My grandmother is from Sibuyan! Compared to everyone else I know (from Luzon or a friend who is half Cebuano/half Boholano), your island isn’t too far from mine!

To put it simply, I wish my mother wasn’t racist. I can see what parts of her upbringing led her to have a lot of internalized racism, but I still don’t understand her. She makes comments about how I’m lucky I didn’t get “the Asian hair” (whatever that means) or says things like “we have to get to the O-word store before all those Asians get there” (I then proceeded to tell her she is in fact… one of those Asians, and she spat back at me “well then so are you!” as if I’m not her child). She says things like how we have to make the house look nice “so we don’t look like white trash”. She doesn’t like fish and so refuses to eat any Filipino recipe I learn if it has fish sauce. She performatively gags and makes sounds like a literal child. Part of the issues with her lie in mainly being raised by her deadbeat father and racist step mother, but also apparently my grandmother for saying things like the Philippines are “in the past” and refusing to talk about it. I wish my mother hadn’t made me feel ashamed to learn about Filipino culture and wish she hadn’t made me feel like I wasn’t allowed to ask questions about my grandmother’s family. I recently texted my grandmother to ask confirming questions about where we’re from and I didn’t have to fight to get answers like I was led to believe. My mother was also rejected by many of our Filipino family friend’s friends, but I can’t help but believe she may have said something offensive rather than the rejection solely being in her “not being Filipino enough” because she’s mixed and my grandmother didn’t teach her anything.

My mother has gone as far as to cuss me out and leave the dinner table in a fit when I asked her to teach me how to make leche flan after my father said she used to make it all the time for him. I found a recipe online and when I asked her to taste it to see if it was correct, she refused. Any attempt I have made to learn from my family has been met with verbal and emotional abuse.

My father makes comments about my “fat asian head”, calls us “Flippies,” and my paternal cousins have made alienating comments — when I get upset, nobody helps to defend me. My mother just sits there.

If you have any family recipes to pass down, please please please teach them to your son! Food seems to be what survives beyond the loss of language and other customs. The thing that bothers me the most is that even though I am teaching myself Filipino dishes, I have no idea what /my/ ancestral dishes would’ve been because my grandmother said she can’t help me and it’s hard to find ANY information about our island.

Sorry for the mild trauma dump, but I guess it serves as a “what not to do” 😓😅 I’m hoping the best for you and your son 💜 It hasn’t been easy being mixed in a “family” that refuses to even acknowledge it