I am care

Living in America had its black and white moments, but there was never a shortage of Filipinos in places I had lived. When I was a toddler, we had lived on Treasure Island, just across from the San Francisco skyline. Our neighbors were brown like us, a family that mirrored ours – a father, a mother, and three kids. Bremerton, Washington was never short of potlocks, as we had delved into the culture of breaking bread with other Filipinos on Saturdays at the Fabelinia’s, the day before church. In Honolulu, there was a surplus of brown folks. Hell, it was like being in the Philippines there. The peak of my childhood was when my skin was the darkest it had ever been, adorning a type of dark shade of tan that I had prided myself in deepening at beaches at Ko’olina.

But the turning point was when I moved to Virginia Beach. This had occurred after living 5 years in Naples, Italy, in a racial bubble of a military base where I could navigate all because my father was in the Navy. I became conscious of my skin in Virginia Beach, a location where a lot of military families or retired folks went – especially Filipino folks. Even as my parents and I had the crop of family friends from past stations to find refuge in, navigating that landscape was when I had first encountered the dirty reality of what the Mason Dixie line had implicated back more than a century ago. In those hallways of high school as a freshman, I danced between the approval of the black kids who praised my royal blue and black Nike Dunks and the rich white kids that did everything in my power to keep from bullying me. After a year of dealing with the social anxiety of walking the halls of Frank W. Cox, teased for “things” beyond my control, my father retired and found a job with the Coast Guard in Alaska. So when we moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, I had buried the whisper deep within my soul, the one that had tip toed around the judgment of watchful eyes. To me, my brown skin was a problem, and I was in for a specific type of disappearing act. On that plane, as I watched the city lights of the small fishing town, I thought to myself “I don’t care.”

Ketchikan was the site of a lot of things. I had done my fair share of trail hiking with friends or on my own. I had even did a bit of gallivanting, cruising around the streets high and faded because there was nothing better to do. I was bored with existence. Even if there were other Filipinos like me in Ketchikan, I held a deep type of shame knowing that we were pretty much at the bottom rung of a ladder. I’d see Filipinos working the registers and fryers at the local fast food joint. Filipinos cleaning the halls of hospitals. My first job ever was as a janitor at City Hall. In the dark of those halls, as I emptied trash receptacles of government workers that left crumbs on carpets. On my knees, I picked at the little morsels. The stains on the fabric reminded me that I was no different. In a town where the snow had capped mountains, buried cars, and whitewashed the rainforest, I was like a speck, the soil that dirtied the idyllic backdrop.