Transnational Bodies

“So why do your eyes look like that?,” the produce guy at the supermarket asked me.  We’ve indulged in quick small talk for the past few months, so I thought this was just a feeble attempt to ask “How are you?” or start a short conversation.  I had been traveling all night on a 12-hour bus ride from Cape Town and had come home from a brutal work day, especially after only getting a few hours of shut-eye in an uncomfortable seat.  I’m sure that my fatigue was showing; even the walk to the supermarket was treacherous, and I opted to push around a trolley instead of carrying a basket.  Still unsure, I asked him what he meant by his question.

“Like, how do you say… Why do they look like that?  Are you from China?”

Surprisingly enough, this was the first time since arriving to South Africa that I was blatantly propositioned about my ethnicity.

“No, I’m not.  I’m Filipino.  From the Philippines.  Except I’m from America.  So I’m American.”

After a short geography lesson, I walk away with my avocados.

As I was walking home with my groceries in hand, there was a mother with her daughter on the sidewalk.  As I passed them, I heard the child say, “Look, it’s a Chinese man!”  It must have been Point Out Paul’s Ethnicity Day because these two times were the first, and still the only times this has happened to me, both on the same day.  As I kept walking, I heard the mother chastise, “Honey, don’t say that about the man. “  I smiled for a second, but then I realized that she made it sound like being Asian was the same as having an extra nose or fingers for eyelashes.  “He may look weird, but he’s still a good person, darling.”

I want to clarify that these were not the first times I had been asked about my origin while in South Africa.  The second a word comes out of my mouth, people already know that I’m not local, and usually hit the nail right on the head and guess that I’m American.  Maybe it’s just the circles I’ve been around, but nobody has ever asked the follow up question, “So if you’re American, why are you Asian?”  Cue one of the iconic Mean Girls quotes when Karen asks Cady, “If you’re from Africa, why are you White?”

Now what does being American really mean?  We can go on for days about apple pie-eating, eagle worshipping, gun slinging, flag bearing Americans for days, but being American is more than that.  After pondering for a while, I realize that it’s incredibly difficult to define what being an American entails.   Does it have to do with being born in America?  No, because there are a lot of immigrants like myself who consider themselves Americans.  Is it living in America?  I live in South Africa, but that doesn’t make me South African.  Is it being raised in American culture?  American culture has infiltrated even the farthest reaches of the world, so that’s a little wishy-washy.  Does it have to do with legal citizenship?  I’m sure a lot of undocumented immigrants would say that they are American despite having no legal status in the United States.

So what does being American really mean?  It comes down to a personal identification with the United States.  How do I understand and see myself within the American fabric?  What is my place?  This rant is me trying to figure that out.

This discourse of being American is further complicated by race.  For whatever reason, American tends to be synonymous with White, and I’ve experienced this in both the United States and abroad.

In the US, why is it socially agreed that a non-White body must have a different origin?  It is assumed that it must come from somewhere else.  In my case, I am actually an immigrant, but for many other non-White people, their origins are the United States and their families have been in America for generations.   Never have I thought to ask a White person, “I know you’re American, but where are you really from?”  It’s a shared experience that most American people are descendants of people who came from somewhere else, some who came earlier than others, but the fact remains the same that everyone has some kind of outside cultural heritage, but for White people, that seems to be forgotten.

While abroad, like in the anecdote with which I began this blog post, I’ve been prodded and interrogated about my background a lot because of it is so multilayered.  I found it especially relevant while traveling in Asia where I was able to physically blend in while still be a cultural outsider.  People would treat me differently or speak to me in local languages, but I had no idea what was going on.  There were times where I just wanted to put a sign on my forehead that said I was American because I wanted people to recognize that I was different from them, even if we looked similar.  Being abroad, especially in Asia, was the time in my life when I was most conflicted about my race and nationality:  I wasn’t a typical American, but I wasn’t a typical Asian, either.

This is the curse of what I am choosing to call the “transnational body.”

I call myself Filipino-American because one, without the other, could not completely describe my entire cultural background, and even in combination, it does not fully encompass all of the cultural influences that make up my worldview.

Yes, I am a Filipino who immigrated to the United States now living in South Africa.  I would say that I’m a hodge-podge of cultural influences; from growing up in the predominantly Black and Hispanic Bronx, to going to a performing arts school, to eventually studying the Indian diaspora through dance.  Along the way, I took a lot of things with me, and my personality and way of seeing the world now is informed by these cultural experiences.  Only under the specific circumstances in which I grew up, learned, and developed would a person like me ever be created.  This is the same for everybody.  It just so happens that my own path was a lot more jagged and unclear.  But for all intents and purposes, I call myself a Filipino-American.

What I’d like to argue is that, even amongst all this diversity, all of these cultural artifacts fall within this umbrella term of “American” because all of these products, despite having roots around the world, were being translated into a contemporary American context, thus making it American.

Bodies are storytellers.  This is something I say to myself every time I rationalize getting a tattoo one day.  Our bodies tell the story of where we have been, and in examining the body, we can understand a lot about the person within it. 

The problem with the body, and especially the transnational one, is that the stories they tell are often misleading.   Bodies can change at a different pace than reality, some parts are completely permanent, and many things are just plain wrong.  People say to never judge a book by its cover, but you most certainly can because it can provide a lot of information.  However, a book’s cover is definitely not the only criteria to use to understand the entirety of a book’s contents.  By looking at my outward appearance, you wouldn’t know that I spoke better Spanish than I do Tagalog.  Or that I know more about Indian folk dances than I do about Filipino ones.

Why does having a transnational body, a minority one that is now twice removed from its origin, matter while being abroad?  And what are the implications in South Africa?  South Africa has its own history that has informed a unique modern racial environment that is dictated by the vestiges of apartheid.  Race is constructed differently here than it is in the United States, and though I cannot confidently say that I understand it fully, I know that it plays a major role in how I understand South Africans and how South Africans understand me.

What am I trying to say?  I’m not really sure, other than that things are not black and white.  Or coloured.  Or Asian or Hispanic or however else race is categorized.  In our constantly changing world, we have to design new paradigms through which we understand race because our former ideas are far too limited to include the entire scope of the people’s ever-evolving diversity.

Stepping Back to Step Forward

Nearly two years ago, I walked down Long Street in the heart of Downtown Cape Town.  I was about halfway through my Semester at Sea voyage, having already been in three continents in two months with a slew of countries in Asia left to go.  I was only going to be in Cape Town for five days, and that was one of the longer stays at a single port.  Under these circumstances, going so many places for such a limited amount of time, you never really knew what you were going to see, and you never quite thought about ever going back because there were so many places ahead of you.

While on SAS, I did a photo project entitled Shoe-mester at Sea.  Before my departure, I purchased a fresh pair of Toms shoes and wore them every day while at port and proceeded to photograph my feet as I traveled around the world.  There was multi-layered reasoning behind the project, the main concept being that people are always advised to leave a footprint on the world, and what better time to do that than a 105-day circumnavigation around the globe?  However, I was more interested in the impact the world would leave on me, and I thought that the best way to represent that was to document my shoes as I tread.  That’s how the Shoe-mester at Sea project was born.

Throughout the semester, I took hundreds of photos of my shoes.  As time went on, the literal blank canvas became covered in dirt and grime, and that gave the shoes their personality.  From the mud stains on hikes to a pink tint from Holi powder, the shoes got a lot of wear.  Every blemish became a story of what I was doing in the shoes when the blemish happened.  This was how I chose to remember my trip.

When taking the photos, not only did I want to highlight the slow deterioration of the shoes, but I wanted people to take notice of the ground on which I stood.  The photos shared a lot about the places I was fortunate enough to visit.  From the vibrant red earth of a dirt road in Ghana to the gray-and-silver concrete jungle of the streets of Tokyo, and everywhere in between, all of these places were different.  The project was a way for people to see what it was like to walk in my shoes, quite literally, and live vicariously the photos.  We often forget to look down because we’re always told to keep our heads up, but the things we find at our feet can be more telling than anything we see at eye-level.

One of my favorite photos in the entire series was one taken at the storefront of the African Music Store on Long Street.  In the entryway, there is a colorful mosaic with the words “Welcome to Africa” encircling an outline of the continent.  Something about the photo was so memorable because it stood out from so many of the other earth-toned photos that are part of the set, and it really emphasized the importance of looking at the ground because there are beautiful things that we often miss.

During my trip to Cape Town earlier this month, I was walking down Long Street and thought back very vividly to that photograph.  Of course, I was gravitated towards visiting the site where it was taken, and upon arriving, I had smiled to see that it was exactly the same as I had seen it two years ago.  Naturally, I took another photo at the spot, wearing different shoes this time around.  In reflecting about the picture, I get chills.

When thinking about it, what are the chances of this happening?  I took hundreds of photos during my semester abroad, and I’ve taken millions upon millions of steps in my lifetime.  Yet, on the other side of the world, I found myself standing in the same exact spot as I did two years ago.  I had no idea that I was ever going to find my way back to South Africa again, let alone be able to live and work in the country for a full year.  It makes me realize the privilege I’ve had to travel so extensively and the opportunity I have to keep doing so.  It also makes me wonder: how many more places that I’ve already gone will I be able to revisit?  At this point, it’s limitless.

If you watch the video intently, you will see that I blatantly took photos of my shoes pre-departure in my neighborhood in the Bronx and throughout New York City.  I tried my best to take photos upon my return at many of the same places in order to see how much change the shoes have undergone during the time I was away.  What I neglected to realize was the change that would be made in the person wearing the shoes that would inevitably happen over time as a result of traveling the world.  I became a different person from the time I had left to when I returned, with a lot more experience under my belt and a whole bunch of new wisdom in my head.

Upon taking the photo at the storefront on Long Street for a second time, I had the opportunity to have that same kind of self-reflection.  The Paul who stood there two years ago in his Toms shoes was very different from the Paul standing there now.  It’s incredibly important to have these kinds of moments, to take a step back in order to step forward; to realize how far you’ve gone and how much further you will go.

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So now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I will give a brief summary of my entire trip down the Garden Route to Cape Town.

Claire and I decided to drive down the Garden Route, a stretch of beautiful coastline between the Eastern and Western Cape provinces, because it has been so heavily recommended by friends and colleagues who have done it in the past.  To break up the 8 hour drive, we took several days, stopping along the way in different cities and towns, staying at hostels (otherwise known as Backpackers here) and getting into loads of adventures along the way.

The drive over took five days with stops in Plettenberg Bay, Knysna, Oudtshoorn, and Mossel Bay.  Along the way, we met some awesome people, including a Swiss German hip-hop dancer and a recent high school graduate from Reunion island volunteering at a village in The Crags, a very large tour guide whose raspy voice was due to his vocal chords being crushed in a rugby accident, and an Afrikaaner bartender who shared his philosophies on life until the wee hours of the night.  Every day was a new adventure: riding elephants, getting an impromptu township tour, climbing through caves, riding ostriches, sandboarding down the longest dune in South Africa, and petting cheetahs were just some of the things I was able to do while driving down the Garden Route.  And don’t even get me started on the scenery, mountains kissing the shore the entire way through, and some pretty awesome food, too.

Upon arriving to Cape Town, we had an amazing and well-deserved reunion with the interns (though it had only been two months since we last saw each other).  I was able to go back to a lot of the places I had already seen, which induced a whole lot of nostalgia, but I was also able to have some new experiences like hiking Lion’s Head and getting a tour (and a little work done) at Grassroot Soccer HQ and the Khayelitsha Football for Hope Center.  Though most of the interns headed out for a huge music festival, Rocking the Daisies, the boys (and Kelsey) stayed behind and had a very relaxing weekend.  Who wouldn’t have enjoyed a great lunch at the Old Biscuit Mill, chilling in the hammock on the Kloof Roof overlooking Table Mountain, and watching Mulan with a cold cider and a hot bowl of chili?  Especially after a long week full of adventures, it was great to chill out for a little while.  It was a vacation, after all, right?

After an amazing week of fun, frolicking, and frivolity, it was time to head back to Port Elizabeth and back to the real world.  After a 12-hour overnight ride on the Intercape Bus, we got straight back to work to prepare for an HCT Tournament that upcoming weekend (which was a success, by the way), and also preparing our farewells to Kelly and Ashley, the two Fulbright English Teaching Assistants who instantly became our friends upon coming to PE and who showed us the ropes.

It’s crazy to think that time is going by so quickly, because before you know it, it’s going to be November, which would mean three months of being in South Africa, or in other words a quarter of the way through the year.  No matter, tihngs seem to be shaping up, and I look forward to my next visit to Cape Town during Thanksgiving and all of my other travels during the December break!

Spoky's Story

It was my first full day in Port Elizabeth.  I already was being whisked away by Siya to Motherwell, one of the city’s largest townships, to check up on a few coaches who were struggling with students at an area high school.  Upon arriving to Cingani High, we were greeted by four coaches, each wearing matching red polo shirts with their names and the Grassroot Soccer logo embroidered across the chest.  We were only there for a few minutes watching the coaches attempt to wrangle up a bunch of rowdy teenagers for the afterschool session until Siya says that we have to return to the office for a meeting.  My first chance at seeing a live GRS intervention would have to be reserved for another day.

Not even a week later, I had been tasked with writing short biographies about two coaches that Port Elizabeth would be nominating to represent Grassroot Soccer at the 2013 One Young World Summit being held in Johannesburg.  One Young World is an international organization that gathers young people from around the world to make positive change.  Other than the Olympics, their annual Summit is the only youth-dominated event that brings together representatives from as many countries.  The conference brings together young leaders and global powerhouses to share ideas of how youth can change the world and provides a platform for them to exchange ideas and make connections.  Grassroot Soccer would be sending two representatives from each country in which it operates, and it sought two nominees from each site from which to choose.  The PE staff seemed to decide instantly who they were going to nominate.  One of them was a sweet young lady named Spokhazi.

That same week, a bubbly girl comes into the office to drop off identification documents, and I put the pieces together that she was Sphokazi, also known simply as Spoky.  I introduced myself to her saying that I wanted to interview her briefly to write her bio to send to the Cape Town headquarters, and she reminded me that I had already met her in Motherwell on my first day.  I apologized, owing the fact that I didn’t recognize her to the fact that I was struggling with all the new faces I had been seeing over the past week.  She had forgiven me for the mishap, and we started the interview.

What was supposed to be a ten-minute chat ended up being a two-hour conversation.  We discussed anything and everything, from comparing our lives, since we were only a month apart in age, to the price of bananas in our respective countries.  She immediately put me at ease with her welcoming tone and friendly smile, and I knew then that I wasn’t going to mess up and forget her the next time I saw her.  I felt so comfortable talking to her, as if I had been speaking with a longtime friend, even though she was a girl from the other side of the globe who I had only met a week prior.

Fast forward two months later.  Spoky was speaking of her life-changing experience at the One Young World Summit to the rest of the coaches during our Friday morning development session.  I sat there listening to her eloquent words, proudly hearing about everything she had learned, all the people she had met, and the impact she wants to make in the future because of it.  It was our initial conversation that inspired my one paragraph reflection about Spoky which eventually led to her being chosen to represent Grassroot Soccer at the conference.  Though I know that it was Spoky’s personality which sold the deal, I’d like to think I had a little to do with the ultimate decision to pick her.

A few weeks ago when I got to tell Spoky that she was going to Johannesburg for the One Young World Summit, I had a huge smile on my face.  The trip would be her first time on a plane and also her first time out of the Easern Cape province.  She would be meeting delegates from around the world, being in the midst of some of the world’s greatest thinkers, leaders, and entrepreneurs.  I was so jealous of the experience she was about to have, but I had no idea how much it was going to open her eyes about the world around us, and most importantly, I had no clue how much it would unlock her own potential.  In the few weeks between finding out that she would be attending as a delegate to the time she had left, I had prepared her for the entire trip, from helping her with registration materials to figuring out logistical details about flights and transport.  The fact that she would be staying in one of the ritziest areas of all of South Africa put a smile on her face, and I knew she was going to have the time of her life.

Listening to Spoky’s account of the conference could not live up to how enlightening it must have been for her on the ground.  From being able to be amongst the huge crowd at the opening ceremony at Soccer City Stadium, having breakfast with Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, speaking with Mohammad Yunus about being a Grassroot Soccer coach, to all of the dialogues in which she was able to take part about relevant topics like education, youth unemployment, HIV, and something that she is especially interested in: gender based violence. 

A major theme of the entire Summit was youth empowerment, and I could tell immediately upon her return that she was more confident now than when she left.  Spoky talked about eating breakfast with Kofi Annan one morning.  As she listened to him speaking about the empowerment of young people, she kept pinching herself to figure out if it was really happening.  She said that at times like these, you do some self-evaluation.  She posed the question, “Where do you stand amongst the great leaders that we can become?”  Seeing the impact that people like Mr. Annan, Spoky admitted, “made [her] realize that the work that [she does] does not end in Port Elizabeth.  It’s part of a bigger concept.”

A very meaningful lesson that Spoky discussed was about what it means to be a leader, and her reflection is something that I’ve been trying to convince myself for a very long time:

“There are different kinds of leaders…  You don’t have to have money, you don’t have to be famous.  Being a leader starts small.  You start with the little changes that we do, and we become leaders through that little change.  Most people picture leadership as those who are in Parliament or already doing big things, but you, as yourself, are a leader in your own right.  We were empowered to continue to do the work we are doing, and to do it more often, because that’s how we can change the world.”

After hearing Spoky’s story, I realize that it’s these narratives that I seek to hear because they share a tale of empowerment, passion, and drive.  These are the stories I have the responsibility to share from the voices I am driven to amplify.

One striking figure from the One Young World Summit was that despite being held in South Africa, only a mere 20 of the 13,000 delegates were South African.  It’s important to hear the stories of young people and provide these kinds of vehicles of global communication because the voice of youth is often silenced because they are viewed as inexperienced, idealistic, and naïve.  It’s even more important to highlight the stories of people like Spoky because they are even further buried in disadvantage and poverty, as too many young people from poor communities never have the chance to stand up for themselves.  But these are the particular voices we have to listen to the most because they have a lot to say.  And the fact of the matter is that they also have so much potential to make a change.

Malala Yousafzai comes to mind immediately as someone whose power lies in her voice - the voice of a young female in a broken society where that voice is never heard.  Her story represents all of the young girls just like her whose rights to education were stolen, and her voice resounds with the all of the voices of girls who have suffered in the same way.  It is because she is young that her voice is powerful, because even in her limited years, she has already seen enough injustice and is wiser than people two, three, or four times her senior to do something about it.

The fact that there were only 20 South African delegates does not signal disadvantage.  To me, and to Spoky, shows progress and opportunity.  That there were twenty South African voices shows that there are even more stories to be told from voices just like theirs.  The presence of these voices at the One Young World Summit shows that there are places out there where young people like Spoky are given a platform to tell their stories to people willing to listen.  One day, there will be more South Africans part of international dialogues like these, and the twenty young South Africans this year, Spoky included, are trailblazers.

Something that stuck out to me in Spoky’s retelling  of her experience was this: “One Young World made me see the potential in myself that I sometimes doubt.  I got to see beyond what I am and show qualities I didn’t know I had.”  Sometimes, it takes some inspiration for someone to realize the true potential of their voice, and now that Spoky has been enlightened of her own, I am confident that now, as a One Young World Ambassador, she can unlock that potential in others.