition of 1587,” Amerasia Journal 21, No. 3 (Winter 1995/1996): 175.
8. Marina Estrella Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana (United States: A.F. Laborde, 1988).
9. Rachel Ramirez, “This site is an important piece of Filipino American history. Climate change is destroying it,” CNN, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/17/us/filipino-american-history-louisiana-climate/index.html.
10. Ramirez, “This site is an important piece of Filipino American history. Climate change is destroying it,” CNN, 2021.
11. Nicholas Loh, “Diasporic Dreams: Law, Whiteness and the Asian American Identity,” Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. 48, No. 5, 2021: 1336 Loh, “Diasporic Dreams,” 1336.
12. Loh, “Diasporic Dreams,” 1336.
13. Loh, “Diasporic Dreams,” 1336.
14. 260 U.S. 178 (2012).
15. 21 U.S. 214 (1923).
16. John Tehranian, “Performing Whiteness: Naturalization Litigation and the Construction of Racial Identity in America,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 109, 2000: 820–21.
17. Sherally Munshi, “You Will See My Family Become So American: Toward a Minor Comparativism,” American Journal of Comparative Law, Vol, 62, 2015: 675.
18. Tehranian, “Performing Whiteness,” 820.
19. Loh, “Diasporic Dreams,” 1343.
20. H. G. Reza, “Navy to Stop Recruiting Filipino Nationals,” Los Angeles Times, 1992, https://www.latimes
.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-02-27-me-3911-story.html.
21. “Filipino Stewards Still used by Navy, but Number Drops,” New York Times, 1970, https://www.nytimes
.com/1970/10/25/archives/filipino-stewards-still-used-by-navy-but-number-drops.html.
22. Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (United States: Random House Publishing Group, 2011), 22–23.
23. Yoshino, Covering, 188.
24. William Peterson, “Success Story: Japanese American Style,” New York Times, January 9, 1966; “Success Story of One Minority Group in U.S,” U.S. News & World Report, December 26, 1966.
25. Edith Wen-Chu Chen and Grace J. Yoo, Encyclopedia of Asian American Issues Today (United Kingdom: Greenwood Press, 2009), 222–223; Loh, “Diaspora Dreams,” 1347.
26. Yoshino, Covering, 188; Loh, “Diasporic Dreams,” 1350.
27. Lizzy Attree, “Reclaiming Africa’s Stolen Histories through Fiction,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2018, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/reclaiming-africas-stolen-histories-through-fiction.
28. Dhiffaf al-Shwillay, Folklore as Resistance in Postcolonial Narratives and Cultural Practices: Hawaiian, African American, and Iraqi, University Hawaii at Manoa, Dissertation 2019, 57–58.
29. Ali Pitargue, “BC Authors are Taking Back the Monsters of Filipino Folklore from Colonial Influences,” CBC News, 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-authors-are-taking-back-the-monsters-of-filipino-folklore-from-colonial-influences-1.6077657.