Spring Break
It doesn't really matter
what we are - sometimes
Kevin Rand
Issue date: 5/5/08 Section: Opinion
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I was in sixth grade. This was Laurelwood Elementary School in Salinas.
I had these friends - Barry, Clarence and Richard.
We had a bigger circle of friends outside of us, but we were all Filipino, and Filipinos often stuck together.
We knew something about each other because of our ethnicity. We knew the accents our relatives carried. We knew about break dancing and Pumas and Nike Airs. We knew to take them off when we went inside each others' houses.
We were Flips - Pinoy - we were brown and proud.
We listened to hip-hop. We ate rice. We watched black movies, like "Juice," "Boyz n the Hood," "Menace II Society" and "New Jack City." That's how we were, Filipinos from Salinas.
I always carried something with me though, and it showed. My eyes were rounder. My nose was bigger. I didn't eat rice with every meal, even though I said I did, because I wanted to be just as Filipino as they were.
My last name was Rand. It wasn't Fernando or Salviejo, Decusan, DeGuzman, Cruz or Lucina. And I had grown up in New York, not California, where the largest concentration of Filipino-Americans lived.
I worked hard to be in the loop. I was the best at impersonating that fresh-off-the-boat, FOB accent. Barry, Clarence and Richard loved it when I did it, when I impersonated our Filipino grandfathers, who all sounded exactly the same when they were angry: "Putang ina mo. You are olways restless, hah. You are making trobbles, olways making kalat. Jast seet. Always hob to be doing someting."
I forced myself to fit in. I was in, sure, but I had a complex. It wasn't my dad's fault he was white. But that made me different.
It made my house different. It made me a Mestizo, "mixed."
Mestizos, actually, were gems in the Philippines. They had that lighter skin that was made for TV; that lighter, richer skin that made you less indigenous.
"You should go to da Pilippines, Kebin, to be an actor," I would hear from one of my mom's relatives. "Dey like Mestizos. You will not hob to work. Dey will do your londry and cook por you."
So I guess I learned to like it a little bit. I liked walking into the Filipino parties. My mom would introduce me to all the aunties, and my head would immediately get big.
"Oh, he's so guapo (handsome). Talagang Mestizo. Talagang guapo."
So screw you, Clarence. You're not Mestizo, Barry. You're not guapo.
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