CLA orientation week was overall an enlightening experience. However, one specific experience that I found had a great impact on me was the Life Mapping workshop we did on the first day of the CLA retreat. In this activity, each of the interns mapped out significant events in their lives that they felt were influential in shaping who and where they are today. Though I’ve engaged in similar activities as this, drawing out these maps with a group of people who shared my goal of empowering the API community cast this activity in a different light. Listening to the other interns talk about the influential events in their lives and creating my own life map gave me the opportunity to explore how the events in my life led me to where I am today.
As I drew out my life map, I thought about what events were integral to shape me into the person I am today. Before this day I’ve thought about these events in a vacuum, thinking about the events contingently such as how excelling in reading and writing throughout middle and high school led me to consider pursuing a career in law or participating in the pre-law organization at my university led me to be a part of the Philippine American Bar Association. However, this activity pushed me to look at my life in a broader context and to contemplate how the events that took place before I was born shaped who I am today and my identity as a member of the API community. Asian Americans have a rich and complicated, to say the least, history in the U.S. and I was no different. I’d always said I was a second generation Asian American, but to me this functioned as simply a label that I cast myself into and I never explored how this label was important to who I am. Thinking about events before I was born, my mom and her family immigrated to the U.S. when she was 10 and her father wanted them to fully assimilate into American culture. Speaking from his experience with maltreatment as a Filipino engineer in California, my grandpa knew his children and wife would be viewed as outcasts and different in California in the 1980s and he wanted to spare them from increasingly being treated as adverse. Because of this he told them not to speak Tagalog outside of the house, to eat American food whether they liked it or not and purchased books teaching them the quintessential ways to fit into American culture.
Bringing it back to the present day, the area where I grew up for 18 years in contrast celebrated Filipino culture. My mom, however, stuck with the methods that helped her and her family fit into her community when she was younger hoping that her kids wouldn’t be treated as outcasts. She cooked and taught us how to cook American food, throwing us birthday parties with pizza and ice cream cake instead of lumpia and lechon and, because she hadn’t retained fluency in Tagalog because of her father, we grew up only fluent in English. Because of this, I felt like an outcast, having an identity crisis for the majority of my life where I knew on the surface level that I was Filipino but didn’t feel a connection to the culture internally. Additionally, because I lived in a predominantly Asian American, specifically Filipino American, community, my mom’s attempt at assimilating my siblings and I into American culture indeliberately made us outcasts. Drawing out this life map made me realize that this resentment I’d harbored for my mom for not teaching us Tagalog and trying to assimilate my siblings and I into American culture actually came from a place of love, as she, like my grandpa, was trying to prevent her children from being mistreated because of our culture. And her decision to incorporate American culture into our lives led me on the path to investigating my Asian American roots and identity.
Moving forward, this activity forced me to think both about my life in a broader context and to contemplate how what I’ve experienced will impact my future. With the world constantly changing, I will inevitably want the same thing as my mom and her father: to make sure my children aren’t treated as outcasts. This will look different than the practices my grandpa and mom subscribed to, and my future offspring may not understand my intentions. I think this activity overall showed me how importantly our past affects our present and future decisions and how, despite my belief that my life is untouched by the decisions of my predecessors, these decisions will inevitably affect our futures, and it’s how we respond to these effects that will determine our future.
