First-Gen Am-Girl

Proud Pinay…

or California girl?

There’s a Facebook app that tests you on “What kind of American accent do you have?” A coworker told me  I sound like a California girl. Not sure I want that – I was going more for the genteel pseudo-British  accent that old movie stars used to affect (Grace Kelly, Cary Grant – dahling don’t you just marvel at how they all sounded so posh?)
Anyway, I’m not from California, and I have no business sounding like I’m from anywhere except Manila, where I was born and raised and where I lived until five years ago. However I do have a fake though unplaceable American twang that comes as naturally to me as my kantong tagalog (street-Tagalog). I never thought anything of it until someone remarked at how I changed accents rapidly depending on who I’m addressing. To my nephew: “Ay naku, I dohno if you want to do dis or dat.” To a stranger in the elevator “Can you just believe how cuh-razy hot it is?”

I stayed in Ireland for a spell, at the end of which I was talking like the perpetually koulld wee littuhl gerrlll people there said I was. Lea Salonga did Ms. Saigon in London for two years and came back to Manila tewhking up intuhviews like a Brit. I have the sharply honed Pinoy gift — or curse — of uncanny adaptation, assimilating completely into one’s adopted domicile. So far it’s allowed many of our hapless people to survive and thrive as they scatter and labor across the globe. “Put a Filipino in Antarctica, and in one month they’ll be one with the penguins.”

Paradoxically I have never felt more Filipino than now that I have been away for so long. I’m a contrarian given to nostalgia and fierce loyalty, and nothing raises my hackles more than self-hating Pinoys who just love to say that the Philippines is going to the dogs and aren’t we lucky to be out of the doghouse. I know things aren’t great, but still. When my mom sold my family’s derelict childhood home without telling us I felt unmoored.

Oh well who am I to talk. I talk like an American. People assume I was born here. Tomorrow morning I’m heading to the INS in Alexandria to get my fingerprints done – first step to naturalization. It’ll make traveling easy, open up jobs for me, let me vote etc. etc. Plus, as an immigration lawyer I went out with told me, I really should become a citizen otherwise “If you go out of this restaurant and decide to shoplift you’d be deported.” That or they may put me in one of the infamous detention centers where I would get no medical care. Kidding aside, the prospect of singing the Star-Spangled banner with feeling is great and I’m truly grateful. I’m told the citizenship process is backlogged up to 18 months so I have more than a year left of Filipinoship to sharpen my searing wit of the staircase to naysayers and ponder why I love the Philippines to myself.

Pasig River

Sometimes I entertain dreams of going back, but my family’s here and they are my spirit of place. I still feel like a little bitty fry in a cold huge ocean full of white sharks and I think of poor polluted Pasig River, full of s___ but familiar waters. But days I attempt to sound like a Filipino, it comes off contrived. Really. Put it down to years of watching Sesame Street. G, Growww—verrrrr, G, Geooooorge. When Batibot came out I recall thinking Pong Pagong seemed retarded and Kuya Bodjie was kind of lame. What a mean thought.