I said last year that Outlaw Mage was dedicated to my daughters. In some ways, it is a love letter to them. A way for me to put down what I’ve had to learn in the last 24 years trying to navigate the Western World, which was so, so hard that I’ve lost count of the number of times I tried to give up. (Some days, I still want to).
So perhaps a better way to put this is as a series of apologies to them. This is the first of those letters.
I’m Sorry for the Racists
I truly thought, once upon a time, that my daughter will never have to deal with the stuff I had to.
My first daughter was born on the year of the Earth Ox, and also incidentally a Scorpio; that already should tell you a lot about her. A social butterfly who made friends with everyone she met, even as a toddler, she would insert herself into any conversation, and was so full of courage she would toddle through a pack of giant dogs without fear.
In contrast, I’m a giant coward. I remember this mechanized gorilla in the mall that terrified me so much, I despised going to that floor. I was scared of the unhoused folks in the streets, of dead cats, of random sounds on our rooftop. The world in which my daughter grew up in looked nothing like world I grew up in, and somehow, I foolishly attributed the struggles I had growing up in the western world to how much everything filled me with anxiety. People weren’t REALLY trying to be racist, they were just being rude, impolite, and draconian about stupid bullshit because I was quiet and shy and didn’t look them in the eye.
And then, sometime during the pandemic, my kid told me that the boys in Scouts have been telling her racist things for years, and I thought, fuck. Fuck. FUCK.
Apparently, in one instance, she was sailing with the boy around the bay during a wonderful afternoon, which I remember being so beautiful. I had no idea during that same instance, my daughter was learning terrible things about the world. Apparently, the boy asked her a series of increasingly difficult math questions and when she couldn’t answer, mocked her and asked “But I thought Asians were smart.” He made other remarks. All in front of an adult, who didn’t say anything.
My daughter internalized the incident and thought she’d done something to make the boy act that way. So she kept it from me for a very long time.
In 2020, more racists came out of the woodwork, and my daughter and I finally got to talking about everything. This, of course, didn’t mean the challenges stopped. More bullies appeared–children who would say Asian languages are the same thing, who would mock her food and mock her name (which isn’t even Asian). Some of the comments were brushed off by others as “middle school humour.” With one child, my daughter was given the choice of having to ignore him because he wasn’t kicked out of the group, or lose her friends in the process. I told her we would support whatever she wanted to do. She chose the former, because she is braver than I could ever comprehend.
Dear love, I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I can’t make the world a better place, that it is full of well-meaning but complacent people at best, full of ignorant people at least, and full of terrible people with terrible intentions at worst. I’m sorry that I didn’t equip you with enough tools to fend these incidents off before I knew what was happening–we were just trying to belong, I was just trying to make things ‘normal,’ not realizing ‘normal’ would hurt. Our immigrant parents didn’t know what challenges we were going to face when we got to this country, and in the Filipino community in particular, racism and white supremacy aren’t really things we talked about. I learned these things the same time as you did. For the longest time, I, like many people in our culture, wanted to believe that everyone was equal and it was just a matter of learning to get along, even if that had never worked for me.
I was wrong. I’m sorry. The only thing I can do now is to try and find safer spaces for you, and to teach you the language that would explain things so that you will never again think you had anything to do with people who treat you this way. You are beautiful and you are enough, and I hope deep inside you learn how to be a proud Filipino and wield it so that nothing they say can ever make you want to be anything but yourself.
