ESSAY
	Issue 03, Summer 2008
The Myth of Filipino Magnetism
Grace Talusan

        As a child, I believed that Filipinos were like magnets, attracting other Filipinos to them when they were far from home. I am full of anecdotal evidence: In front of St. Peter's in Rome, my aunt Rose, who lives in San Francisco, walked by my parents' best friends from Massachusetts. Although they had only met once before, they recognized each other and snapped a photo for proof. I was flipping through a family photo album and found a photo of my mother on a couch at a wedding with other Filipino women. When I looked closer at the women's faces I recognized Corazon Aquino. It was when she was still a housewife, a few years before her husband, Ninoy Aquino, was assassinated and she became President of the Philippines.

        Recently, I was at an anniversary party in Montreal for a friend of a friend and happened to sit on a couch next to a South Asian woman whose daughter was best friends with a Filipino girl from Boston. She said the girl had recently lost her mother. I said, "You're talking about Ruby." The woman looked surprised, but I wasn't shocked at all. These coincidences were a part of my life. I believed that Filipinos spread all over the world, away from family and friends and their language and food, were rewarded every now and then with a bit of comfort in finding each other.

        Or maybe the phenomenon is the same as when you buy a car. It seems everyone on the road is driving the same car you are when in fact you're just noticing what was always there.

        I was always on the lookout for others like me, but growing up in a suburb of Boston, I didn't see myself reflected very often, especially on TV. The first time I saw a Filipino on TV was the 1980 Miss Universe pageant. I was eight years old and my father had summoned all of us with a "Hurry, everyone, come quick!" We were already in bed but we threw off our sheets, wide-awake, and followed his voice to the family room. We'd never heard this urgency and alarm in his voice before.

        My father had been drawn to pull the knob on the TV that night although it wasn't his habit to watch before bed. At that time, early in his career as an eye surgeon, he was always reading a medical journal. But something told him to turn on the TV (Was it the Filipino magnet?) just as Miss Philippines sashayed across the screen in a shimmering turquoise evening gown, the bottom flared out like a mermaid's tail.  After the commercial break, Miss Philippines would be interviewed by Bob Barker. My father stood in the kitchen, his finger impatiently dialing the rotary phone, calling relatives in Los Angeles and Chicago, urging them, "Turn on the TV!"

        My mother quieted everyone. "She's about to speak."

        Miss Philippines selected a note card from a brass bowl and answered host Bob Barker's questions. Not only was she was beautiful and elegant; she reminded me that there were other beautiful and elegant Filipinos in this world.

        During the crowing, well past our bedtimes, we waited for the news. Would we witness the crowning of a Filipina Miss Universe? To me, it didn't matter if she won. I just wanted to look at her. When Miss Philippines appeared on the screen, I touched my finger to the screen, alive with static, and said, "There she is. Look."

        That year, Miss Philippines was crowned third runner up, but she placed above fourth runner up Miss Sweden, a tall blond and blue-eyed woman whose image defined traditional Western beauty. The next day at school, I struggled to stay awake, but I felt proud. A teacher asked me, "Did you see Miss Philippines on TV? Your family is from there, right?" Miss Philippines in her mermaid dress meant that someday it might be possible for me, as a Filipina, to be beautiful and dignified someday.

        Even today, if a Filipino (or a half or quarter Filipino) shows up on American Idol or becomes the lead singer of a popular rock band, I'll get text messages and emails from multiple sources telling me, "Look, a Filipino!"

        I used to be a person who thought, dreamt, sang, and spoke in Tagalog, a Filipino language. My parents, who spoke both English and Tagalog, thought their children would become confused by the two languages when we moved to the US and insisted on an "English only" policy.  The Tagalog part of me was lost and forgotten. Where is that Filipino part of me? Will I ever meet her again?

        When I hear Tagalog, even though I don't know the meaning of the sounds, I stop whatever I'm doing. I want to run to the speaker and throw my arms around them, even if that person is a stranger. Several Tagalog words stay with me: underarm (kilikili), fart (utot), love (mahal), dead (patay), and a respectable collection of curses.

        I'm grateful that my parents built their life in the US, but I'm also aware that the move was traumatic. I gained so much by becoming an American and have had so many opportunities, but there's also a lot I've lost in the exchange.

        When my parents moved us from the Philippines to the US in 1975, I was three years old. I was known by another name, Bubut, which means "little flower bud," and the sound of that name, the hearty, roundness of it said aloud, described perfectly my tubby toddler body. Compared to my older sister who hated to eat, I was another species with my ankle rolls and ham hock thighs. Despite my heft, older cousins loved to lift me into their arms and carry me through the houses and the courtyard in the compound. During meals, cooked by the servants and eaten communally, my titas, aunts, grabbed me as I walked by their table, pressing their noses into my doughy cheek and sighing, "Good enough to eat."

        Our home was the Gamalinda clan's compound in the Philippines. A tall brick wall surrounded the compound of five houses and small apartment building. To enter the compound, the driver tooted his horn quickly three times (which was distinct from the way the neighbor's driver honked) and one of our servants would run out to open the gate.

        The main reason we left the Philippines was so my father could accept a medical internship in the US. Even today, about half of Filipino medical school graduates seek opportunities outside of the Philippines. We went from living in a family compound with my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and servants to an apartment building in a lower income neighborhood in Boston.

        At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was still in power and Imelda, his wife, was amassing her famous shoe collection. Although many of my relatives lived a comfortable life in the Philippines, they couldn't afford a plane ticket to the US nor obtain visas. More than 30 years later, this fact is still true. On my mother's side alone, I have over three dozen first cousins, eight married sets of aunts and uncles, and a vast kinship network of godparents and distant blood relations. When we left this world behind, suddenly, my only relatives were my immediate family.

        After a few years in the US, the cousins, aunties, and others of the family compound were barely a memory. I was only reminded of their existence on the rare occasion when we would meet other Filipinos in the US. Instead of the usual questions Americans asked about careers and vacation spots, Filipinos asked us to list our surnames: my father's, my mother's, my grandparents, even great grandparents. The Philippines is a densely populated nation consisting of many regions, languages, and islands. Yet, it seemed every Filipino we encountered knew someone we were related to back home.

        They would say: "Talusan? I know a Dr. Talusan on a TV show." (My uncle Tony.) "Your mother is a Gamalinda? My high school teacher was a Mrs. Gamalinda." (My grandmother.) "Are you related to the Talusan who is a San Rafael municipal councilor?" (My uncle Guidet.)

        It seemed all Filipinos, once away from home, knew each other.   For example, in his first month in America, my father was alone. He didn't send for his wife and daughters until he had settled into an apartment. One day, he decided to go to the Sears Tower on his day off. At that time, the Sears Tower was only two years old and the record holder for the world's tallest building. My father didn't want to waste his money in a coin-operated telescope and brought his camera, which he had bought used from my mother's brother. My uncle's last name, Gamalinda, was engraved on the body of the camera. Searching through the lens, he tried to find the hospital where he worked, his apartment, and the nursing school dormitory where Richard Speck had murdered eight nurses, including some Filipinas, almost a decade earlier. When my father moved the camera away from his face and squinted, thinking, I am in America now, a Chinese man standing near him shouted, "Gamalinda!"

        "How do you know this name?" my father asked.

        "My friend Cesar is a Gamalinda. He has been looking for you," the man said in Tagalog.

        Cesar had received a letter stating that his cousin, Emil Gamalinda, was moving to America. The letter asked, "Could Cesar help him?" But the letter didn't say when or to which of the 50 states Emil was moving.

        "Emil is my wife's brother. He sold me this camera. His visa hasn't come through yet," my father said.

        The man scratched his friend's phone number on a scrap of paper and my father was eating pancit, fried pork lumpia, and steamed white rice at Cesar Gamalinda's by the next weekend. My father played trucks with Cesar's young son, and wondered what his daughters were doing half a world away.  My father didn't stay long in Chicago, accepting an ophthalmology fellowship in Boston and raising his children there.

        I visited Chicago 30 years later to visit my friend Joanne, who is married to a Filipino American photographer (whose parents went to the same medical school as my parents). Stuck to Joanne's refrigerator was a magnet advertising a dentist named Dr. Gamalinda. I called my mother, "Do we know any Gamalinda's in Chicago?" The dentist was Cesar's son, all grown up.

        More support for the theory of Filipino magnetism: I met my boyfriend Alonso a decade ago when we were both graduate students in Irvine, California. Both of us were far from home: Boston, for me, and Louisville, for him. Alonso was the first person I'd ever met from Kentucky. As we searched for something in common those first few moments of meeting each other, Alonso told me was that his best friend Chris was Filipino American.

        "Filipinos in Kentucky?" I asked. Alonso explained that there was a small, but thriving Filipino immigrant community working mostly in healthcare.

        A year later, on a trip to Louisville, I met Chris, Alonso's best friend, and Chris's parents. Of course, they asked for my surnames. I mumbled the names, doubting they would recognize them. I found out that my grandmother was Dr. Crame's high school teacher. Dr. Crame's father, also a doctor, had been the family physician for the Gamalinda clan. My mother's best friend from elementary through high school, Christine, was Dr. Crame's sister. Dr. Crame knew more about my family than I did. As a boy, Dr. Crame was friends with my uncle Otto, but when Dr. Crame immigrated to the US, he lost touch. He was sad when I told him that Otto, my uncle, had had a stroke when he was 33 and hasn't spoken a word since.

        Because I grew up far from my country of origin, the Philippines only existed as an unformed idea, as a dream I couldn't quite remember, or in stories of "back home" told by my parents. I never read about the US colonization of the Philippines until I was a junior in college. Americans always assumed I was Chinese or Japanese.

        Until the People Power Revolution of 1986, when I was 14, and the jokes about Imelda Marcos' shoes began, no one had anything to say about the Philippines. It was if it didn't exist. And if the Philippines didn't exist, then I didn't exist.

        When someone else besides my immediate family referred to the Philippines as if it was a real place, I didn't feel so invisible or alien. I didn't feel as though that rich, full life in the Gamalinda compound was only a dream. As the only "Oriental" in the entire school, I was made fun of in the schoolyard, and children often ran up to me, pulling at the corners of their eyes, taunting, "Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees, look at these!"

        I responded, my face burning, "I'm not Chinese or Japanese. I'm Filipino. I came from the Philippines."

        "Never heard of it," they would say, but then would also alter their taunts slightly. I heard, "Gook. Jap," and every now and then someone would throw in, "Spic." I was in first grade the first time I experienced racial taunts and these continued throughout my school days. It didn't happen often, but when it did I'd feel overwhelmed, as if a giant wave had crashed over my head, making it impossible to breathe. I felt utterly alone and unable to speak.

        With the exception of gatherings by the Filipino community in Boston, I hardly ever met another Filipino. There was one other Filipino family in the town I grew up in and although he went to a different elementary school than me, other children would whisper that we were arranged to be married. Until I left for college, outside of my family, I knew only three other Asian Americans, all girls, all Korean adoptees. I had met only one African American boy, but no Native Americans and no Latinos.

        I am always aware of how many people of color are around in an office boardroom, a classroom, a hair salon, literary reading, or dinner party. Often, I'm the only one. Counting is automatic. In Boston, unless I'm at a family gathering or at a meeting somehow related to people of color, I can count quickly. It matters. If I'm the only Asian face in the room, everyone will turn to look at me for comment if the subject is the Olympics in China or the proper pronunciation for Vietnamese chicken noodle soup arises. At an open mic literary reading where I'm the timekeeper, a white woman reads from a short story, fiction of course, about a husband running off with a "slant-eyed skinny Asian bitch," and I feel all eyes strike me, to watch my reaction.

        The first time I returned "home" in 19 years, I was struck by how many Filipinos there were in the Manila airport. I started by counting the Filipino pilots and flight attendants, but soon lost count amidst all the customs officials, baggage handlers, passengers, and taxi drivers. On the road from the airport to the hotel, there were Filipinos living in shacks on the side of the road. I met Filipino hotel employees, waitresses, store clerks, and security standing guard outside the entrances to malls and banks with their automatic weapons. When I opened the newspaper, the bylines were Filipino names. The news stories, even those on the front page, featured Filipinos. The newspaper advertisements, TV commercials, and billboards showcased Filipinos faces that looked like my relatives. Whole bookstores were full of writings by Filipinos authors I had never heard of in my American education. Here was a whole world populated by Filipinos, where Filipinos voices mattered. If their voices mattered, maybe mine did too.

        Recently, my friend, the writer Noel Alumit, shared a YouTube link showing Miss Philippines in the 1980 Miss Universe pageant. I replayed these screen moments that had meant so much to me. But that's when I also learned that the Miss Philippines 1980, Rosario "Chat" Salayan, died of cancer a year ago at age 46.

        Associative clicking, which I can't retrace now, on YouTube rewards me with this find: Psychic surgery in the Philippines. Recently, I had a double mastectomy and reconstruction of my breasts. Recovery took weeks. Perhaps I should have opted for psychic surgery. It requires no anesthesia, no incision, and apparently the healing is instant.

        Calm and awake, the patient lies on a table and the psychic surgeon manipulates and massages their skin with bare hands. The hands dip into the skin, reach inside, and remove bloody bits of organs and entrails. In 1984, Comedian Andy Kaufman traveled to the Philippines and was treated by a psychic surgeon. A few months after he claimed the psychic surgeon removed the tumors, Kaufman died from complications due to advanced lung cancer.

        Of course, psychic surgery doesn't cure cancer, but I understand the fantasy that someone could literally reach into you and take away your pain. Many years ago, a friend invited me to visit a healer with her. The healer grabbed at invisible bugs flying around the outline of my body and made a zapping sound. For a few hours afterwards, I felt lighter, as if the healer had cleansed the dangerous, despairing parts of me that soap couldn't touch.

        When I watched the clips on psychic surgery, I remembered that I had first learned about psychic surgery from the 1980's hit show, "Real People," with co-hosts Skip Stephenson and Sarah Purcell. This was second time I'd ever seen the Filipinos on TV. When the psychic surgery segment on Real People came on, I remember calling for my family to gather around the TV. "Psychic surgery is a quack," said my father, a board certified eye surgeon. "That man is taking money from the desperate and poor. Everyone knows that's chicken blood and pig intestines."

        I wasn't shocked by the way the psychic surgeon rubbed the patient's skin with his fingers inspiring dark blood to flow out. I wasn't amazed by the intestines the surgeon drew from the body, like a magician pulling endless silk scarves from his fist. The psychic surgeon discarded the bits of flesh into a glass bowl filled with water. Ribbons of red blood cut sharp lines in the water, and then clouded it up.

        We watched as the blood was washed from patient's skin. Despite their disbelief, my family members still said, "Wow," when they saw how smooth and clean the skin was after all that blood. It was as if nothing had happened. But it wasn't the surgery that had impressed me.

        Instead, I pointed to the TV and said, "Look, Filipinos."