I Hid Behind McDonald’s Instead of Embracing My Filipino Heritage
Being the only Filipino kid in my group of friends, I grew up ashamed of the tastes and smells of my culture
For a period of time during my childhood, I lived in close proximity to my mother’s Filipino family in northern Virginia. Having emigrated from the Philippines, they settled where members of their family had initially found opportunity. This meant Washington, D.C., working for the government, the World Bank, or one of the embassies — a city where they were largely in the minority. It also meant we’d gather for dinner a couple of times a week. My mom and her sisters would take turns hosting. My grandmother, with the culinary chops to rival any restaurant chef, was often the one cooking up Filipino food staples: lumpia and pancit and adobo and lugaw, along with delicacies like dinuguan, dilis, and balut. The dinners were rarely planned; often an aunt would call my mom and within seconds they were already gossiping and planning another family dinner.
Being from a half-Filipino household, I had the luck of growing up surrounded by a diverse and wholly unique culture. But Tagalog sounded fast to me, too harsh on the tongue. It didn’t seem “cool.” At 10, maybe 12, I had already begun forming a narrow view of what “cool” meant, cobbled…
