As an eighteen year old climbs up on top of a telephone box, a couple on their Saturday errands prepare to tell him to get down. By the time they have cantered over he is back on the ground, thanks to a reverse back-flip. This is greeted with applause from his friends and whitened knuckles [...]
The question, “Have you been back?” used to bother me much more than the question “Where do you come from?” because it stabbed me with a pang of guilt. It was this self-created guilt that I had not yet made the pilgrimage that so many of my fellow Filipino-Americans had already made, some multiple times. While most Filipinos do emigrate to the United States to create a better life for themselves economically, many of them visit frequently and end up retiring back in the Philippines since the cost of living there is comparatively low. I heard “Have you been back?”so much, I was tempted at times just to lie, to claim that I had been there so I could get out of having to explain why I hadn’t made the journey. Eventually the question only strengthened my resolve. I knew I would go to the Philippines at least once in my life before I became too old to appreciate its natural wonders and to see the places where my parents were raised before deciding to embark on the American dream they bequeathed to my sister, brother and me.
Nona. To a platoon of us Americanized cousins that included my little brother and me our maternal grandmother was always Nona. “Nona” is not a common term for grandmother in Latino families. Abuelita is much more widely used, especially in Mexican families, but my grandmother trained a whole wave of her first- and second-generation immigrant grandchildren to use “Nona.” You see, we “americanos,” as Nona described those of our generation (even if technically we had been born in our original home country of Peru), spoke utterly broken Spanish.
Two hundred years ago, a young Austrian medical student found himself with the same question. He was struggling in school, and he was jealous of those among his class who so easily excelled at memorization. In interminable lectures he watched these men trying to figure out what made them different from him, why it was so easy for them to remember and so difficult for him.
It was the eyes, he decided. They all seemed to have larger eyes.
The Red Shirt character is a colloquial reference among fans of a 1960s era television science fiction program. In Star Trek’s opening scenes, two or three of the lead characters (often wearing yellow or blue uniforms) would land on a planet, accompanied by one or two characters wearing red uniforms. Within the first ten minutes of the show, generally someone wearing a red uniform died, and her or his demise introduced the central conflict of the episode’s plot. So, at the beginning of the episode, if someone appeared in a red shirt, you knew that this person, no matter how likeable, competent, or regardless of how much this character connected for the moment with the yellow and blue uniformed lead characters (often the stars of the show), this Red Shirt was toast.
June 12, 2009 was the date of the latest Iranian political crisis, a coup. This coup was special, however. Not only was this coup a military act to seize power, but it is also an act that completes the Iranian revolution in a very ironic fashion. The last remains of those who began the revolution and developed its ideology have been wiped out. Thirty years after the revolution’s victory, the revolution finally ate all its first children.
When I was a small child relishing the miracle of my family’s brand new VCR, we would all pile into the car and go to the video rental place. I learned the pleasures of browsing the shelves, looking at titles and poster art, debating whether we should get a comedy or action movie based on what we felt like watching at the time. It was a social activity. As an adult, I still enjoyed roaming from one genre section to another thinking about what kind of mood I was in and whether it was more conducive to an indie thriller that I’d heard was really good or the romantic comedy that I already knew I liked. Or maybe something else entirely would catch my eye and be the perfect choice even though I hadn’t known it existed before. Or feeling indecisive, I could just ask the film geek at the desk for a recommendation. The options were endless.
In the most populous state of California, Filipinos have enough of a population presence that they are counted as a separate ethnic demographic from Asians and Pacific Islanders since the 2000 census. Yet Filipino cultural visibility and societal participation remains frustratingly minimal given the lack of Filipino restaurants, lack of Filipino celebrities and politicians, and minimal knowledge of crucial historical relationships between the Philippines and the United States. Filipinos truly are what the Wikipedia entry on “Filipino American” labels as the “invisible minority.”
Imagine my surprise when the movie turned out to be brilliant. Brilliant, note—not enjoyable. The cinematography was fantastic and every one of us was retrospectively amazed that the whole thing was accomplished using a mere five actors. So yes, an incredible piece of work. The technical coups, however, were only icing on the cake. Its true distinction lay in its patent ability to discomfort the viewer in ways that I no longer thought possible, in a show-all, tell-all world.
Every year, on the fourteenth day of February, one is bound to hear numerous complaints from just about everyone (besides florists) about how Valentine’s Day is mere commercialism. Whichever side they come from – and whichever variation of the arguments they choose – it all boils down to this: they are decrying the fact that relationships have moved from the private to the public sphere. The underlying logic is that love is between two persons only and should remain between them; love should remain an unmediated experience between the two persons in that relationship.
