So eloquent (?)

Growing up is weird. A lot of what I've been told in my childhood has really fucked me up as an adult. As a fair-skinned Filipino woman, my relatives wouldn't compliment my intelligence or my physical features, they would compliment the color of my skin. The fact that I had a lighter skin tone made me a more desirable person because apparently the whiter you are, the better you are. (I could go on about Filipino beauty standards and western influences but that could be a whole other blog post in itself.)

Pictured: little me, just shy of two years old

When touching on the topic of identity and portrayal of identity online in class this week, it made me think about my own place in the world. My value of identity was shaped by others at a young age. Despite explicitly saying "act white" (which did occur), my entire family foundation has been built on the concept of faking it until we make it. When my family immigrated from the Philippines, they changed their last name from Villamero to Mero. Their first names from Simeona to Sally, Luzvaminda to Mindy, Jovencio to Joe, the list goes on. In an attempt to fit in as much as possible, my family masked their true identities and swept our history under the rug.

Is that falsely identifying oneself? Well, no. They never lied about their race, they attempted to blend their race in. Am I portraying myself in a false identity when I "talk white" on the phone, in an essay, or on applications? No. If there hadn't been this idea in the first place that being white is preferable, people of color wouldn't have to act like another race just to have the same opportunities. I mean, it got my family to America. When my mom told her coworkers she was born in the Philippines, a white woman looked shocked and said "Wow, you talk so eloquently." As if a brown person can't be well educated?

White preference became such an engraved idea in my identity that at one point, I refused to even identify with any Filipino culture. While that is far from true today, I still find myself on important phone calls speaking in a way my mom's coworker would describe as eloquent.

I really don't know what I'm trying to say here or what point I'm trying to make. I guess this is just a collection of my own thoughts as I attempt to grasp my own identity. All I know is I don't sugarcoat anything anymore, neither online nor face-to-face. With me, for the most part, what you see is what you get.