The bitter aftertaste of colonialism

Two Sundays ago, I came across a personal essay written by a 30-year-old Dominican-American man, published at the New York Times. Christopher Rivas remembers as a child how his father took great care of his appearance, so much so that he spent more time getting ready to go out than his mother or his sisters did.

His father explained, Rivas wrote, “that as a young man in the Dominican Republic, you had to work so hard, perfecting yourself, preparing your mask, so that when a young European or American woman came through, she might choose you, might take you home with her, like that was your only way out.”

It was a belief, Rivas says, perpetrated by the movies and TV, that a black or brown man gets made better by being with a white woman. It was, he adds, a whole system coded within him.

The Dominican Republic was a colony of Spain for over three hundred years.

This story strongly reminded me of the Philippines, another country which had been under the Spanish rule for three hundred years. Before the Spaniards came, the nation we now call Philippines was actually a group of 7,100 disparate islands, every island had its own ruler, language, religion and culture. They were fighters too. The first explorer Spain sent to the Philippines, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed by a ‘Filipino’ warrior as soon as he stepped on the beach.

In response, Spain sent religious missionaries instead. They conquered the people through religion, planted in their hearts the fear of God, and made them feel guilty, unworthy and inferior. Cultures disappeared, religions died, identities got blurred, and languages evolved. Those who resisted were thrown into prison, killed or deported. At some point in those days, they declared those islands one country under Spain and called it Philippines in honour of their king at the time. Afterwards, when the Filipinos decided they preferred freedom, the Americans came to supposedly help deliver us from that nightmare, only to replace Spain’s with their own hidden agenda. This is my simplified version of my country’s history. 

But more than anything else, all colonizers left a toxic cultural spoor that the colonized then absorbed and accepted as their own. In the Philippines, how often has one heard an innocent remark about someone else who could be prettier, if only they had a fairer skin, or a more western nose? Or how proud or how superior someone feels for carrying a colonizer’s genes? As if being brown, short and flat-nosed is being second rate? Or how a lot of people think we can only get our act together when run by another country? Those are conditioned attitude, formed through centuries of colonization.

Dependency, feelings of inferiority, inadequacy, and resentment are common by-products of being under another country’s power for decades. Filipinos are not alone. All over the world, I have no doubt that thousands of peoples feel this way. England was in India for two hundred years. In fact, a recent research shows that historically, only 22 countries have never been colonized or attacked by England at some point in the past.

Spain, also known as the Catholic Monarchy, was considered one of the largest empires in history. Spain controlled vast overseas territories that included places in the Americas, in Europe, Africa and Asia for over four hundred years.

Not to mention other countries like Portugal, France and the Netherlands, which left their own colonial mark upon countless places in the world.

More recent, however, more palpable and currently, still being felt in real time are the after-effects of colonization on the First Nations peoples of North America. In Canada, before the Europeans came, First Nations communities were self-sufficient, healthy, and confident of their special place in the world. They have their own form of government, languages and cultures. Their only fault was that they were too hospitable.

Colonizers took their lands away, forced them to live in reservations, destroyed their cultures, and sent their children to residential schools, where they were then converted to Christianity, and many of them sexually or physically abused. This is common knowledge. News media has detailed these abuses and the resulting court cases in the recent years.

I’ve been wondering about what benefits, if any, have the colonized gotten out of all these? I don’t know. Let me do some more research and I will get back to you.

(Previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, April 15th, 2019 issue)

THE OCEAN BETWEEN US, a film by Crisanta Sampang

Motherhood for Dollars

“They come from alien cultures to fill our culture’s most important job, raising our kids. We’ve decided to let other women take care of our children so that we can give them a better life. It’s an excruciating decision, as the nannies know better than anyone…” Susan Cheever, Global Woman

It’s beginning of September at Vancouver’s Jericho Park. Today, as I sit alone on a knoll absorbing the sunshine, the oaks and the maple trees around me are gently shedding their leaves. To my right lies the duck pond surrounded by weeping willows. To the east, tall evergreens conceal the apartment buildings that line Fourth Avenue. To the north, the undulating peaks of Cypress Mountain guard the beaches of English Bay. Yet I didn’t see the magic nor feel the peace these surroundings offer. Instead I peer beyond the bay towards the Pacific Ocean. As if I could discern across this ocean the two adjacent houses in Antipolo, a town in central Philippines --- where two of my daughters live with their families. This evening, I watch the bay and I think about them. It’s early morning back there. They should be waking up soon.

Jericho Park represents the North American edge of my fractured life, the cliff upon where I could look down at the deep, invisible divide that keeps my dreams forever incomplete. Season after season, this park never fails to remind me where my brain says I should be as opposed to where my heart wants to be, and that getting them in the same place remains to be done.

But I’ll see my girls tonight when I get home. We’ll exchange news, trade stories, laugh together and have a good look at each other, then blow kisses and say, “Bye-bye. Lub you. Mwah-mwah!”  Afterwards I’ll go to bed happy, back to my own life. And they back to theirs. We do this regularly through our web cams. I’ll have to wait for a few more months though, before I can really kiss them and hold them in my arms, and distribute the presents I’ve been hoarding in my Balikbayan Box.  My life revolves around these homecomings.

I’m here and they’re over there because years ago I made a tough choice.  A single parent at the age of 26, I left my three daughters in my mother’s care to look after other women’s children in Singapore, then four years later, in Vancouver, Canada.  In return, my children went to a good school, they had generous allowances, mobile phones, and all the brand-name denim jeans my money could buy. They had everything, except my presence.

I remember the first time I left for Vancouver. My whole family went to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to see me off. We walked together to the departure gates, as far as the security personnel would let us. When it was time to go, I kissed each of my three daughters goodbye, then walked towards the doors. I heard Maricel start to cry. Maricar and Catherine joined in. My heart was pounding. I walked away, faster and faster, without once looking back. Because I knew that if I stopped, if I looked back --- like Orpheus at the gates of Hell --- my dreams would disappear. But I had to leave. My plans for them were only half-achieved.

While working in another country, I think about them every day. I silently tallied in my calendar all the birthdays and hugs and kissies that I missed. I made sure that I talk to my daughters by phone at least once a week, to send their allowances twice a month, and go home to them every year. I reminded them every chance I got that I was here and they were there because I wanted them to have the things I never had as a child. I told them that going away was very hard for me, but sacrifice was required of us to break away from poverty and lack of education, circumstances that most of the people from my farming village in the Philippines will spend the rest of their lives in.

Until today, I never realized I’ve been living my life in smug delusion. Although I had been physically absent from my kids’ daily lives, I’d believed I’ve raised them right, and expressed my motherly love in a variety of personal and material ways. I thought I’ve learned from, and done better than other mothers like myself.

“Not so,” writes Catherine, my youngest, about the past: “When I was a kid, I’d wanted to tell you, ‘I don’t care about the allowances and the toys. I want you to stay home with me and my sisters. You’ve always said you loved us. Do you think I believe you?’ But I never expressed these things because I was afraid that if I did, you would never come back.”

“Not so,” says Maricar, my middle child, of the present: “Me, I would never leave my kids to work in a foreign country. I can’t imagine my child crying alone in the middle of the night because I’m not there. I know what it feels like.”

Because I waited too long, I failed to bring my daughters to Vancouver. Maricar and Catherine both dropped out of college and got married in their teenage years. Only Maricel, my first-born, has a university degree. All three of them have their own families now and are living away from me. Catherine lives in Washington, USA, with her American husband. Yet, despite these kids having grown up and chosen their own paths, they remain little children in my mind. I stay trapped in a time warp, doomed to be fighting my guilt and trying to make up for the years I’ve lost: visiting yearly, bringing them chocolates, toothpaste, toothbrushes, and umbrellas; treating them to mall shopping trips… cooking with them, snuggling with them and telling them stories; treating them like little kids. And whenever I leave to pursue my own life once again, we’re back to replaying the same old good-bye drama at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport, only this time my daughters are accompanied by their own children and husbands.

Until perhaps, I promised myself, I’ve managed to bring all of them to Vancouver. Next time I leave them at the airport gates, I will look back and wave, because my dream has changed.

 

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

It’s all fun and games at the Foreign Workers Cooperative Launch

Languages by the pound

Back in the olden days, on the very first Sunday of my first nannying job in Singapore, my lady employer wondered whether I wanted to go to church with them.

“Do you want to follow us to church?” she asked.

“Can’t I just ride with you guys? I asked back.

“That’s what I mean,” she told me.

My first lesson on Singaporean English: when you ‘follow’ someone in Singapore, you are actually going together to the same destination; you aren’t walking or travelling in another vehicle closely behind them. Singaporeans, like other English-speaking peoples, have created their own version of English, called Singlish, a language that also incorporated words from Malay, Tamil and various Chinese dialects. I soon learned to listen and speak the same way to get my point across.

When I first arrived in Canada, I wasn’t too surprised to find that the same linguistic challenges applied. Nothing ever grows and mutates faster than a language, a many-headed entity that changes form and shifts shape to accommodate the changing times. It brings to my mind the vision of an avalanche rushing down a mountainside, picking up and swallowing all sorts of debris along its way, landing at the bottom much bigger and less purer than when it started going down the slope. The only difference is that a language just keeps on going.

I can speak for English and Tagalog, the two languages I know best. Growth in technology and globalization has brought so many new words and expressions into the lexicon that they would probably drive language purists, if such people still exist, out of their minds. Heck, it could drive a Taglish-speaking Filipino crazy, when he still has to figure out about 7 other major languages already being spoken in the country, on top of the techno-speak being developed by call-centre workers and the gay-speak, the dialect of the Manila gay and show business communities. And when he goes out of the country, he then has to contend with how other English speakers so mangled the language that it makes him feel as if he’s talking to a Martian.

(Don’t even get me started on how words are pronounced. For instance, why would the word ‘swam’ be spoken like ‘swam’ but ‘swamp’ be ‘swomp’ and swan ‘swon’? Aaaaaargh!)

Nothing gives English-as-second-language (ESL) speakers more trouble than the slang being spawned and spoken by various specific groups. ESL people learn English from books, and generally speak that way, but you’ll find out right away when what you’re saying translates very differently to an ESL speaker.

For instance, a friend who’s a nurse by profession once asked an elderly Canadian male patient on which side would he like to be laid? She didn’t report what his response was, but I could imagine celebratory bells clanging inside the old man’s head: “Service with benefits, baby!”

Or the nurse’s German husband who once requested her to check a pimple on his ‘foreskin’, when he actually meant on his ‘forehead’. To him, those words were similar. I heard that the nurse corrected him immediately, although on further thought, maybe he did have another pimple somewhere else and really wanted his wife to have a look at that one.

Or take the case of my daughter who lives in the US, who overheard her colleagues talking about dogs being sold by the Pound. A curious person by nature, she had to know: “How much per pound?” Judging by the scandalized expression on their faces, my daughter realized she must have asked the wrong question. On the other hand, dogs do sell per pound in underground markets in the Philippines, or so I heard.

Keeping any language pure is a losing battle, because language is alive. Language evolves. It adapts to its surroundings to survive. I sincerely wish all purists who want to fight this trend the best of luck.

A friend of mine has stronger words for such people. He says there will always be some narrow-minded idiots who will want to keep their language ‘clean’ and not allow foreign words to infiltrate it.

“Wanting to keep a language clean”, he tells me, “is another form of discrimination.”

“Like Hitler said in his book, urban mice should only mate with urban mice, and rural mice should only mate with rural mice. Well, Adolf, ” my friend adds, “I've got news for you: Mice don't care whom they mate with, as long as it's another mice!”

(previously published at the Mill Woods Mosaic, January 15, 2012 issue)