Being an Immigrant

In regular NPR fashion, WNYC has been doing this Becoming an American series every morning ramping up to Thanksgiving. Obviously, it prompts me to think of the choices I've made to become a citizen in more ways than on paper. This one Indian girl with a very Indian name talked about how even now as an adult she still feels only half-American, despite spending most of her life here. Compounding this with Megan's post on creating a new kind of citizenship, and going to Grace's Korean home for Thanksgiving, serving with a large contingent of Asians at the Bowery Mission on Monday, I've thought about my pinoy-ness at odd moments in recent days.

It's weird to become self-aware of the fact that I am a Pilipina, in my current way of life, it's a bit of a reach. But what's cool about being in the working world, is I really see a lot of normal wage-earning Pilipinos running around, speaking my language, cracking jokes they think no one will hear. It reminds me so much of my parents, and how they're exactly like these folks, most especially since I'm involved in work that my dad precisely used to do. I look at the IT project leader sometimes with his thick accent (not pinoy btw) and I think of my father. This one Finance pinoy manager has a distinctly nasal quality to his English, and I caught up with him on the train once. Turns out, he lives on Long Island, his daughter is a Senior at NYU and will be going to law school. We also talked about Stern summer interns he had hired, one of which was really bratty. We talked about where I was from in the Philippines and the major development that's happened around my childhood home and subdivision, we talked about development around my old Catholic school, what it was like the last time we were there, the new mall, the infamous LRT.

Something the NPR series pointed out for one guy was the fact that most people will assume you're American. That is, if you are assimilated enough. It was weird when I became a citizen and was telling people about it, most people were surprised. Most people don't know how hard and costly it is to become one either. But because I really do have minimal, what I affectionately call, "immigrant moments" where diction or lack of knowledge betray, I seem like a perfectly normal young American. And indeed, I am. Thus, another point of tension part of the wider one of justification and sanctification.

It was hard growing up in Arizona. I had to go through a lot of misunderstandings about my identity. There was this one kid, Ryan (from Alaska..go figure), who seriously, seriously thought I was making up my ethnicity, even after I showed him a 25 centavo coin (probably didn't help that it was gold and has a butterfly on it, making it look token-ish)...until he met my mom (he lived around the block from me) then he was very, very nice to me. His father was an A/C repairer and fixed our central air. A lot of people thought I was Native American, or Mexican, or Hawaiian...rarely would they figure it right the first time. Then there's my blessed name, and people would think I was Greek. My parents seemed like anti-social people and do not, to this day, make friends with my friends' parents. My father is going to go into high stress, if he ever has to meet Ben's parents. It sucks to think I caught a lot of my shy tendencies from this. I'm too different, I'm too complicated, we have so little in common, better not try to bridge the gap. I have really cramped small talk skills. I didn't have a lot of examples of people standing around talking about nothing while their children play. I can't help but make small talk something more serious, otherwise I want to kill myself out of the madness.

Really though, my parents are great people. My father is a hilarious, jolly human being with a amazing servant's heart. My mother is a super empathetic, encouraging person. They both talk endlessly about politics, art, travel, business, and all implications of life. They're intelligent people. But place them in Arizona and I don't think my father specifically has found much community, even after 13 years. He really only talks to the dog, my mother, and sometimes his children. He writes these amazing emails about food, filled with rich history. He really is a great poet, his Tagalog is the deepest I'd ever dare read (he won many speech writing awards in school).

I know this has turned into a I love my parents fest, but really I'm just trying to make a case that being an immigrant makes things complicated, even for fluent English speakers. Arizona was not only so different from the Philippines, but it was a different America from the movies we saw. There are no brownstones, green lawns (except if you specifically look for it), brick houses with long driveways just white stucco, pink buildings, and red mountain landscapes. Nothing was familiar. I found myself constantly grasping for something that I could feel was mine and intimately connected to my identity. Well, duh, of course I know this happens to everyone, as we don't belong in this broken world. I'm just trying to express it in my terms as an immigrant.

Really, this is a process of not forgetting. I need to remember what it was like when I felt so left out of the world, that I thought I and/or God made a mistake. I spent a lot of time waiting for life to be over. I need to remember that Jesus walked the earth feeling exactly what I felt yet even more so, and died for the world anyway and was ultimately on the cross left out of the only community we really want to be in, the Father's. He not only welcomes, He knows. So that whenever I feel distant from things that I once felt intimate with (whether people, hobbies, or culture), whenever I feel like I'm being fake and it's obstructing my connection with people, I know that these are mere shadows of the deepest intimacy I've ever had and that is with my God. It is impossible for me to fake who I am with Him. It's ok for me to be confused about who I am too, since I don't determine that, He does. I always belong anyway, because I belong to Him.