Subtle Asian Family Traits
Bata, bata...pa’no ka ginawa? (Child, child...how were you made?) (Image: Nicole Cadelina @ni.muy)
Mum once gave me some sage advice on the walk to Westpoint outside Blacktown Library - ‘If you ever get kidnapped, you must scream as loud as you can so people can hear you.’ She added if the kidnapper pulled a knife on me, I had to be quiet and not say a word. I was at least nine years old at the time. All I ever cared about back then were thin devon sandwiches and Ribena for big lunch.
This advice had been buried under the dusty rugs of my mind some fourteen years later - lo and behold, I have not been kidnapped (obviously, and thankfully). Many Asians I knew could relate to hearing our parents perched on our shoulders, poking and prodding us with obvious advice, anxious texts, and pressing questions. ‘Don’t get drunk.’ ‘Don’t do drugs.’ ‘Did you do S-E-X?’ ‘How will you get home?’ ‘Is he white?’
I imagined Filipino-Australians as collages of their parents' worries. It’s easy to reduce our parents’ strictness to two words - ‘Filipino kasi!’ (‘because they’re Filipino!’) - as if we weren’t allowed to scrutinise our parental upbringings. Overprotective? Anxious? Must be a Filo thing. It’s an unspoken rule that all ‘freshies’ are cursed to be ‘weird’ in their collectivist ways to survive in the wild, wild Western suburbs.
It felt imperative to hate and detach myself from my parents, as if being a carrier of their worries prevented me from living the ideal young-adult life in the John Green books or Fox Searchlight films I loved so much. It’s only when I reached my twenties where I’ve become the stories I often daydreamed about - yet even then, one of my friends reminded me ‘Nicole, you’re turning twenty-one.’ It almost implied that I was a few years too late to live out my own adolescent freedoms. How could I when I was seldom invited to gathos and parties in high school?
I once joked to myself that our parents migrated here so us diasporic Asians could enjoy the privileges of a hedonistic, self-absorbed life that may otherwise be judged upon in our home countries - akin to the beer-bellied Bojack Horseman or the sexually liberating Fleabag. Legend has it our parents remain ignorant of our vices so that we can undo years of being ‘brainwashed’ by their overprotective anxieties. Anything to forget about home, family, and the migrant love language of sliced fruit - if only for a few nights.
Too often, I imagine how easy my life would be if I was not born Filipino, if I could live more risky and freely without the burden of my parents’ anxieties. Instead, I would hear ‘I love you’ more often without a taboo stutter or second thought. I would no longer be punished for correcting my parents, and as a child I would no longer be told to ‘stop crying’ in public over miniscule mishaps.
And too often, I wonder if it’d be right to give a final ‘f*ck you’ to my parents and their imperfect parenting, by deliberately self-sabotaging myself with a drug or sex addiction, and forgoing the migrant dream of becoming their successful Filipino child. Our Filipino values of filial piety and utang na loob (inner debt) can be damaging - but so can our own individualisms. It is possible to get carried away in your own self-indulgences, without discipline, to a point of distancing yourself from loved ones - from friends, colleagues, and yes, family.
As Asian-Australians, we live between the collective world of our families, and the individualism of Western thought. We are not our parents, but that does not mean we are perfect either. We can acknowledge our parents for trying their best to guide and take care of us, the same way we explore and love ourselves freely with care and discipline. I’ve learnt to be thankful for their overprotection and occasional strictness, as it’s also taught me to look after and discipline myself in this terrifying world. In my own reflections of being Filipino-Australian, I’ve also learnt to make peace with these two worlds through acceptance - by accepting myself, my family, and how I am made in this blemished lifetime.
