Reflections on Heritage from a Third-Gen Filipino American

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When I was eight or nine, my Girl Scout troop hosted a celebration for World Thinking Day, a holiday celebrated every year on February 22nd by Scouting organizations worldwide. The goal of Thinking Day is to learn about and appreciate countries and cultures other than your own, and each troop is responsible for researching a country beforehand and setting up a poster-board booth (sometimes with food) to teach each other what they learned.

We’d kick off Thinking Day with an opening ceremony, a pseudo-Parade-of-Nations, with each girl representing a different country. Conveniently, my mother had found, stashed among another troop leader’s Scouting memorabilia, a Girl Scout uniform from the Philippines: a short-sleeved, knee-length green dress printed with trefoils, with a matching green hat and a yellow kerchief tied around the neck to finish it off. But I didn’t want to represent the Philippines. I was in the height of my French phase, ballet-obsessed and convinced I’d open my own Parisian boutique. After arguing with my mother and crying in a corner for a bit, I ended up curtsying for France.

In hindsight, I should’ve just worn the dress. But almost a decade later, I still find myself coming back to that Thinking Day incident because it’s the most concrete example of this ongoing dissonance I’ve felt for years between my identity and my experience as a third-generation Filipino American. The culture that uniform symbolized, that heritage—it never felt like mine.

I’ve never been to the Philippines. I don’t speak either of my grandparents’ languages (Tagalog for my mom’s side, Kapampangan for my dad’s). And although I grew up in a relatively diverse community, few of my friends over the years have been Filipino, something that shocked one of my parents’ many Filipino college friends when I brought it up.

“All my friends in college were Filipino!” she exclaimed. It wasn’t for lack of trying on my part; I’d meant to get involved with Fil-Am organizations in high school and college, but I found it easier and more convenient to gravitate toward other social circles—friends I’d made in Girl Scouts or my dorm—where I was almost always the only Filipina.

Over the years, as I’ve learned more about the history of race and immigration in the U.S., I’ve made a more conscious effort to reconnect with my culture. Though my palate has always leaned toward other cuisines, my mom and I started cooking Filipino food from scratch during the pandemic: stir-frying noodles and vegetables for pancit, slow-cooking beef shank for sinigang. I began following Instagram pages dedicated to Philippine culture and history, learning about indigenous Filipino traditions and mythology and the history of dishes such as adobo and deep-fried turon. I even joined the staff of Kapwa Magazine, copyediting the stories of Filipinos across the diaspora as they documented their history and experiences.

In general, though, I’ve always felt more American than Filipino, from my friend groups to my food preferences. My mom, born in San Francisco and raised in Daly City (home to one of the highest concentrations of Filipinos in North America), sometimes talks about being called “coconut” growing up: brown on the outside, white on the inside. It’s an accusation I internalized for years, even before I could articulate it—the feeling of being overly Americanized, if not whitewashed altogether. I fit in too well with my white friends and never spent my childhood feeling Othered or singled out like my parents did. And so even as I chase the representation I craved and lacked growing up, in books like Mia Alvar’s In the Country and Danton Remoto’s Riverrun, in characters like Ned Leeds and his iconic Lola (who owns the same lamp as my grandmother!) or Jo Koy’s impressions of his mom, I am haunted by this nagging sense of imposter syndrome—this sense that I’m just not Filipino enough.

In June, right before I graduated college, a Filipino-American student on TikTok caught flak from Philippine-based Filipinos for wearing a graduation stole printed with the Philippine flag, which is apparently illegal to wear in the Philippines. The discussion raised wider questions around the complexities and nuances of diasporic upbringing—nuances that are often ignored in conversations around identity and culture—but what really bothered me was how a number of Philippine-based Filipinos called Filipino Americans foreigners. To me—to many of us—that label was a rejection. We don’t want you. You’re not one of us

You’re not Filipino.

To belong to a diaspora is to occupy the strange liminal space between two cultures, never fully feeling comfortable in either. My identity is a complex blend of the beliefs and practices my grandparents carried over from the Philippines, the efforts they made to assimilate, and the negotiations my parents continue to make as second-gen Americans who grew up bouncing between Filipino immigrant households and late-20th-century U.S. culture. And my family, too, does not always fit neatly into the mold or expectations laid out for what a Filipino or even Filipino-American family should be.

My grandmother immigrated to the States in the mid-20th century from Santa Ana, Pampanga. Her cooking is legendary among our relatives, and for years, her adobo was my standard for how adobo should taste: tender meat simmered in a sour vinegar-based sauce, served over a bed of white rice. But when she gave me her recipe, I noticed it lacked two ingredients that most Filipinos swear are essential to adobo: bay leaves and black peppercorns. Apparently, black peppercorn makes her sneeze.

For years, I’ve compared myself to this image of what a Filipino should be. But at the end of the day, I know where my roots are. I know who I am.

And I’m proud.