[ad_1]
All of that was familiar. Twenty years ago and in a variety of dresses, I also wore a cat costume as a regular dancer for nightclubs in San Francisco. Friends thought I was confident to dance in the cage once a week, but it was the opposite. Because of my confused characteristics, after being ugly and called “half-half” in school, dancing was a way to control how other people perceived me, just as Anne did when she was transformed.
It seems like a bad comedy from the badly aged 1980s, my blond and middle-aged father married my mother, a postal bride in the Philippines. Both families were culturally and politically opposed, and both of my parents fought financially. Therefore, my father’s grandmother was my primary caregiver when I was 6 years old, and I lived in Kansas with half of my childhood until I died when I was 14 years old.
After Grandma’s death, her father’s family members had no contact. Like Annena. When I arrived I moved to New York and have been hearing about them for a decade. On the first day of Thanksgiving I did in town, I went to a restaurant and, while I was punching a blueberry jelly, I wanted someone to call me home. Luckily, I received a random phone call from my father from my old aunt. She said she had been reflecting on life and had heard from my mother that I had gone there to New York without knowing a single person there. He said he spent many days thinking about how the family hadn’t talked to me in so long and that he felt sorry for living on the Big Apple on my own, and that I would love to come to a family reunion. Without saying a word racism, apologized for “how the family treated me.”
It wasn’t a perfect forgiveness, but it meant a lot to me that someone who had been humbly acknowledging their mistakes for almost a century. I was planning a trip to Kansas, wondering what it would be like to see the white side of my family again. Soon I was sitting in a cabin at the airport, heading to a hotel chain in Overland Park.
When I entered the hotel, my white relatives excitedly reached out to me. They surprised me when they started talking to me slowly, with wide-mouthed movements, as if they were talking to a deaf foreigner.
“I want to. You. Take care. For. Some. Move. Fry?” Asked a long-lost cousin. I felt confused. I was born in America. I never lived abroad or I didn’t know any other language than English. This must have been Anne. how he felt when other students thought he was American, even if he was actually Japanese.
“Oh, I don’t like fries very much,” I said, laughing politely. “I remember the best burgers and potatoes from my grandmother’s life come from the Midwest. So I would like a burger. Adding a bit of local vernacular, I hoped they would understand that I wasn’t American and not at all exotic.
Eventually we headed out to a typical bar and grill, which was what I wanted. As we were eating together, “Do you live in the neighborhood with other Filipinos?” I deleted questions like that. and I felt disarmed, unsure of how to respond.
I finally had my answer at the end of dinner, when a cousin suddenly said without warning, loudly, “I feel bad for the rotators, they shouldn’t be born. They will never know who they really are or have a real identity, all because their parents decided to have a selfish night of passion. ”
The whole table was quiet. I thought about how I lived my life in New York on my own without help and without a little relationship with my family, how I left when I was young and survived without their help.
[ad_2]
Source link
