MY Experience (Spork Part 2)

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story (TEDGlobal 2009)

A few notes before I arrived at writing this post…

As I mentioned in the photo caption above, I initially was going to use a new picture of a hummingbird because I felt some of the recent hummingbird visits were an underlying prompt for feeling compelled to write a new post. They’ve had a big role in my joy recently because of their frequent visits, and some of the hummingbirds have been flying towards me and hovering when they leave the feeder as if they recognize me as the keeper of their feeder and want to say, “Thank you!” Wednesday may not have been as joyful when a pair of them seemed to be fighting, twirling together like a mini tornado headed towards me. They came apart, and it felt like one was about to land in my lap! They ended up as one chasing the other into the trees.

Hearing the towhee’s call was the nudge to share more about MY experiences and thoughts I’ve been uncovering and processing because no one else can tell it except for me. We may read relatable posts, articles, and such, but they’re not identical to each other or to our own journey. People may want to counter my perception of my experiences, but isn’t this how we experience the world? Our journey is our own – through our own eyes and in our own skin with our own views either instilled by our upbringing or shaped by our past experiences, our education, our environment… everything that makes us a unique individual – and our own personal discoveries as we hear each other’s truth.

All of my life, I’ve had times of being the weird friend. Sometimes I’m in a group and make a joke, and the person who doesn’t get it says to someone else, “This is where you just smile and nod”, but this is how I’ve found my tribe – the folks who can follow my train of thought without explaining it and laugh with me. One of my favorite connections with my closest friends, especially if it’s the whole group of us, is our off-the-wall humor.

I feel certain that some people find it easy to dismiss my thoughts because I feel spiritually guided even though I spent part of my life as a freethinker with no spiritual life. I still use critical thinking, but I also cannot deny an unseen divine existence. When I started to trust my intuition (the little all-knowing voice), better things began to happen. Manifestation (both good and bad) have become more obvious, and everything flows more freely and abundantly as my dedication and trust in my practices become habits… starting and ending a day with joy and gratitude truly do attract more of the same, just as a shitty attitude first thing in the morning seems to attract more to make a bad day worse. I experience magic in my reality, and I know it’s because I choose to see it as such; but it’s also because I am learning balance – how to combine spiritual “tools” with solid action towards my goals and the messages I want to share.

More importantly, I am grateful to you, the ones who choose to keep reading whether or not you take me seriously about crystals, cards, angel numbers, and so on… Your willingness to hear someone else’s story is what contributes to my hope that more and more, we find value in each other’s perspectives even if they’re not entirely relatable. We’re not meant to get each other 100%, but being open to simply listening without judgment and hearing what someone else has to say is a good start for appreciating each other and our contributions to this world.

Since my last post when I mentioned winning the May/June giveaway from Crystals by Jeanie, I received more news about “winning”. I had entered a giveaway by live.and.breathe.reiki on Instagram, and on Monday, Stefanie sent me a message that although I did not win, she felt called to offer me a free 10 minute reiki session. 🙂

The timing felt like it lined up with my full moon intentions and full moon release ritual, and I was receiving another high-vibration gift to help me on my path. I set a distance reiki appointment with Stefanie for Tuesday at 1900 – 7/7 at 7:00 p.m. After our session, Stefanie sent me her notes, and we chatted about our experience. I felt in awe of how in sync we were even from hundreds of miles apart. The guidance she provided also felt divinely orchestrated because she recommended using amber, which currently is not in my crystal collection, but what should appear as the first post in my Instagram, but an amber necklace available from Crystals by Jeanie! So yeah, I went over to her show on Facebook that was already in progress, asked to see it, and bought it. 🙂

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! lolololol I stepped away from the show for a bit and when I returned, Jeanie was transitioning between items. The next item she displayed was a super seven sphere. Beautiful crystal. She had already moved on to another item when I felt the nudge to buy it. July 7. 7/7. Super 7. 😉

So yeah, I’m writing about 7s but you know the idea of how things happen in threes? I won Jeanie’s monthly giveaway, I received a free reiki sessions, and on Wednesday, 8 July, Jeanie had more news for me. In a pick-a-number giveaway for her show on The Mystical Shaman’s Market, my guess was the closest without going over!

I have felt so happy because ordinarily I’m one of those people who sits back and sees other people who seem to have all the luck, but after deciding to follow suggestions from The Secret, I’ve added a daily mantra/reminder: “Inner joy invites abundance.” The abundance of joy from hummingbird visits and winning feel like a foundation for more to come beyond birds and crystals and reiki.

One More Nudge

It’s taken me a few days to write this post. Distractions that I let be my excuses for not sitting here, dedicated to writing this post. However, this morning (Saturday, 11 July) I felt a post speaking directly to me from Joyel of Crawford Leadership Strategies, LLC.

“When you raise your voice, you raise your value.”

– Joyel Crawford, Crawford Leadership Strategies, LLC

Joyel and I reconnected through Facebook in the past year. I enjoy her personal posts of “heartwarmer of the day” because I can rely on those posts to be a light that offsets the not-so-great “news” that others seem to share more frequently than sharing positive stories. In following her business page, I felt so excited to see her great news, “It’s official! My show, Career View Mirror (R), is now a registered trademark!”

Joyel and I recall that we kind of “just know each other from around campus” when we try to remember how we connected in college. We find truth in Maya Angelou’s quote, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Joyel and I have no solid memories together other than remembering each other as someone who was pleasant to be around. 🙂

So this morning, when I read what she says to her clients all the time – “When you raise your voice, you raise your value” – I listened. And now I am back at this post. Thank you for shining your light so brightly and empoweringly, Joyel.

My Story as a Filipina American

Bear with me and Leenie Brain… it’s all over the place. I just gotta get this out even if it’s disjointed and jumping… This is the third day of typing, and it does no good to sit in draft. I know I am not going to get EVERYTHING out here, but I will share more at a later time. I may even share partial thoughts, so I appreciate your patience and understanding… Just like major changes can’t happen overnight, I can’t share everything in one post. I mean, even with all the pages and posts on this site since September, there is still soooooooo much more to share.

2020 is past the halfway mark, and between ‘rona and racism, it’s been a crazy ride. For me, it feels like over the past seven years, I continue to arrive various moments where I think, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” – Douglas Adams

I can reflect on most of my ages and stages, jobs, friendships and relationships… everything AND everyone who have come and gone and the ones that haven’t gone anywhere… and the whos and whats in place in my life today… I can see how sharing today is different from yesterday and may be different tomorrow or further in the future. Change is always happening.

I also can reflect on a thing that annoys me in conversations – interruptions. And don’t get me wrong. I am one of those people who may interrupt someone else when I feel overcome with excitement about the speaker having a similar experience and have to chime in, “Me too!” like Phoebe Buffay finding things in common with her birth mother. 😉 I try not to do it, especially if I launch into sharing my similar experience. However, I’m referring to these types of interruptions: when I’m telling a story, and the listener can relate and thinks she knows what I’m going to say and tries to speakinunisonwithmeveryquickly to finish my sentence. Gaaaahhhhhhh!!!

With that in mind, please read this without thinking you know what I’m going to say. And please read it remembering that no single story exists as a blanket for everyone who fits a description. Please try to read without assumptions or judgment.

Writing this absolutely is a response, not a reaction, to everything racially-focused that I’ve run across in the past month. It’s my own experience with recognizing exceptions to someone else’s story whether told in first person or third person. Stories always have more than one perspective.

When I was in college, I took a sociology course, “Race/Ethnic Relations”. I might be able to dig up my paper, “My Non-Stereotypical Experience as an Asian American Student”. To sum it up, the statistics on Asian American students were too broad at the time. Maybe they still are. American-born versus recently-immigrated students are too different to be lumped like that. Once again, I didn’t fit in where it seemed like I should.

One of my favorite discussions in this class was about the stereotypes of our families and ancestries, but we arrived at discovering a common theme across races and ethnic groups – food-focused gatherings. Whether it’s a reunion, a celebration, or just a weekly meal, when families get together, we all take food seriously. We look forward to someone’s specialty dish. We don’t take kindly to “the wrong person” taking over and bringing someone else’s signature item. And we definitely know better than to say anyone’s recipe is better than the original. Family feuds over mac-n-cheese. They’re real. 😉

Typical Filipina moms like to make sure you’re fed even if you said you’re not hungry. I remember thinking, “Yup!” when Ruben’s mom in The Debut keeps offering food to his friends. My friends and my Keets can confirm that my mom always tried to feed them. “To feed you is to love you.”

When I was growing up, I didn’t think that much about being Filipino or not white except when other people “reminded me”. This is that part of me that some want to call “white privilege” as opposed to their position that Black Americans don’t forget that they’re Black. (I’d argue though, that too is based on others and environment… I feel like we don’t sit at home, watching Netflix and have a running thought about race.)

As I was growing up, even into my college years, I felt like the general population knew very little about Filipinos and what someone knew was based on their experience with Filipino friends, coworkers, fellow churchgoers… and I’m pretty sure the first things that come to mind for non-Filipinos are lumpia and pansit. Regardless of race, we often come back to food. 😉 Keep in mind, the Filipino population in different states and different parts of the state varies. A lot. Where I am now in North Carolina is sooooo different from growing up in Northern Virginia. And Northern Virginia is also different from Chesapeake or Virginia Beach or many cities in California, just to name a couple of places. I don’t know what the U.S. Census has now, but once upon a time, Filipinos accounted for only 4% of the population in North Carolina. Yeah… here I am reppin’ for real, hahaha.

Although it didn’t make sense to me while I was growing up WHY my mom would say this, she often tried to curb any of my undesired behaviors by scolding me with, “Filipinos don’t do that!” At the time, I was too young to understand that people may make hasty generalizations about a group based on their experience or observation of one person. Depending on how and why I interacted with someone, they might think I add to the “model minority” stereotype or think “Wow, not all Asians are good at math after all”. 😉 It just didn’t occur to me that someone might look at me as representing Filipinos instead of me as an individual.

Nowadays, thanks to entertainers such as Jo Koy or even Anjelah Johnson who has close ties who are Filipinos, the general population knows a little more from a humorous approach. (Seriously, Jo Koy is so fucking accurate about Filipina nurses.) And yes, Filipinos have more presence or notability beyond what I just wrote, but I ain’t about to go off on that tangent for this post. It’s just a touch of why I’m writing.

As a child I was no stranger to other kids slanting their eyes at me and calling me “chink”. Kids are strange little creatures. You can be sitting there and minding your own business, and for whatever reason, a child decides to mock you whether it be making goofy faces, sticking out their tongue, or in some cases, taking a jab at your race. They learn it from somewhere, which is most likely from adults like the people we see in viral videos having their meltdowns. Or maybe they learn it elsewhere but have no adult who tells them to knock that shit off because it’s wrong. Not impolite. Just fucking wrong.

Of my experiences as an adult, only one incident comes to mind. Twenty or so years ago, I was a technical writer, and we had paper manuals for more than 200 branches of the bank as well as operational departments. One of the project managers (the owner of a specific manual’s content) had not asked me to handle the distribution for the update that I wrote, so he was upset that he would have to do it himself. Seriously. Putting labels on paper packets then sticking them in a mail bin. As I walked up the hall to my boss’s office, most likely to get her to sign off on something or maybe to go on break, I could hear him and another coworker talking in his office because his door was open.

Female coworker: “How does she see like this?”

Project manager: “Eileen?”

They both laughed, but he stopped when he saw me pass his door, and I saw the female coworker had her hands up to her face, which from the bit of conversation I heard made it clear – she was slanting her eyes.

And because I vented to my boss, HR had to get involved. I forgot that even though I was merely venting and not actually reporting it to her, as a member of management, she had a responsibility to report it. I felt so stupid for forgetting, but it makes sense now. We can’t grow or change if we don’t hear each other, and no one can hear us when we don’t speak up – good or bad. How did I grow? I spoke my mind right away without thinking about consequences. I don’t remember it impacting the rest of my time that I worked there, but those two coworkers had more awareness that their little joke was unacceptable, at least in the workplace. I don’t know if they were reprimanded, given a warning, or what. It wasn’t my business. The female came over to apologize, and I tried to be polite in calling her ignorant to her face because she seemed insincere. I don’t know if HR advised her to talk to me. Honestly, I would have been happier if she just fucked off and never spoke to me again. We didn’t even actually work together. She was in another department on the same floor.

Oh, so these were two white coworkers and a white female boss and Black male HR representative if that matters to you for this part of my story.

I said it before in another post, I don’t know if being Filipina has ever affected getting or not getting a job. I don’t even know how it affected getting into college. I recall a classmate during our senior year of high school telling me not to worry about college acceptance for enrollment. She saw it as more colleges would want me in their next batch for race quota whereas white girls like her had to work harder. For real. She said that.

My freshman year of college, I was more aware of being Filipina because I got invited to what I call “diversity dinners”. I think I was invited to three or so… at least two… And it felt like such a joke to me and another girl who were born in the U.S. We couldn’t figure out if they were trying to make us feel welcome on campus or trying to learn about our backgrounds as non-whites. At the time, I felt like I had nothing to offer.

My parents raised me and my brothers in some kind of partially cultural assimilation. My parents are bilingual whereas they didn’t teach us to write or speak Tagalog. I was an adult when I asked my mom why, and she said that we’re in America and there’s no use for it. However she would ridicule us for our misunderstandings or mispronunciations of Tagalog.

My brothers and I had to ask our parents to pass down their recipes of how they cook Filipino dishes. (Trust me – it’s like every other recipe situation in the world – if you want to make it like the chef, you need the chef’s recipe.) Our household’s dinners were just like any American home – a little of this, a little of that depending on the day of the week. Some Filipino dishes were “party food” for birthdays and such. I don’t know if that’s how it is in the Philippines. Yes, I am that ignorant of my own heritage.

So, here’s where my thoughts have been when it comes to where I fit in now. If you’re trying to categorize based on race as only two groups – white or black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC)- you might initially throw me into BIPOC, right? However, my reality is I was raised by Filipino immigrants who showed bits and pieces of the colonial mentality.

It’s summertime. I have spent a lot of time working in the yard. When I went up to see Chief Daddy for Father’s Day, he asked, “Why are you so dark?” That’s a thing with some Filipinos. Google that shit. You’ll find articles about cinema and television in the Philippines. Take a look at the actors and notice how light skinned many of them are. You’ll even find articles/posts about skin lightening procedures and products in the Philippines. I’m sure some of that is true for Filipinos in the U.S. too.

The summers of my childhood and teenage years, I either played outside or deliberately laid out to get a tan. (Or as white friends pointed out, “You’re already tan.”) I remember coming home from a day out on the lake, and my dad said, “Oh hey, darkie! So you’re trying to be Black now?” I honestly still wasn’t getting it about skin color. I never got to have that conversation with my mom, but I should probably talk to my dad about it before he’s gone. I don’t know if they fall into the group of Filipinos who think darker skin is an indicator of being too poor to hire help to do the outdoor shit or a colonial mentality preference of lighter skin or a fear of getting dark to pass for Black and being subjected to racism that a Filipino could escape as being “more white than Black”.

Here we are in the middle of summer and since the Fourth of July, I’ve had a lot on my mind. One of the conversations I had with my dad in the last year or two was about how he enlisted in the United States Navy. The nutshell version – on the same day that he quit his job as a bulldozer operator and was heading home and trying to figure out what he was going to do, he saw an ad recruiting Filipinos for the USN. He went through the tests and whatever else they did, and in 1959 he enlisted and headed to California. He said it afforded him the opportunity to see the world and do more and support his family than if he stayed in the Philippines. That’s my dad. You’ll have to ask other Philippines-recruited sailors why they chose to enlist.

My dad became a citizen in 1970. My parents met in California in 1966 and got married in 1967. My mom got her citizenship in 1979. My dad proudly served. You can tell by all the USN stuff at his house and on his vehicle. My parents chose to be Americans. They raised me with both Filipino pride and American pride. They raised my family in Northern Virginia, and my schools and neighborhood were more racially diverse. My classmates and I had public education to learn history, but from time to time, we managed to learn more history when our parents told us about their experiences. My BFF’s mother, Aldrena, published a book, No Longer Silent: Memoirs for My Granddaughter, to share beyond a written account for their family. Please click the link to read “About the Author” which describes the content of her memoir. I look at it as a labor of love, putting it in writing rather than the generation-to-generation oral stories that lose details over time. Her memoir includes telling about her experience with public education (Prince Edward County, Virginia public schools closed during her childhood) and her action and voice in the civil rights movement.

My son asked Mom-Aldrena if she had time for an interview for one of his projects in high school. As I remember it, he needed to ask at least two people about their experiences during the civil rights movement. He was able to interview her as well as his grandfather on his father’s side. I gotta ask him if he saved that paper because he recorded two experiences that were most likely very different – a black woman and a white man.

The last time I checked in with Mom-Aldrena, I mentioned that I’ve been writing this blog, and she asked if I’d be writing a book. At the time, I wasn’t sure but since then, I’ve started that project as a collection of shotgun writing exercises to let it unfold. Yes, another divinely orchestrated nudge to just write everyday and let a book come into being. Allowing instead of chasing.

With any subject, be it big or small, we have to speak for ourselves. No one can speak for us. When we put it in writing, our voice can carry on for generations without worrying someone leaves out the point we were making or even getting it wrong with a silly anecdote. I can’t even go to the grocery store without a list because I am likely to forget THE main item that prompted me to go in the first place. So imagine trying to tell a family story, but you can’t remember who were the actual relatives or when or where it happened. Don’t let the family history slip away. And no, at this point, my book isn’t a memoir, but I do need to write down family stories for my Keets.

Well, my laptop just popped up a battery warning… This is it for today. The cord is upstairs, and I’m downstairs. Let’s just call this the sign to hit publish and come back on another post because I still have thoughts to share about 4 July 2020.

Thank you for sharing your time with me.

Luceat lux vestra.