After waking up at 6:30 am to make the drive to the Pilipino Workers Center (PWC) office on Wednesday from Orange County, I arrived early for my 9 am call time and eventually was able to enter the locked offices around 20 minutes after 9 once somebody who lived in the building heard my knocking and opened the doors. I wandered around unsuccessfully searching for somebody to talk to about my assignments for the day, and eventually settled in the same offices I had worked in the previous week. After some time, a woman called Tita Tess from a different department arrived and seated herself nearby, occasionally taking phone calls and completing her own work. I was absentmindedly researching what to add for the PWC resource guide I was working on while awaiting my supervisor’s arrival.
After a little over an hour, more people began to trickle into the office. Down the hallway, I heard someone singing, their voice growing louder and louder until I saw the door burst open to reveal a middle-aged woman smiling ear to ear, her arms outstretched as if expecting an embrace. Tita Tess looked up from her desk. Upon seeing Tess, the woman gasped and ran over to grab and hug her, pronouncing “I LOVE THIS BEAUTIFUL WOMAN!” and gushing about her life and work, both in spoken word and in song. If someone else had been in the room they would have noticed me take up sudden and steady focus on my laptop screen. Tita Au, another woman at PWC who was passing by on her way to the printer, became the new object of the woman’s attention and she repeated the same songs and compliments. Tita Au and Tita Tess were tolerant of this and repeated their own love for the woman, but firmly insisted that they were at work and could not be distracted. They repeated this demand multiple times before the woman’s eyes fell on me. I looked up to see her pointing at me, asking who I was. After I introduced myself as a summer intern, she walked over and spoke about how much she loved Aqui, the executive director, and how she had worked at PWC for almost ten years and had loved every second of it. Tita Au and Tita Tess concurred with her on this when she asked them to. She talked about how, being Black, she had not expected to be as accepted in this Asian organization as much as she had been. When her son married an Asian woman, she couldn’t have been happier — “in fact,” she said, “I love Asians.”
When the woman left the office and her singing was out of earshot, Tita Tess turned to me. With a knowing look, she said, “She’s…ano…alcoholic.”
I didn’t really think about this interaction that much the day it happened, but thinking back to it for the sake of the blog post is forcing me to reflect on the diverse environments of established nonprofits. A lot of the people at PWC have worked together for years or decades, such that the social relationships between them supersede the professional standards often assigned to such organizations. Tita Tess and Tita Au had clearly experienced years of this behavior from the woman, but she still worked there. The executive director was down the hall and heard all of this, but nobody acted surprised or acknowledged how inappropriate this behavior would be in other settings. She was one of them, and this was an immutable trait — she was family.
CLA Intern Olivia Sieve during a CLA Session.
The views and opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of CAUSE or the CAUSE network.
Written by Olivia Sieve, Leadership Academy 2023 Intern.
The CAUSE Leadership Academy (CLA) for students is a nine-week, paid, internship program that prepares college undergraduates to lead and advocate for the Asian Pacific Islander community on their campuses and beyond.