[excerpt from “A Lot on My Mind”]

For my Asian American studies class, I have to do a five page book report on one of the books on the teacher’s list. I picked the only Filipino one on there, America is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan. I’ve begun to read it and in only three days I’m a third of the way through the book. The first third of the book is spent describing his childhood in the Philippines. He grew up in the same province as my mom–Pangasinan.

The way he described his childhood made me reflect on my dad’s. Although Carlos Bulosan grew up a generation before my dad, I couldn’t help but think that this was perhaps still how it may have been at least with my grandparents. Maybe it wasn’t any different than how my dad grew up. It just really made me realize why my dad is the way he is.

Maybe my dad didn’t leave the Philippines because he was so in love with America. Maybe he left because that was the only way he could make something of himself coming from a poor farming family. Maybe he pushed me into going to school so hard because he or his brothers were pushed so hard that it was the only thing they knew. Carlos’ brothers both went to school and the family literally sacrificed all that they could by selling their own farmland so that one of the sons could go to the only high school in the entire province. Maybe my dad didn’t go back to the Philippines when his parents died in the early 90’s because he wasn’t ready to go back there–back to the situation he left to make better of himself. Maybe he wasn’t as close to them as I thought he was. Maybe my family’s dynamic is like that of the family in the book because that’s what the Filipino culture is like.

I started to become less and less resentful of my dad and more and more understanding. He grew up by a set of standards and I realized that I grew up judging him ethnocentrically. It wasn’t a fair comparison because I viewed him through glasses lensed with the standards of the American society whereas he was raised by a totally different set from a totally different society and era.

I have yet to talk to him, as I have to do a family immigration history paper and need to interview him, but maybe I don’t need to hear the answers from him, or don’t want to because I will have already known why. Maybe whatever the vocal answers he provides me won’t match what I’m beginning to learn from this book, but deep down I will understand the context in which he came.