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.