Missing Manila

by Carlos Yu

There are weekends when my mother and I, missing Manila, click through old albums on Facebook. We feel nostalgic whenever we see our old homes and young faces. Images of large trees, sunlight spilling into every corner, and cracked roads and sidewalks, are somehow moving. What moves me the most is to see myself––as if I were revisiting not only my home but who I was. Sometimes I even doubted if I was actually the same person from those albums. My mother used to say I looked like a burnt chocolate chip cookie. Since then, I've revisited my memories, wondering when that changed and why I am no longer a burnt chocolate chip cookie. 

Before I moved to New York from the Philippines, I was brown. I was brown, and my hair was smooth, and I pronounced mango as meng-go. My mom listened to Madonna, and my father listened to Jim Morrison. My eldest brother listened to Lil Wayne, and my sister listened to Avenged Sevenfold. I played football and went to Catholic school. We went to church every Sunday and tried to go to confession. We played Guitar Hero and memorized the words to "Say it Ain't So." I didn't realize it before, but I was concrete. The way I saw myself was as concrete as a vase or a mug from which I drank chocolate milk. I never doubted my interest in the games I played, the music I listened to, or the toys I played with. I knew who I was. Although we listened to American music and played American games, I never once doubted that I was Filipino. That is, until the summer of second grade when my family split, and we flew from our home and left for New York. 

The summer I arrived in the U.S., my brother, PJ, and I stayed at my grandfather's place in Long Island while my mom searched for a job. We didn't have our own apartment. Almost every day, we went to the park a block away from my grandfather's. We brought our scooters to the small hill every afternoon, racing each other, thinking that we were just on an extended boring vacation. He had the scooter that does tricks, and I had the spark scooter. Old trees lined the path downhill. Their roots split the concrete and created bumps scattered everywhere. One day, I felt brave, and I pushed myself to go the fastest I'd ever gone. It was a nasty fall.

I hit a crack in the road, and it sent me flying. I slid down the hill on my right elbow and dragged my right arm across the hot, jagged street. Suddenly, we weren't on vacation anymore, and I cried. As any third-grader would, I cried and cried as I gathered pieces of my scooter, holding the spark attachment in my hand, wheeling my mangled scooter back to my grandfather. I cried as I rang the doorbell, as I walked up the stairs, as my grandfather pressed betadine and alcohol cotton swabs into my bloody elbow. I cried after everything. I cried as if I dropped a mug of chocolate milk. I cried, thinking about my scooter. I cried, thinking about the spark attachment never to be used again. I cried, thinking about the droplets of blood that fell upon the concrete of an American park. I cried, staring at the scab on my elbow that opened like a crack when I bent my arm. Now, I look at the massive keloid on my elbow, wondering where all the scraped skin went. 

I didn't understand the first American school that I attended. I wasn't used to sharing pens and pencils, I wasn't used to snack time or rug time or independent reading time, I wasn't used to the art activities and accents, and I wasn't used to all the white faces. Still, I wanted to find friends, a group, a place where I belonged, so I played in the Big Yard, but some days, in a panic, in some fight or flight reaction, my mind would go into a state of alarm. As the captains picked teams, I would remember that I am not white, that I am not like them, but the way their blue eyes glazed over me, their gaze averted my body was louder than the internal scream telling me that I don't belong. But I still wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to take part in their jokes even when I became the joke, even when they would echo my words and giggle, even when they would take my sentences and clown me and put me on display and laugh in my face, smirks spread across their pale cheeks. While I would go into a fit of hot rage, step out of the shadow of the backboard, and demand my respect, no one took me seriously, and I'd scurry back into the shade, in despair, shamed, embarrassed to sound the way I did, to look the way I did. Hot rage, cold shame, hypervisibility, invisibility, it was too much for me at the time. I felt like I would crack. When I arrived home after a long day at the park, I'd stare at the dark brown burnt mass at the center of the mirror, standing against the white wall, with my spiky hair, flat nose, and fat lips wishing that maybe there could be some way to blend in better. 

Sometime in third grade, I can't remember now because the years seem to blur, our teachers assigned us a Claymation project. There were two other people in our group, and we worked in the art room where there were smudges of paint and random dark spots on the tables where paint mixed and mixed to the point where it was all an incoherent blob. One girl in our group dominated the project. She decided everything: the story, the setting, the characters, and their appearances. She added pieces of yellow clay to the brown hair of the figures. Why are you adding that? I asked. Everyone has highlights. I don't. Well, you're not everyone. She pressed the golden streaks into the brown clay. It's as if she didn't see my hair, as if she didn't see me, like another smudge on the table. That's probably all I was to her. Just a brown smudge. 

Third grade was the toughest year of my life. It sounds funny when I say it now, but that year I was rushed to the hospital twice: I fell off my scooter, got two concussions, and a stitch on my upper lip. I was always falling, sliding, bleeding, and crying on American concrete. I'm surprised now that I didn't just wake up one day and fall apart. 

Nine years later, I checked off Asian on my college application without thinking about it. I happily wrote about being an immigrant. I spoke about life in the Philippines and used it in interviews and applications to programs. In the end, after I sent my applications, read over my supplements and essays, I began to doubt if I was Filipino. 

It's inevitable, living with your parents, that they get mad at you. Sometimes my mother will throw things at me or in the garbage, sometimes she'll point out my shortcomings and my glaring flaws, but I know, in the end, she still loves me. It never really hurts me that much. But on one occasion, she fractured me, intended or unintended, when I was disrespectful. She was watching The Real Housewives of Orange County, and I blurted a remark about the kinds of shows she watches and the trash reality stars she spends so much time criticizing. She yelled at me, and rightfully so. It was the usual criticism, but it ended with a sting, a kind of scar in my head, burned into me forever. 

You are just like your white boyfriends.

I shuddered at the thought. That night I awoke from a nightmare where I brushed my teeth, looked at myself in the mirror, and saw a white boy. I sat up from my bed in a panic, inspected my hands, and saw that I wasn't a burnt cookie. My hands were pasty and indistinct, like I wasn't white, nor was I brown. I turned my hands over and over, expecting a difference in color. Isn't this what I always wanted? 

At a dinner with my cousins in the Philippines, I told them about the college process in the states and how I was pursuing a scholarship that helped minorities get into college. They shot me a confused look. Minorities? You're not a minority, one of them responded. Yes, in New York, I am considered a minority. Really? That's weird. I know, I can't even recite Panatang Makabayan or sing "Lupang Hinirang" anymore. 

After I visited Manila, returned to New York, returned to the apartment, unpacked, sat down, and sighed, I listened to music. Every year, upon return, there is a new playlist. This year, I began listening to a Filipino band called the Eraserheads. As I discovered more and more of their songs, their lyrics hidden beneath a blanket of a familiar and alien language, I found that I missed Manila more than ever. Before I looked up the translation to each song, I watched their ten-year-old music videos in 480p for their songs "With a Smile" and "Ang Huling el Bimbo." I was struck with deep nostalgia, but suddenly, upon finishing, I asked myself if it was legitimate, if I was groping in the dark, fabricating memories of familiar landscapes and dreams and images and faces that seemed familiar, faces that I seemed to know, or faces that could be brown and feel familiar whether or not they were Filipino. I ask myself if I even lived there the same way my siblings do when I can't remember the name of a food, a street, a game, or a holiday. 

Moments of doubt arrive in shades and waves of shame. When I look up the translation to Eraserheads songs, when my friends ask me what words mean and I look at my arm or parts of my body, and I hit them, or tap them, or run my fingers across them because I can only get feelings from words and not the actual definitions or nuances in use or anything, I am thrown into shade, and I am washed with shame. It's the same kind of shame and betrayal that washes over me when some ask if I can speak Tagalog. That kind of shame––the embarrassment that turns into rage that goes back into shame washing over me and receding in waves over and over every day hurts. The same way my teeth feel when I drink hot tea then cold water. Like it will crack. 

The summer before I left to visit my family in Manila, I went to the MET with my two best friends. As we walked through the galleries, I stumbled upon Francis Bacon's Three Studies for a Self-Portrait. Bacon remarked that "I loathe my own face." His head emerges from an abyss of darkness, the contours of his face blurred. The portrait feels like it comprises torn-up portraits that were taped together into some kind of monstrosity. Yet I smiled, a little horrified, for a moment, my eyes watery, as if I were staring at a reflection of myself. 

The ancient art of Kintsugi arose around the 15th century in Japan and came about when Ashikaga Yoshimasa, the eighth shogunate, broke his tea bowl and sent it to China for repairs. When it returned, the bowl was mended with ugly metal staples. His frustration and disappointment called for Japan's craftsmen to find a more "pleasing" alternative: Kintsugi. At one point, people broke their pottery on purpose and mended it to make a profit. 

Kintsugi or Kintsukuroi translates to golden joinery. Instead of using ordinary lacquer sap to mend broken pots or vases, they used tree sap lacquer dusted with silver, platinum, or gold. They wanted the fractures and cracks to be visible, emphasizing the imperfections, emblazoning it, signaling a crucial moment in the life of a vase or bowl, signaling the beginning of its "second life." This art form falls under a broader philosophy called Wabi-Sabi that sees beauty, not in the traditional western ideals of symmetry and geometry but imperfection and impermanence. Kintsugi finds beauty in the cracks of mended pottery, not in the pristine white marble statues and pillars at the MET.

When did it begin? When did my darkness fade? I found answers in my memories or on my body, in relics, or pieces of myself, or scars of the past, revisiting them like old Facebook albums. I remember it. I was playing football when a much larger teenager blindsided me by accident. I remember how my face went straight first into the ground. I remember how I bit down on my lips, bracing for the impact. I remember everything. The sizzle of black asphalt. The heat of the sun. A warm streak running down my temple. Breathless. Suffocating. The crushing weight of a third-grade body. Little black rocks pressing into my skin. Lying upon the floor like it was my bed—scattered limbs struggling to move. A hyper-extended arm reaching out. Pointing to my brother. Shadows hanging above me. Staring. Crowding. My brown body painted upon a black canvas. I sat up, gathering myself, putting myself back together, but I was still broken. Since then, I've been putting myself back together in a misguided, confused way. Searching for pieces of myself that disappeared in the ground like the skin that tore from my arms and face.

I went to the hospital. They stitched my philtrum, iced my left eye, and sent me off. When I returned home, I looked at myself in the mirror, horrified at what appeared. My left eye was black and puffy like my lips. A green scab covered my upper lip, which was covered by a band-aid. I imagined what I looked like to all those faces in the yard. Embarrassed to think that my face was frozen like that, in pain, my brown skin painted upon the black abyss of the blistering concrete, like Bacon's self-portrait emerging from the abyss mangled and deformed, as a mug mended with all the wrong pieces connected. 

After I put myself back together, dusted the rocks from my skin, took a long look at myself, and continued with my life, the doubt created a desperate need to love myself and what I had become. It made a desperate need for a home where someone could love me, a home where I could mend my face, stare at myself in the mirror with a smile, my cracks emblazoned, my reflection framed like Bacon's self-portrait. 

I showed my teacher the self-portrait and told her I felt like him. I told her that I saw his face when I looked in the mirror, and she asked me why. I said because I'm ugly because I'm Americanized. She paused and said that I should be proud to be both. She said it's what made me unique. I found that I was no longer concrete. Doubting my belonging in Manila and New York, doubting the beauty of my skin, of my reflection, questioning my very existence in old albums broke me. I knew and know my fractures better than anyone. I see the scars on my elbow, on top of my lip, on my knees. I feel them; still, it stings when they flare when I pronounce words wrong or forget names, yet I see the beauty; it's like looking into Bacon's distorted face tearing up and coming to accept what I've become, though it isn't easy. 

My father called me the other day, and I told him I ate at a Filipino restaurant. I ate tapa with egg, I told him. Tapsilog, my baby boy, Tapsilog. I meant to say that. I meant to say that. It's okay. I'm sorry.

Carlos Yu is a writer from the Philippines that has an addiction to chocolate milk, rice and writing about his family. He thinks everything in this world is connected somehow and tries to employ that view in his writing.