Chapter One: Eskimo

I always thought that my father died in the bathroom trying to pass a kidney stone. I was wrong. He did have kidney stones and he did die in the bathroom but as it turns out he died of a stroke which caused him to throw his arm out in pain knocking a metal washing pan hanging above him on to his head. I thought it was a funny way to die in the bathroom with your pants down anyway but there's something cartoonlike about the way it actually happened.

My mother was sitting outside on the patio with my oldest sister, Manang, and myself. Both of them were trying to help me figure out which details of my memories were correct and which were the result of an absentminded child.

"But you did take me out under a full moon and had a dog lick me behind my ear to remove a birthmark. Right?! And it worked right?..."

Mother rolled her eyes and said, "That's just an old wives tale! "

I ask Manang every couple of months, “Who do you identify with”, forgetting that I’ve had this conversation with her many times before and each time she answers

“No one really. I’m not Filipino because the culture is strange to me. I’m not the Middle America that I grew up in.”

Ditto. I’m living in a purgatory where neither culture is my home. This is my story. This is what it's like to live on the flip side.

Immigrant, resident alien and eventual citizen through no effort of my own. I remember my mother, ever studious, working under the 45-watt bulb in the kitchen. Laboring to remember dates and names, the history of this country that she’d brought 3 daughters to knowing that this was a better life. The kitchen was still brown then. The paneling, Dad’s quick fix for ugly old wallpaper could have been a black hole the way it sucked any light that came across its path. Still, it was a long way from the dirt floor kitchen in the Philippines.

That was the year every body in my first grade class thought I was an Eskimo. Winter 1982 was the coldest winter I would spend in America. It was my first winter here and I always kept my boots on and often my coat would stay on hours into school. Seven years of sun on a tropical island had no way to prepare me for the cold November as we stepped off the plane onto American soil for the first time. The weeks that passed as we deloused with Nice and were poked and prodded, stabbed w/ needles to inoculate us only brought colder weather. So many people talking so fast in a language that I half understood. Most were nice but I will never forget the barely hidden curl of disgust from some.

So there I was in my brown boots with the picture of an orange and yellow tiger and my brown hooded jacket, hood always up, white turtle neck white jeans, my uniform. At recess Stacey walked up to me, Stacey in her purple coat, a real life Shirley Temple, with her big blond curls and blue eyes, every third world countriners ideal American, walked up to me and asked if I was an Eskimo loud enough for her friends to hear. She ran away before I could answer and stayed huddled with her friends casting glances at me now and then and giggling. I didn’t know what to do that recess. I knew how to play. I knew how to play by myself but it was winter now and the ground was too hard to dig in and besides, none of the other children were playing in the dirt. So I stood by myself knowing I was being watched and watched and listened to them, waiting for the rules of their game to reveal themselves.