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ABC Pin@y
My friend, who I nicked-named, Mindanao, asked me what it means to me to be ABC Pin@y.
I’ve adopted the term ABC Pin@y as a way to quickly describe some of my ancestral ties via romanized letters, so that I might connect with you a little more. These letters don’t hold the nuance of the complexity of who I am to myself and my loved ones, but there is still poetry in letters, so I’ll play. I invite you to play with me.
ABC stands for American Born Chinese. I’ve only recently adopted ABC, to be honest, because I didn’t feel like I had a claim to it. My father is roughly 30%+ Chinese and yet he didn’t refer to his Chinese-ness much, except for having a preference for Mandarin cuisine and fresh baked bao. The most significant reference of course, was to my Chinese paternal grandfather. The most powerful image I hold is of him hiding in the Malacañang palace, so that he wasn’t identified as a Chinese person who could read Japanese in WWII. Yet, even though my father appears very Chinese with a smidge of Portuguese, like his father, he’s technically mostly Ilocano from his mother. My grandmother’s ancestry is Ilocana, indigenous Ibanag and Gaddang and a smidge of Spanish. For my father, being a Chinese appearing Ilocano was an advantage and a struggle in the Phillippines. He was assummed to have wealth and some kind of arbritrary status. Like me, we were really latchkey kids without any claim to status…
