When I was little and wanted to be a writer when I grew up, I didn’t think, “Gee, I want to be a Filipino American writer when I grow up.” I just wanted to be a Writer. No additional adjectives, no ethnic tags at all. Just Writer, with a capital W. Being a Filipina didn’t seem interesting because I was born into it, just like some are born with blue eyes or wide noses. When I thought about writing, I thought about exciting things that people always seemed to write about, like traveling or solving exotic mysteries or discovering great adventures or fighting bad guys, always in the Big City or the High Mountains, like New York or the Alps. Something Big and Universal, that all people could get excited about, not something Small and Particular, that a non-Filipino would say, “What’s a Filipino, where’s Guam, and why should I care?”
I didn’t mean to write in a collection of stories about an eight-year old Filipino American girl living in Guam in the early 1980s; the subject seemed too personal, too particular. Up to that point (it was 1996), I mostly wrote fantasy stories or humorous, children’s stories with a fantasy, sci-fi bent because that was what I mostly liked to read: J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Douglas Adams, et cetera. (Granted, none of them were publishable because they were always too quirky and strange – or at least publishers seemed to find them too quirky and strange for their editorial standards.) My college education was in the proverbial Great Books curriculum – lots of reading and writing about Dead White Men with Pretty Good Ideas. I never even heard of Maxine Hong Kingston until grad school, which leads me to how I ended up writing this quasi-memoiresque book you’re reading now.
As I mentioned before, I didn’t mean to write it. In grad school, I took a couple of creative writing classes, one of which was a special topic one in which I could come up with my own curriculum. I proposed to explore the intersection of “Faerie” (the fantastic, magical realm) and the Real World in a group of short stories. Again, there’s that fantasy/sci-fi interest that I’ve always had, and I intended to delve into the genre with serious, graduate school gusto. But, of course, life has a way of turning well-thought out intentions upside-down. I was so busy working as a grad assistant that I didn’t write the first story of the class until the day it was due. It was morning; the ten-page story was due at five P.M. For the life of me, I couldn’t think of anything fantastic, fairy, or magical. Finally desperate to come up with something, I ended up writing this little story about a Filipino kid hating piano lessons. Since I started piano lessons when I was living in Guam, I set the story in Guam. And since I was living in Guam because my father was stationed in Guam, I made the kid a military brat. I whipped out the ten pages, barely checked for spelling mistakes (I didn’t have a computer at the time, only an over-glorified electronic typewriter), turned it in my professor’s box, and avoided my professor out of mild, academic paranoia.
When my professor, Dr. Smith, finally found me, he said that he wanted more stories like the one I had submitted, and that these stories could be shaped into a creative Master’s thesis. I was stunned. Yes, I know the old adage: “Write what you know.” But I really wasn’t all that self-conscious about being Filipino. (Okay, maybe I was a little: When I was younger and more foolish, I wished that I could either be white with blue eyes and blond hair or Japanese with straight, long hair and creamy skin because I knew two girls – one white, the other Japanese -- whom I thought looked prettier than I was.) Nevertheless, I thought my knowledge about being Filipino was sketchy at best. Sure, my parents were bona fide Filipino: They were born and raised in the Philippines, they spoke Ilocano (a Filipino dialect), and thus they participated in Filipino culture. But me? I was born in Taiwan, raised in Taiwan, Illinois, South Carolina, Guam, and Texas, spoke only English in the flat, Midwest accent that demonstrated that I was American, and participated in all things American, especially US higher education and Tex-Mex food. I was afraid that what I would write would be wrong, would be false, about the Filipino American experience. After all, I don’t live in Manila, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago. I don’t speak the language. I think Filipino music sounds kind of funny, and I have no overwhelming passion to visit the Philippines every year because of family. My immediate family lives in Texas, and I hadn’t seen the folks in the Philippines or in California since I was a kid. There is no cohesive “Chinatown” or “Asia Town” or “Little Filipino” in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (where I have lived since I was ten); there are Filipinos here, but we are spread out throughout the Metroplex, like isolated pigeons startled by an incoming jeepney. And I have read very little in literature about those Filipinos and their families who became American citizens through the US military; it’s as if the role of the US military for the “baby boomer” generation of Filipinos (my parents’ generation) is an anomaly in the overall history of Filipinos in America , but that’s the only bit of Filipino American history that I know well.
I can write what I know, but would anybody really be interested in what I wrote? More importantly, would anybody Filipino be able to read what I wrote and say, “Yes, that’s what it means to be Filipino, too” or would he or she say, “No, that’s not Filipino at all, where does she get off thinking this is Filipino?”
The latter concern became more important as I wrote – very reluctantly -- these stories for my thesis. I kept asking myself, “What in me is Filipino? What’s Filipino?” My parents weren’t into story-telling as I was growing up; they were too pragmatic, too concerned with the day to day, what with my mother working twelve hour shifts in a hospital and my father overseas. Also, since I couldn’t understand the language, I was cut off from what they were saying to each other when they spoke Ilocano and was cut off from what other Filipinos were saying to each other when my family attended Filipino parties. (At the time, I was too busy trying to fit in with my white friends to care.) As a result, I didn’t have many stories about my parents’ childhood in the Philippines; they seldom volunteered, and I didn’t think to ask. Even faced with the task of writing a whole Master’s thesis of these Filipino American stories, I still didn’t ask them about their childhood, perhaps because I didn’t know how to ask but mostly because I was exploring what it meant to be Filipino American according to me, not according to my parents. This thrashing about in the dark for cultural identity I realized was a part of what I thought was Filipino American in me, and it was with this approach that I wrote these stories.
Hence, the title of my Master’s thesis and, consequently, this collection, Bahala Na. When I told my mother the title, she looked at me strangely and asked, “Why’d you name it that?” It’s roughly translated as “What will be, will be” or “Come what may.” It literally means “Choice already!” implying indecision over uncertainties in life and thus leaving the choice up to Bathala, or God. Perhaps the phrase has a bad connotation, as seen in my mom’s reaction to the title. But I think it’s appropriate to what I was going through while writing these stories, overcoming writer’s block, overcoming my tendency to procrastinate, and shaping my amorphous childhood memories through the lens of my older, more experienced eyes.
That’s why even though the point of view in the stories is ostensibly of an eight-year old girl, the tone of this girl’s thoughts is of an adult’s, i.e., mine. In order to explain some of the adult tone of the stories, I’ve included a section before each story, setting up the story and recounting what was going on when I wrote it; this is an addition to my original thesis, and the addition breaks up the collection into pairs: the section before the story about Ellen, the little girl, and then the story itself. These sections are not so much stories of the present but musings and anecdotes, sought from my memories and historical and literary sources, to put together the puzzle of the Filipino American identity, of my identity. The stories after the sections are loosely based upon childhood memories.
But even though the seed of these stories are my childhood memories, these events did not actually happen to me, although it could have happened. These stories are not autobiographical, although it reads like a memoir. Dr. Smith referred to my style as a mix of fact and fiction in a manner that you can’t distinguish fact from fiction. I suppose including these pre-story sections will emphasize the weird fact/fiction hybrid that is this book. Nevertheless, whether factual or fictional, I only hope that what I wrote is true.
© 2000 Rufel F. Ramos