$2.99 Buddha
Moving to Chicago, a place with a much more dense Filipino population, I've been relieved of feeling like an island. However, I have also struck a nerve I'm now forced to actualize.
Growing up, my family's beloved living room shelf display, a collection of statuette jade buddhas, are approximately $2.99/each at the Chinatown gift shop, neighboring other other plastic, anime paraphernalia on the store shelf. The Filo-Hawaiian place sells musubi for $5 a pop while the white cashier explains to a white customer about the owners backstory, similar to a Smithsonian piece encased in resin. Another café is ☆Filo-owned☆ and their lattés are $12 a cup, while several non-filo patrons take their work calls as Kanye blasts on the speakers. That other filo restaurant calls itself "elevated" and serves what mom used to make for $24. Don't worry though, the excess of Tiktok memes boiling down my identity to fatphobic lolas and irony poison are free!
Do you feel the pinoy pride yet?
I asked my spouse how it'd feel if our friends theoretically pointed him to every black-owned business in the locale. He tells me it would be pretty annoying, but perhaps my own annoyance has rubbed off him.
Dollar, dollar, dollar.
I'm not annoyed with the gesture that my friends have thought about me in my search for recognition, but I am bothered as to why is it always through the lens of superfluous consumption? I grow hungry because I crave to validate my self-hood outside of my wallet's potential. As I watch another white urbanist devour my food, like spoils from cultural conquest, I feel my grasp of ego dwindle.
Of course I want my brethren to Get Their Bag, but what are we beyond that? As mentioned in bell hooks' Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, am I just a spice to flavor the white experience? The people ultimately pushing cash flow into these establishments the most? It is where the money is at, after all.
However even then, I fear they only love us at our most palatable (aka within the White Comfort Zone). They'll eat me with a pleasantly sweet ube flavored latte, but wrinkle their nose from a whiff of fish sauce in my sour sinigang. You'll meet me at my fruity islander whimsy, but not as a survivor of colonized trauma. We've dwelled in our pride to use humor and smile in the face of adversity, when anger and sadness is also a righteous tool to express where it hurts.
Late February, I attended a fully Filipino run drag show which funded victims of the recent typhoons that hit the islands. This was also in overlap with the People's Power Revolution anniversary, and was well integrated into the heart of the show (educationally but also symbolically). It was a rally cry to fuel our fighting spirit, as well as letters of love from what the queens and kings of the drag family had to offer.
I vividly remember the ending where the entire drag family lined up onstage, as if their tita was ushering them with crusty phone camera in hand. I saw drag king and queen arm in arm, crying into the nooks of each others necks. Proud of their accomplishments that night, and that they could stand together at all.
I would rather not regurgitate my experience into a flattened text spectacle, for it was a practically religious experience with an impact I cannot adequately express. The solution is simple, I must live it as much as I can.
Could some brown tranny's life shine so brightly? Yes, and it's divine!
Oh, I also started my first prescription of lexapro recently. That's cool.