Mestisa
An exercise in self-reflection on my racial identity
I’m using this platform as a way to push myself to think more critically about things. As someone who does not consider herself a writer, to write about something then click publish is my way of forcing myself out of my comfort zone to write better and think deeper. Pushing myself by increasing the stakes.
One thing that this year has brought into sharp relief, is my racial identity. I’ve always been quite proud to be a mixed-race baby. But I’ve never really thought deeply about what that meant for my experiences and perceptions. I get called a white person on a daily basis here, which is interesting because I’d never really thought of myself as a white girl. But what had I thought of myself as?
So these words are about ethnicity, nationality, and identity.
ETHNICALLY AMBIGUOUS
I've been told that my ethnic background is hard to pick.
Multiple instances in Melbourne I’ve been asked where I’m from. I usually say Frankston (Outer south-eastern suburb of Melbourne). Like most second-generation Australians I do this as a way to highlight that assuming I’m not from Australia because I look mildly ethnic is unintentionally racist. And what does “ethnic” even mean? My face is round, my hair dark, my eyes brown and my skin is olive. But isn’t that the majority of the world’s population?
Let’s be real, ethnic, in the way I’ve been exposed to it, just means non-white. White is the default.
My skin. The numerous shades of my skin. Based on the season, and parts of my body, I range from an Asian kind of white to what I like to call caramel. (hey there body positivity). It’s the largest indicator that I am ethnically different. But I feel like my brownness is ambiguous enough (and light enough?) that it is hard to immediately put me into a racially-profiled box. So I don’t feel like I was treated differently growing up. As a child, I was mostly met with curiosity about my heritage and compliments about my skin colour. I was happy with my tan lines. I didn’t really understand why my Filipino mum didn’t like my sister and me actively tanning (not including the whole skin cancer risk thing). I didn’t understand why, in the Philippines, all the skin products advertised “skin whitening”. But for people in the Philippines in the 90s (I can not speak for any decade prior to that, but it’s likely it was the same) America and “The West” were glorified. Even now, the majority of Filipino soap stars are the lightest shade of Asian. So although I am proud of my skin, there’s a whole lot of media and messaging out there telling me not to be.
This might be why growing up, although never really feeling marginalised, I always felt uncool. It wasn’t cool to be Asian. There wasn’t an Asian spice girl, no one wanted to be the yellow power ranger and I can’t think of a stand-out character in any 90’s sit-com or teen drama aired in Australia that was Asian. Wikipedia tells me that at least 16% of Australians in the census in 2016 claimed Asian ancestry. So over a tenth of our population is “Asian Australian” yet growing up, I could not see a single cool, hot or popular Asian-Australian celebrity. I wished Mum was from somewhere else. Like Brazil, or Spain. In my head, being half-Filipino wasn’t exotic, it wasn’t cool. It was just different.
I distinctly remember being an angsty teen that decided that different was my identity. I’m only starting to realise now that my skin colour may have played a part in this decision. I will freely admit I was a cliche early 2000s emo kid who overused eyeliner, put cryptic messages on their Myspace and hated my parents for not understanding my struggle. I thought I was raging against the machine by writing in my diary about how my Mum didn’t get me. But of course she didn’t. There was an entire culture between us, and reflecting on that period, It was I, who did not get my Mum. I failed to ask about her struggle. About how ballsy she was to move to Papua New Guinea on nothing but an opportunity to earn more money to send back to the Philippines. About how she raged against her system by marrying a white man and moving to Australia. How isolating it would have been in Australia before she was able to have parts of her family eventually immigrate too. But she never complained, she worked hard and she continually pushed my sister and I, much to my dismay, to ensure we had more choices and opportunities than she did. While I was worried about fitting in and being cool.
So shout out to my mum who is all types of daring under a demure facade. Mahal kita x
HALF-HALF
The problem maybe with ambiguity, with feeling half-half but never wholly something was that I struggled to embrace both cultures simultaneously. I wanted to be more than half of both. I never felt Filipino enough at family gatherings and I still stood out and was stared at in the Philippines. On the other side of the coin, I never really felt Anglo-Australian enough either, I took my shoes off at the door and I ate rice too much for that.
Let’s also touch on whether I’m actually Asian at all. The Philippines is geographically situated in Asia, but was colonised by the Spanish and has pacific island vibes. So we take siestas by the ocean while eating rice.
One thing I’m only just understanding is that the more broadly we generalise — “Asian” “African” “The West” — the less human we get. So maybe this whole blog post is just a rambling celebration of nuance. That grey area that we all seem to be moving away from. Could we all just come back to this grey space, and laugh about our stereotypes, talk about our differences and celebrate our shared humanity? We’ll all eat cake, it’ll be great.
I try to convey this nuance here in Tanzania when people ask me where I’m from. When I say Australia, they sometimes say you don’t look like you’re Australian. At this point, if time permits, I point out that most of the Australians I live and work with here have at least one parent or grandparent who was born outside of Australia — Irish, Iranian, Italian, Filipino — but all say Australian. This is the picture of Australia that I’d like to paint. One of diversity, of nuance. And I guess that’s what picture I’m painting for myself.
A region is not one thing, nor is a country, and neither am I.
I guess I’m proud of all of my little details that define me. This singular word, mestisa, means half-half, and although you can convey my heritage in a single word, the stories, experiences and nuance have to be explained. So I guess that is what I’m doing here.
