In one week and five days, I leave for a holiday in Scotland. More importantly, in one week and five days, I will have lived exactly half of my life in the Philippines and exactly half of my life in Canada. I feel like this is very unique to me, as I know of no other person at this time who is straddling that line quite so thinly as I am. And it brings up a dilemma. In two weeks, when I’m traveling in the UK, do I introduce myself as, “Hello, my name is Diana, and I’m Canadian”? I always feel like I have to follow something like that with, “But I was actually born in the Philippines and lived there for a decade and I speak fluent Tagalog and I used to be very, very brown.”
What am I now?
How am I classified? By ethnicity? By citizenship? By the language I speak?
In a way, I feel kind of privileged. I have the distinct ability to see through two lenses, which is kinda cool, eh? I had asked a friend on facebook his opinion on North American-born/raised Filipino comedians who poke fun at the Filipino accent (upon speaking English). I noticed that his response was largely from a Canadian-born perspective. And for a moment, I reveled in the fact that I had a rebuttal (not that it was a debate)! I don’t, however, think I ever replied because I was sidetracked by the sudden realization that while I am able to see through two lenses, which one, now, must I claim to be the primary one?
It just floored me how I have two nationalities. It’s unsettling.
I know that there’s always the option of always introducing yourself as a Filipino-Canadian. And it’s not like I have to stop speaking Tagalog or being concerned with Filipino things. But there is always this guilt. Like I’m jumping ship.
Here’s some backstory: I was watching the TV Patrol (news) yesterday on TFC (The Filipino Chanel) and seeing as it is, yet again, typhoon season, Julius Babao and co. were reporting on small towns and villages affected by flooding, boat crashes, oil spills, busted electrical circuits, etc. At one point, Karen Davila, one of the anchors, was standing in front of a screen titled ‘Suplay ng Kuryente’. That translated to ‘Electricity Supply’. I had to squint my eyes to see if that was spelt correctly. I turned to my dad and asked, “What is ‘supply’ in Tagalog?” To which he looked at my mom, who looked at her mom who was equally confused. We eventually came up with ‘rasyon’. (Mini story time! Scroll to the end to read footnotes or click here) Which is really just a Tagalog-ized version of ‘ration’, an English term.
We continued talking about words and the Tagalog language for a while, concluding how, for the most part, it is a lot of English derivatives and even more so of Spanish derivatives. Ie: Filipinos count in Spanish. It’s true. I have never heard anyone count higher than ten in Tagalog. Which makes me question how much of Tagalog, of the Philippines, was really, truly Filipino. (And if you do your research, you’ll easily find that the essence of the word Filipino, and the name of the country itself… is all rooted in someone else’s roots- Spain. Which, if you are a Filipino like me, is MUCH cause for some pretty awful self-scrutiny and an identity crisis of epic proportions. OMG WHAT ARE WE???)
With this idea of there not being a concrete definition of Philippines, it feels kind of traitorous to, in any way, leave. Like the fact that I live in Canada. Or that I speak English more than I do Tagalog. And that I think in English even when I am speaking in Tagalog. That I mostly read and watch English books and movies and listen to English music.
I feel like I always have to compensate for these facts. By, for example, that book I bought in a bookstore in the Philippines that I had SO much intention of reading but haven’t picked up since. Or the fact that we continue to subscribe to TFC despite their programs, soap operas and actors being of astronomically crappy quality. Or by drawing up a family tree for the Navals and Pocsidios and Reyeses and Mayos in an attempt to reconnect with the home country. Or this blog itself; containing a few entries in which I feel the need to defend the country from whatever criticism (sometimes my own). Or this habit I have of looking down on the use of Taglish (Tagalog English) while subsequently being unable to eliminate it from my own speech.
There’s always been this kind of… dichotomy since I moved here. And the fact that in one week and five days, it will be made official, just makes it all the more… unsettling. My biggest fear is that as the years go by, when the ratio of Filipino-living to Canadian-living decreases, the ratio of my Filipino-identity to Canadian-identity might decrease all the same.
Footnotes:
In Chemfields, a pharmaceutical company that my dad designed machinery for as a mechanical engineer, the employees were treated very kindly. I distinctly remember a dental procedure for my dad (paid for by the company) that I sat in as a kid. The dentist was a very gay man who, funnily, kinda had a crush on my dad. Or maybe he was like that with everyone? Anyways, along with witnessing this great dental plan in action, I also remember sitting in our jeep on the way to the company warehouse to go pick up some rice. The relevance of this story to the word ‘ration’ is that my dad and his coworkers would refer to their monthly rice supply as ‘ration’. So that’s how we came up with ‘ration’ being a sort of equivalent for ‘supply’