The last week has been a clusterfuck, and I’m still trying to process my feelings about it. My thoughts are all over the place. I came in here wanting to write a thorough article about certain topics, you know, bulletin points and all that, but then I realized I’m not in the right frame of mind to do that. So I’m going to do what I do best. I’m going to ramble.
—
Imagine that there’s a race.
Imagine that I didn’t have a car to get to the start of that race. I had to hitchike for a bit, and then I got dropped off in the middle of nowhere so I had to start walking. It’s 32 degrees, it’s hot, and the shoes I saved up for weren’t all that great, so they’ve started pinching in all the wrong places. And maybe half an hour away from my destination, the sole in the right shoe pops open.
I get there, anyway. The race has already started. They let me get to the starting gates, anyway. So off I go. Off I run. I’m running my heart out. My feet hurt, my toes are bleeding, I’m tired, I’m thirsty, but I’m running my heart out.
Obviously, I don’t finish. Obviously. And maybe because I was tired, and wearing the wrong shoes, or started way too late, so of course my form was all wrong. But I ran my heart out.
At the end of it all, awards are given out, and I hear someone sneer from the sidelines: “Yeah, all I care about is how they ran. If you didn’t make it, too bad.”
Then they look at me and say, “Maybe you should’ve bought a car.”
I didn’t know how to explain I couldn’t afford one.
“Or I don’t know, gotten here earlier.”
But I had to work a part time job in the morning…
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have ran at all.”
Then I turn to the other runners, who all give me a high-five and say, “Yeah, we all had it tough! What a race!”
—
In a bubble, it’s easy to say, “All that matters is whether it’s good.” Especially if you’re the reader and all you see is the end product, or you’re a writer who’s never had to deal with balancing yourself with what you perceive your audience values (whether it is true or not). But while I fully understand how such a statement can come from a place of innocence, I’m going to try to explain *how* it sounds to people like me…
—
Analogy number 2. You went to a restaurant. It just says “Barbeque.” I make you a great feast: lechon, Filipino bbq, tilapia and squid roasted over charcoal, chicken inasal, the works.
You take one bite and say, “Doesn’t taste like burger.”
“But…”
“Nah, it’s not you. I just prefer burger.”
—
The world isn’t fair. I learned that a long time ago.
I grew up poor, in a society choked by lack of opportunities; no matter how hard you worked or how intelligent you were, you couldn’t move up. Mistakes meant death, and there was nowhere to turn to, no one who could help you.
I was nine years old, crossing the twelve or so lanes of Edsa in the morning under the sweltering heat to get to school. “Why do I have to?” “Because we can’t afford a car.” After a long, hot day, I would look forward to the urine, sewage-tinged street outside my home, because I could at least curl up on the cold floor with a book. My parents were both highly-educated engineers.
I later learned that some things are unavoidable because of the way certain societies are built. The Philippines was colonized for so many hundreds of years, and so didn’t have the systems in place to truly govern themselves even a hundred years after we won freedom. Even down to the languages we speak is tainted, our very histories erased. Later, in North America, I came at odds with people who continued to call the Philippine-American war an “insurgency.”
“Your people rebelled! We helped you out!”
“You betrayed us, so we fought back!”
We’re always fighting.
—
It’s just fantasy. It’s just entertainment.
Except it’s not. My stories are the stories of my people because I cannot erase my background, I can’t erase the things that are important to me or the feelings I have to express, and I can only write what I know. I do try to make them entertaining along the way. In fact, at no time do you ever have to stop and think about the bigger picture. There’s plot, there’s characters and relationships and interactions, there’s fun things and stabby things and heart breakings.
But if you dismiss the very idea that I may have written something more than what’s on the surface…
I don’t know. Somewhere, I get a little mad. Maybe more than a little.
“Why don’t you write in your own language, for the people who want to hear those kinds of stories?” “Because colonization; we weren’t raised to be fluent in our own language, because ang wika ng banyaga ay mas mahalaga.”
“Obviously, we’re the majority, so we only want to see the stories made by people like us. Or maybe diverse stories filtered through the lens of people like us so we don’t have to deal with your strange ideas and your strange ways.” “What about people like me?”
—
It’s complicated. Complicated enough that I could spend a lifetime going through those nuances and trying to express them in the background of my stories and I don’t think I’ll even be able to crack the depths. It’s a puzzle I turn again over and over in my mind, and then I write about it imperfectly, and then I try to do it all over again. Most days I’m not even sure what I’m doing or why.
But if you say it doesn’t MATTER to you…
I hear, “Maybe you don’t belong here.”
I hear, “Fuck your gourmet feast. I just want a burger.”
And it breaks my heart, just a little.
