The Melting Pot in My Hair

My face says, East Asian.

Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Smaller, almond eyes, yellow-toned skin.

My accent says otherwise, Latinx. Call me Mexican, Puerto Rican, Ecuadorian. Strong vowels, emphasis on my r’s. My identity is an enigma, questioned by the average person.

It came to a point that these days, while I’m in Syracuse, I throw the word Filipina in the first sentence of my introduction. You can see the recognition click in someone’s eyes, why I’m so hard to label. While I’m in Manila, most people assume I’m Filipina, unless they’re expats.

Here, in the land of many identities and cultures, the line blurs. I’m light-skinned for a Filipina, but not as light-skinned as most Asians. While my accent sounds familiar to some, I confuse people when I tell them I’m not fluent in Spanish. I fall in the gray area.

I used to dislike the gray area that I belonged to. People have a strange tendency to poke fun and praise my looks in the same breath, and it killed me to not fully relate to the Filipino image.

This is even as I keep my light-skinned privilege in mind. My whole life, I’ve noticed that people treated me with more respect than they would a darker-skinned Filipino. In my experience, I see that colorism is rampant in Filipino (and by extension, Asian) society, given the 300 years of colonialism and the strong American culture influence. It’s evident in the way people associate wealth with the lightness of my skin. There used to be a little nickname for me at an office I worked at before I moved to Syracuse. They called me, Hollywood girl, because I looked like ‘I belonged on the red carpet.’ They assumed to I was rich enough to have light skin and to belong with celebrities.

Or my hair. I love my hair, the way it curls around my shoulders and rests in a messy veil around my face. I call it a melting pot because it has a few different colors - mostly light brown and red and flecks of gold. As a child, strangers would reach and hold hair, as if it were forbidden fruit they could touch. Mestiza, they murmur, parang hindi ka Pinoy.

“It’s almost like you’re not Filipino.”

These comments had good intentions, but it was a painful insult for brown skin disguised as praise for Eurasian features. In saying I didn’t look Filipino because I was light-skinned, and by calling me a “Hollywood girl”, it seemed I was better off than most people. By treating my hair with a strange fascination, and labeling it, “not Filipino”, it distinguished me from the rest. And for that reason, I felt less Filipino no matter how proud I was of my heritage and my nationality. It was heartbreaking that people associated me with the United States by association of Hollywood, a country that seemed so distant to me, rather than the country I lived in my whole life.

Not anymore. I’ve slowly grown to embrace the ambiguity of my appearance. The world is becoming more global by the day, and I have met people of so many interesting backgrounds here in college. People who come from multicultural backgrounds, whose identities are complex and unique. People who have travelled and lived in different parts of the world, who aren’t sure what to say when they’re asked, where do you come from? I have learned that there are many ways to look Filipino, and many ways to be proud of it. Some of the ways are my love for Original Pinoy Music, my constant craving for Hello Panda and Pancit Canton, my insistence on bringing my religious pendant with me wherever I go. If people confuse who I am, then I accept it, correct them, and move on. Rather than getting upset, I will show them my heritage, and let them see how proud I am of it. Show, not tell, and not only in your face, but in your actions.

It’s really true, that when you show your love and pride for your culture, it shows. I’ll never forget how one of my Filipino friends here at Syracuse once saw me singing along to an old song from my childhood before she said, “You’re probably one of the most Filipina people I know.”

As I continue to battle the difficulty of my identity, the world is becoming a melting pot by the day. Even in just my hair, there are a lot of identities one can find in there. But I identify as completely Filipino, with no other country or nationality I can call mine. One day, I looked into the mirror and realized the girl looking back will carry her Filipino identity in her blood for the rest of her life. I will be carrying this melting pot of stories, of physical features, of dreams, in my skin. And to me, that’s all what really matters in the end.