For much of my life, if you asked me what Americans thought of Filipinos, most of the time my answer would be ‘they don’t’. I am biased in that I have lived my entire life in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC; Californians or Hawaiians may have a different experience. I have taken to explaining it to friends as “we’re not good-at-math Asians. We’re boat people Asians, or nurse Asians, or guerrilla fighter Asians, or mail-order-bride Asians”. My sister has put it more succinctly: “we’re not the marketable Asians”.
Did you know? When I’ve looked for Filipino history in local libraries, I’ve found far too many accounts of white Americans in the islands during World War II to the detriment of anything else.
For the longest time, the idea that I would feel seen by watching a movie was alien, something I dismissed as adolescent whining. I am autistic, half-white, Filipino-American, and have never visited the Philippines to my regret. I am simply unused to anyone ever being really relatable to me, let alone any work of art. When the commentariat was celebrating Raya and the Last Dragon as a groundbreaking example of Southeast Asian representation, I was left cold, partially because that film draws from mainland Southeast Asia rather than insular Southeast Asia, of which the Philippines is the part most dissimilar to others. There is still something within me that thinks searching for art to see yourself in is narcissistic and navel-gazing; is not one of the greatest things about art the ability to understand other people, if only for the briefest of moments?
Did you know? My mother once answered my question about why there are no Filipino celebrities with “we are not attention whores”.
Some months ago, I was in the movie theater waiting to watch Supergirl and sitting through the mandatory barrage of trailers. One of them was for Forgotten Island, which seemed to be another CGI kids movie of the type that has been ubiquitous since Toy Story. Two friends find a portal to a lost island full of adventure - typical stuff, I thought. But then I noticed the pastel-colored jeep that they drove in. I then noticed the portal they stepped through: the sun of the Philippine flag. My heart leapt: there were pinoys in a mainstream movie! I confess it did tug on a heartstring, being someone who grew up with a pull-back toy jeepney and who embarrassed himself by scaring his classmates in a suburban Virginia preschool with ‘bulaga!,’ which is what Filipino ghosts say.
Did you know? ‘Pinoy’ is a term used by Filipinos to refer to themselves (the feminine form is 'pinay').
Most Americans, I gather, have only the vaguest inkling that America ruled the Philippines with an iron fist for forty-odd years. They may remember Corregidor or the fall of Manila (but not that Manila ranks with Warsaw and Stalingrad as one of the most totally destroyed cities of the war). They may remember Douglas MacArthur stepping out into the water on his way to wrest control of the island from the Japanese. They do not know that the word ‘boondock’ is originally ‘bundok,’ a Tagalog word meaning ‘mountain.’ They do not know that ‘Bataan’ is properly pronounced with three syllables. They may recall Imelda Marcos’ massive collection of shoes. Sometimes, they will recall the Bojinka Plot, a failed terrorist attack by the men who would later demolish the Twin Towers. Very occasionally, they will snicker about the way that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is abbreviated. The vast majority of the time, we are simply not on the American radar at all.
Did you know? For every American that died in the Philippines in World War II, a hundred Filipinos died.
On the flip side of that equation, Filipinos spent a lot of time - perhaps too much time - thinking about America. The old canard in intelligentsia and diaspora discussions is the Philippines’ supposed ‘colonial mentality.’ Filipinos prize white skin, love American popular culture and American food, and on some level use the United States as the yardstick to which the Philippines is compared, and inevitably found wanting.
Did you know? When I was born, my Filipino great-grandfather, a former resistance fighter against the Japanese, applauded the fact that I was half-white, saying that it was “improving the race”.
The single great anxiety underlying the Filipino intellectual is the fear that our nation is fundamentally fake. The old saying is that the Philippines spent “four hundred years in a convent, and forty years in Hollywood” (the version my mother taught me swapped out ‘Hollywood’ for ‘a whorehouse;’ I learned of the ‘Hollywood’ version in Stanley Karnow’s book In Our Image: the American Empire in the Philippines); apparently a version with ‘three hundred years’ and ‘fifty years’ is older, and may have been a coining by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. The very name of the country is from that of a Spanish king. The sun symbol on the flag, which becomes a portal in Forgotten Island, was taken from the Sun of May, a revolutionary symbol of South American independence that now adorns the flags of Argentina and Uruguay. The triangle on the flag is Masonic, as were the early fighters for independence. The national anthem of the country was originally sung in Spanish. Most Filipinos have Spanish names, and many also have American names, often with the addition of an extra letter ‘h.’ The country, as a historically contingent nation state, is a colonial creation; there are no inherent reasons for a Caviteño or a Moro to be countrymen, any more than there are for a Punjabi and a Mirpuri to be Pakistanis, or a Catalan and a Basque to be Spaniards. We think of nations as eternal, static things that exist independently of others, but that has never been true (and people have known that for a while).
Did you know? When I’ve looked for Filipino history in local libraries, I’ve found far too many accounts of white Americans in the islands during World War II to the detriment of anything else.
For the longest time, the idea that I would feel seen by watching a movie was alien, something I dismissed as adolescent whining. I am autistic, half-white, Filipino-American, and have never visited the Philippines to my regret. I am simply unused to anyone ever being really relatable to me, let alone any work of art. When the commentariat was celebrating Raya and the Last Dragon as a groundbreaking example of Southeast Asian representation, I was left cold, partially because that film draws from mainland Southeast Asia rather than insular Southeast Asia, of which the Philippines is the part most dissimilar to others. There is still something within me that thinks searching for art to see yourself in is narcissistic and navel-gazing; is not one of the greatest things about art the ability to understand other people, if only for the briefest of moments?
Did you know? My mother once answered my question about why there are no Filipino celebrities with “we are not attention whores”.
Some months ago, I was in the movie theater waiting to watch Supergirl and sitting through the mandatory barrage of trailers. One of them was for Forgotten Island, which seemed to be another CGI kids movie of the type that has been ubiquitous since Toy Story. Two friends find a portal to a lost island full of adventure - typical stuff, I thought. But then I noticed the pastel-colored jeep that they drove in. I then noticed the portal they stepped through: the sun of the Philippine flag. My heart leapt: there were pinoys in a mainstream movie! I confess it did tug on a heartstring, being someone who grew up with a pull-back toy jeepney and who embarrassed himself by scaring his classmates in a suburban Virginia preschool with ‘bulaga!,’ which is what Filipino ghosts say.
Did you know? ‘Pinoy’ is a term used by Filipinos to refer to themselves (the feminine form is 'pinay').
Most Americans, I gather, have only the vaguest inkling that America ruled the Philippines with an iron fist for forty-odd years. They may remember Corregidor or the fall of Manila (but not that Manila ranks with Warsaw and Stalingrad as one of the most totally destroyed cities of the war). They may remember Douglas MacArthur stepping out into the water on his way to wrest control of the island from the Japanese. They do not know that the word ‘boondock’ is originally ‘bundok,’ a Tagalog word meaning ‘mountain.’ They do not know that ‘Bataan’ is properly pronounced with three syllables. They may recall Imelda Marcos’ massive collection of shoes. Sometimes, they will recall the Bojinka Plot, a failed terrorist attack by the men who would later demolish the Twin Towers. Very occasionally, they will snicker about the way that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is abbreviated. The vast majority of the time, we are simply not on the American radar at all.
Did you know? For every American that died in the Philippines in World War II, a hundred Filipinos died.
On the flip side of that equation, Filipinos spent a lot of time - perhaps too much time - thinking about America. The old canard in intelligentsia and diaspora discussions is the Philippines’ supposed ‘colonial mentality.’ Filipinos prize white skin, love American popular culture and American food, and on some level use the United States as the yardstick to which the Philippines is compared, and inevitably found wanting.
Did you know? When I was born, my Filipino great-grandfather, a former resistance fighter against the Japanese, applauded the fact that I was half-white, saying that it was “improving the race”.
The single great anxiety underlying the Filipino intellectual is the fear that our nation is fundamentally fake. The old saying is that the Philippines spent “four hundred years in a convent, and forty years in Hollywood” (the version my mother taught me swapped out ‘Hollywood’ for ‘a whorehouse;’ I learned of the ‘Hollywood’ version in Stanley Karnow’s book In Our Image: the American Empire in the Philippines); apparently a version with ‘three hundred years’ and ‘fifty years’ is older, and may have been a coining by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. The very name of the country is from that of a Spanish king. The sun symbol on the flag, which becomes a portal in Forgotten Island, was taken from the Sun of May, a revolutionary symbol of South American independence that now adorns the flags of Argentina and Uruguay. The triangle on the flag is Masonic, as were the early fighters for independence. The national anthem of the country was originally sung in Spanish. Most Filipinos have Spanish names, and many also have American names, often with the addition of an extra letter ‘h.’ The country, as a historically contingent nation state, is a colonial creation; there are no inherent reasons for a Caviteño or a Moro to be countrymen, any more than there are for a Punjabi and a Mirpuri to be Pakistanis, or a Catalan and a Basque to be Spaniards. We think of nations as eternal, static things that exist independently of others, but that has never been true (and people have known that for a while).
Did you know? When my mother was growing up in the Philippines in the late sixties, her mother told her to not play outside too long, or she'd become dark "like an Igorot."
In other words, Filipinos worry that if you could strip from the country all the remnants of foreign interference - the Japanese, the Americans, the Spanish, the Muslim merchants who brought Islam, the Chinese traders who were in the country for centuries - you would find absolutely nothing at the core.
Did you know? Noli Mi Tangere, the book widely considered the national epic of the Philippines, was originally written in Spanish.
Now, at long last, after the sheer amount of context that I feel obliged to give, we can discuss the film. There are two protagonists, rebellious Jo and studious Raissa, who meet as children in detention and bond over their love of Filipino folklore. You get a montage of the two of them growing up together over the course of the 1990s Philippines, enthralled by the stories from Jo’s mother. The two of them swear to one day find the titular forgotten island, Nakali, home of the evil Manananggal. For them, mythology is an escape from the travails of adolescence. But, as adolescence inevitably does, it ends. Jo believes that she and Raissa will get to live together as Raissa studies at a local university, but then everything is forced to change when Raissa confesses to Jo that she is going to study at Caltech, in California, and so their sisterhood is faced with a rupture of distance and a rupture of shared intent. They are driven further apart by Raissa’s family who disapproves of their daughter spending so much time with a girl they consider a lout, and just as it appears the rupture may be permanent, a sand dollar washes up on shore and creates a portal opens up in front of them, on the beach where they parked their jeepney, in the shape of the sun of the Philippine flag. This is it: the way to Nakali.
Did you know? The Philippine flag is flown upside down, with the red stripe on top, during wartime.
They wake up in Nakali having forgotten the events of the last twelve hours, meet colorful local characters, and stumble around trying to figure out what happened. They meet a local boy who can turn into a wolf who claims that they spent the last night partying together. He takes them to Manang, who claims that she can bring them home if they are willing to sacrifice to her their memories. The two refuse, and set off to find the sand dollar that created the portal that brought them here. By this point, the film’s thematic core is made clear.
The sin of modern Filipino culture is forgetting. We have seen this painfully clear recently in that country; in 2022 the nation elected Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the tyrant who brutalized the country from the sixties to the eighties. Like a distressing number of countries in the past fifteen-odd years, the Philippines has forgotten the value of democracy. Many Filipinos still uncritically try to emulate the United States, forgetting what this country has done there. Some Filipinos try to cozy up to China, forgetting the militarism in the South China Sea and the perils of surrendering national sovereignty. Christian Filipinos like to forget that Islam was in the archipelago before Christianity.
Did you know? Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and his wife Imelda hold the Guinness World Record for most money ever stolen from a government.
In our film, Raissa is a Filipina who is outward-looking, seeing America as her future, wondering if she’ll ever come back to the third-world country she grew up in. Jo fears that Raissa could forget about her home, the value of its culture, and perhaps worst of all, her. Jo represents the Philippines' wariness towards the outside world, the fear that it could overwhelm anything distinctive about us. The two of them are each a distinct current within the modern Filipino nation, the part that cringes when it beholds America, the one that is insular (no pun intended), one that wants to remain ‘authentically’ Filipino (whatever that means) on Jo's part, and the part that looks fascinatedly on the outside world on Raissa's part.
Did you know? Noli Mi Tangere, the book widely considered the national epic of the Philippines, was originally written in Spanish.
Now, at long last, after the sheer amount of context that I feel obliged to give, we can discuss the film. There are two protagonists, rebellious Jo and studious Raissa, who meet as children in detention and bond over their love of Filipino folklore. You get a montage of the two of them growing up together over the course of the 1990s Philippines, enthralled by the stories from Jo’s mother. The two of them swear to one day find the titular forgotten island, Nakali, home of the evil Manananggal. For them, mythology is an escape from the travails of adolescence. But, as adolescence inevitably does, it ends. Jo believes that she and Raissa will get to live together as Raissa studies at a local university, but then everything is forced to change when Raissa confesses to Jo that she is going to study at Caltech, in California, and so their sisterhood is faced with a rupture of distance and a rupture of shared intent. They are driven further apart by Raissa’s family who disapproves of their daughter spending so much time with a girl they consider a lout, and just as it appears the rupture may be permanent, a sand dollar washes up on shore and creates a portal opens up in front of them, on the beach where they parked their jeepney, in the shape of the sun of the Philippine flag. This is it: the way to Nakali.
Did you know? The Philippine flag is flown upside down, with the red stripe on top, during wartime.
They wake up in Nakali having forgotten the events of the last twelve hours, meet colorful local characters, and stumble around trying to figure out what happened. They meet a local boy who can turn into a wolf who claims that they spent the last night partying together. He takes them to Manang, who claims that she can bring them home if they are willing to sacrifice to her their memories. The two refuse, and set off to find the sand dollar that created the portal that brought them here. By this point, the film’s thematic core is made clear.
The sin of modern Filipino culture is forgetting. We have seen this painfully clear recently in that country; in 2022 the nation elected Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the tyrant who brutalized the country from the sixties to the eighties. Like a distressing number of countries in the past fifteen-odd years, the Philippines has forgotten the value of democracy. Many Filipinos still uncritically try to emulate the United States, forgetting what this country has done there. Some Filipinos try to cozy up to China, forgetting the militarism in the South China Sea and the perils of surrendering national sovereignty. Christian Filipinos like to forget that Islam was in the archipelago before Christianity.
Did you know? Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and his wife Imelda hold the Guinness World Record for most money ever stolen from a government.
In our film, Raissa is a Filipina who is outward-looking, seeing America as her future, wondering if she’ll ever come back to the third-world country she grew up in. Jo fears that Raissa could forget about her home, the value of its culture, and perhaps worst of all, her. Jo represents the Philippines' wariness towards the outside world, the fear that it could overwhelm anything distinctive about us. The two of them are each a distinct current within the modern Filipino nation, the part that cringes when it beholds America, the one that is insular (no pun intended), one that wants to remain ‘authentically’ Filipino (whatever that means) on Jo's part, and the part that looks fascinatedly on the outside world on Raissa's part.
But, it is worth noting, both of them love American culture. Jo, the one who fears that America offers her best friend a loss of identity, still blasts American pop music and eagerly watches American movies. This is is a contradiction that goes down to the deepest anxieties of our people.
Did you know? The Philippines once elected a former action star to the presidency. He is still alive and likes posing with weapons on social media. He was removed after mass protests for taking money from illegal gambling rings. He is my third cousin once removed.
There is a lot of pop music in the soundtrack of this film. Most of it is American, many of it recognizable to Americans with no links to the Philippines. It is the soundtrack of a Filipino childhood, as Jo and Raissa watch American movies and sing American songs on their quest to find Nakali. Notably, for the first half of the movie, all of the songs they sing are in English, even as they go further into Nakali trying to find the magic sand dollar. This changes, finally, when they are led to the island’s great marketplace, with many different creatures from Filipino mythology hawking their wares. You are given here a montage of the various new things they encounter set to this song, a song from the first Filipino hip-hop album (released in 1990) proudly extolling Filipino identity, covered by today’s biggest P-pop group.
Did you know? Multiple Filipinos have been murdered over bad renditions of Frank Sinatra’s My Way in karaoke bars.
This market montage is a very particular fantasy of a Philippines unaffected by foreign influence. The market is a Philippines without the Japanese who threw our babies into the air and skewered them with bayonets, without the Americans who framed a trench of corpses of women and children like a hunting trophy, without the Spanish who ruled by the Church, and, perhaps the most provocatively, without the merchants from points west that converted much of the archipelago to Islam (to this day, the large southern island of Mindanao is a third Muslim. They are known as Moros, and in some ways they have never been entirely under the rule of anyone who has ever ruled the Philippines, including the modern Philippine state. A comprehensive peace settlement was not reached until 2017). It is a vision of a Philippines that is solely its own.
Did you know? During the American invasion of the Philippines, General Jacob Smith ordered his forces to kill everyone on the island of Samar over the age of ten? His forces stole bells from the churches of Balangiga, which were only returned in 2018. General Jacob Smith is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
But therein lies the great contradiction of the Philippines, a nation named after a Spanish king, and from there the ultimate reason that this sequence can only be a fantasy. The song that proudly proclaims its heritage is in an idiom that comes from African-Americans with significant influence from Jamaica, brought to the Philippines through American bases. It is sung by a group who made by an industry that has followed South Korea's model. It is sung in a language whose ancestral homeland is generally believed to be Taiwan. It is a fantasy of a country who loves spam, which is American, and corned beef, which is Irish by way of America. Spoken Tagalog, the nation’s lingua franca and indigenous to Luzon, is replete with Spanish and English words. They have, and the film has, run into the great unsettling truth of any attempt to systematize understanding of the Philippines: it has suffered the brutality of colonialism, but without colonialism, it would simply not be the Philippines. There is no way a Philippines that does not have foreign influence could possibly be the Philippines, and Jo, the sceptic of foreign influence who nevertheless loves American music, is eventually shown the error of her ways.
Did you know? The Filipino love of spam was once explained by Americans by lying that we used to be cannibals. Not understanding the valences of this, whenever our mother fed us spam as children, my sister and I would happily proclaim "we're cannibals! we're cannibals!"
(closing on the market sequence - there is a gut-bustingly funny parental in-joke that is only comprehensible if you are Filipino. Among the rapid montage of the delights of the market, you see your protagonists slowly removing a cylindrical cover from a human figure. This is Barrel Man, icon of tourist junk shops throughout the country, is a running national joke, and regularly scandalizes and delights tourists who happen to visit. Nobody is quite sure where he came from, but one theory is that he was created by the Ifugao people of mountainous north-central Luzon, who historically walked about nearly-naked, to mock their prudish American occupiers. The shot cuts away just before they find what is underneath the barrel, namely a large phallus on a spring. Given the rating, the film could never show the ramifications of this particular discovery, but it implies a scene like the infamous leg lamp scene in A Christmas Story, or the scene in Goodbye Lenin! where the young East Berliners, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, discover a baffling new application for whipped cream in a West Berlin adult film shop. I found this joke hysterical and I want others to feel the hilarity. And yes, in more recent times there are variants of Barrel Man as a woman with comedically large breasts likewise mounted on springs, revealed via the same manner as her male counterpart)
Did you know? When my great-grandmother moved to the United States, she was mortally offended by Americans asking if she had ever been to the American bases in the Philippines, because she assumed they were calling her a whore. My grandfather had to explain to her that they were only thinking of the few places in the country they had actually heard of.
It is only fitting, then, that this story of the Philippines in the world was created by an American studio, who became famous via a raucous comedic retelling of European folklore, and animated with strong influence from Japanese anime (some have pointed out how this is the Filipino presence in animation coming full circle, as Filipino studios have often done the grunt work for Japanese and American animation). Its two lead voice actors are Filipina-American, one of whom is half Black, as is one of its directors. We have joined the ranks of cultures that the American animation industry, and not only Dreamworks (nor only Disney), have showcased in their professed love of multiculturalism.
Did you know? When the Americans invaded the Philippines, they called Filipinos the n-word.
But in being an American film telling a fundamentally Filipino story, it reveals its Americanness in two ways. The first one disturbed me when I realized it: the film is mostly in English with bits of Tagalog, as I would expect, but the only recognizably Filipino accents are among the old people. I recognized the big Filipino family at Raissa’s graduation, with the older people asking questions about where she is moving. She responds with CalTech, and the adults subsequently ask her several questions containing assumptions that do not match what she tells them, until her family is convinced that she is moving to Hollywood to become an actress like Tom Cruise. She has to correct them, and I don’t think she succeeded.
Did you know? I was ten years old at my aunt’s wedding when I had to explain to older relatives that my cousin from my other aunt was not my sister. I’m not sure I succeeded.
The American-accented youth trying and failing to correct the heavily accented grandparent is something I have experienced and I suspect many other Filipino-Americans have. But in doing so, I can’t help but think that the film is imposing a common experience among the diaspora in the homeland. This, in itself, is an interesting cultural difference but not particularly harmful, like the way that K-Pop Demon Hunters transposed American fandom norms of romantic speculation onto a Korean music industry that enforces extremely strong rules against their stars having relationships (a norm that began among the Japanese pop idol industry but was ruled illegal there). Among my own family, which came to the United States in the seventies, only my grandparents’ generation has thick accents. My mother’s generation can emulate it well if they want to sound like their parents, whereas I can only do an impression of my mother’s impression of her parents (and it isn’t very good).
Did you know? I once tried to do a Filipino accent in the company of white people to demonstrate what it sounded like, and one of them asked me if it were possible to be racist towards a group I was part of.
What disturbed me about the aspect with the accents is that the youth of the Philippines, and therefore in some sense the future of the Philippines, is simply not allowed to sound Filipino beyond slang. There are few of the voiced consonants that produce the distinct Filipino accent, none of the Spanish that peppers the language, no ‘f’s that are blunted into ‘p’s,’ no slightly elongated vowels, no blunt glottal stops. What this implies is that Filipino languages belong to the past, that Filipino culture belongs to the past and cannot change, which is itself an old orientalist trope that delegitimizes non-European cultures. I know they did this to make it marketable - but then, this shows you what is marketable, doesn’t it? (recall my sister’s quip that we aren’t the marketable Asians)
Did you know? The Tagalog language is not pronounced like the girl scout cookie.
The other part that reveals to me that this film is American is that, ironically but ever-so-predictably, it really doesn’t want to talk about America. Many cultures, not only Filipinos, knew that one of their own moving to America would irrevocably change them (for example, in the 19th century, the Irish would hold wakes for their countrymen who got on the boats bound for New York or Boston). Raissa is depicted as the ambitious one, but the film never bothers to really reckon with what she actually wants. She wants to become a professional, an educated woman in a way that her home country could never provide her with, but the film, mainly through Jo, has only vague strokes of an idea of what that would end up doing to her. She would be moving to a country that openly hates anyone with a skin tone darker than a lily, a country that slaughtered Filipinos less than a century ago, and that until quite recently stationed soldiers and backed dictators there. What does that mean for her? What does that mean for the Philippines?
Did you know? Many of the tactics and practices used by American police departments and security agencies were originally pioneered during the occupation of the Philippines. The Pennsylvania State Police, the first state police agency, and from there every state police agency, were based on the Philippine Constabulary (the American colonial skullcracker force which was one of the ancestors of the modern Philippine National Police. Perhaps not unrelatedly, the British writer James Hamilton-Paterson, in his novel Ghosts of Manila, referred to the Manila police as "the Khmer Rouge in Disneyland").
The film isn’t particularly interested in these questions. I am once again reminded of Dylan Rodriguez’s book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, which spends a lot of time discussing what it really means to be ‘Filipino-American.’ He concludes, ultimately, that such a thing is impossible, as the American project towards Filipinos is to either murder them or to prevent them from being Filipinos. That is America’s bargain with its immigrants: don’t have too much of a conscience of your heritage, or you will be met with the genocidal force of the state. It is the state that has encouraged first-generation immigrants to not teach their languages to their children, in hopes of making them American, thereby destroying cultural memory in the process. That is the real cost of the melting pot, and a cost that Raissa, or the film, never really thinks about having to pay. Indeed you suspect that Dreamworks denies that cost at all.
But there is a part of me that thinks that Rodriguez simply hasn’t really considered the reality of the Filipino diaspora, and indeed the Philippines itself. It is perhaps correct that it is impossible for the idea of an American and the idea of a Filipino simply cannot coincide as the former is intent on destroying the latter - but Filipino-Americans actually exist. Some are half-white, like me, and some are half-Black, like H. E. R., who voices Jo. If I’m not Filipino-American, what am I, exactly? I am reminded of my friend Nathan Goldwag’s left-liberal reinterpretation of Margaret Thatcher’s quote “There is no such thing as society:” the ideologies and conceptual frameworks we devise to explain the world may be useful, but they ultimately don’t exist. What does exist is people.
Did you know? I pilfered much of the architecture of this essay, including the sprinkling of trivia, from my friend and colleague Arturo Serrano’s (frankly, far better) essay about his feelings about Encanto as a Colombian. I worry that this isn't as good because, being second-generation, not speaking Tagalog, and not having been to the Philippines, I don't have as good of a grasp of the culture as he has on his.
And what does exist, rather than an abstract conception of nationhood, is a real nation, a nation of over seven thousand islands, a nation named after a foreign king, a nation called the Philippines, inhabited by people called Filipinos. Raissa sees the opportunity that the Philippines sees in the world. Jo sees how the world can threaten the Philippines’ conception of itself. It is through the interaction between the two (or if you want to be pretentious, the Hegelian dialectic between the two) that has produced, and currently defined, this real nation called the Philippines, and the real people called Filipinos. The Philippines is not a bug frozen in amber, but rather a process, a perpetual becoming that never stops changing. That is what Jo and Raissa discover, to their ultimate joy, and ours.
Did you know? Political scientist Benedict Anderson called the nation an ‘imagined community.’
Did you know? When the Americans invaded the Philippines, they called Filipinos the n-word.
But in being an American film telling a fundamentally Filipino story, it reveals its Americanness in two ways. The first one disturbed me when I realized it: the film is mostly in English with bits of Tagalog, as I would expect, but the only recognizably Filipino accents are among the old people. I recognized the big Filipino family at Raissa’s graduation, with the older people asking questions about where she is moving. She responds with CalTech, and the adults subsequently ask her several questions containing assumptions that do not match what she tells them, until her family is convinced that she is moving to Hollywood to become an actress like Tom Cruise. She has to correct them, and I don’t think she succeeded.
Did you know? I was ten years old at my aunt’s wedding when I had to explain to older relatives that my cousin from my other aunt was not my sister. I’m not sure I succeeded.
The American-accented youth trying and failing to correct the heavily accented grandparent is something I have experienced and I suspect many other Filipino-Americans have. But in doing so, I can’t help but think that the film is imposing a common experience among the diaspora in the homeland. This, in itself, is an interesting cultural difference but not particularly harmful, like the way that K-Pop Demon Hunters transposed American fandom norms of romantic speculation onto a Korean music industry that enforces extremely strong rules against their stars having relationships (a norm that began among the Japanese pop idol industry but was ruled illegal there). Among my own family, which came to the United States in the seventies, only my grandparents’ generation has thick accents. My mother’s generation can emulate it well if they want to sound like their parents, whereas I can only do an impression of my mother’s impression of her parents (and it isn’t very good).
Did you know? I once tried to do a Filipino accent in the company of white people to demonstrate what it sounded like, and one of them asked me if it were possible to be racist towards a group I was part of.
What disturbed me about the aspect with the accents is that the youth of the Philippines, and therefore in some sense the future of the Philippines, is simply not allowed to sound Filipino beyond slang. There are few of the voiced consonants that produce the distinct Filipino accent, none of the Spanish that peppers the language, no ‘f’s that are blunted into ‘p’s,’ no slightly elongated vowels, no blunt glottal stops. What this implies is that Filipino languages belong to the past, that Filipino culture belongs to the past and cannot change, which is itself an old orientalist trope that delegitimizes non-European cultures. I know they did this to make it marketable - but then, this shows you what is marketable, doesn’t it? (recall my sister’s quip that we aren’t the marketable Asians)
Did you know? The Tagalog language is not pronounced like the girl scout cookie.
The other part that reveals to me that this film is American is that, ironically but ever-so-predictably, it really doesn’t want to talk about America. Many cultures, not only Filipinos, knew that one of their own moving to America would irrevocably change them (for example, in the 19th century, the Irish would hold wakes for their countrymen who got on the boats bound for New York or Boston). Raissa is depicted as the ambitious one, but the film never bothers to really reckon with what she actually wants. She wants to become a professional, an educated woman in a way that her home country could never provide her with, but the film, mainly through Jo, has only vague strokes of an idea of what that would end up doing to her. She would be moving to a country that openly hates anyone with a skin tone darker than a lily, a country that slaughtered Filipinos less than a century ago, and that until quite recently stationed soldiers and backed dictators there. What does that mean for her? What does that mean for the Philippines?
Did you know? Many of the tactics and practices used by American police departments and security agencies were originally pioneered during the occupation of the Philippines. The Pennsylvania State Police, the first state police agency, and from there every state police agency, were based on the Philippine Constabulary (the American colonial skullcracker force which was one of the ancestors of the modern Philippine National Police. Perhaps not unrelatedly, the British writer James Hamilton-Paterson, in his novel Ghosts of Manila, referred to the Manila police as "the Khmer Rouge in Disneyland").
The film isn’t particularly interested in these questions. I am once again reminded of Dylan Rodriguez’s book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, which spends a lot of time discussing what it really means to be ‘Filipino-American.’ He concludes, ultimately, that such a thing is impossible, as the American project towards Filipinos is to either murder them or to prevent them from being Filipinos. That is America’s bargain with its immigrants: don’t have too much of a conscience of your heritage, or you will be met with the genocidal force of the state. It is the state that has encouraged first-generation immigrants to not teach their languages to their children, in hopes of making them American, thereby destroying cultural memory in the process. That is the real cost of the melting pot, and a cost that Raissa, or the film, never really thinks about having to pay. Indeed you suspect that Dreamworks denies that cost at all.
But there is a part of me that thinks that Rodriguez simply hasn’t really considered the reality of the Filipino diaspora, and indeed the Philippines itself. It is perhaps correct that it is impossible for the idea of an American and the idea of a Filipino simply cannot coincide as the former is intent on destroying the latter - but Filipino-Americans actually exist. Some are half-white, like me, and some are half-Black, like H. E. R., who voices Jo. If I’m not Filipino-American, what am I, exactly? I am reminded of my friend Nathan Goldwag’s left-liberal reinterpretation of Margaret Thatcher’s quote “There is no such thing as society:” the ideologies and conceptual frameworks we devise to explain the world may be useful, but they ultimately don’t exist. What does exist is people.
Did you know? I pilfered much of the architecture of this essay, including the sprinkling of trivia, from my friend and colleague Arturo Serrano’s (frankly, far better) essay about his feelings about Encanto as a Colombian. I worry that this isn't as good because, being second-generation, not speaking Tagalog, and not having been to the Philippines, I don't have as good of a grasp of the culture as he has on his.
And what does exist, rather than an abstract conception of nationhood, is a real nation, a nation of over seven thousand islands, a nation named after a foreign king, a nation called the Philippines, inhabited by people called Filipinos. Raissa sees the opportunity that the Philippines sees in the world. Jo sees how the world can threaten the Philippines’ conception of itself. It is through the interaction between the two (or if you want to be pretentious, the Hegelian dialectic between the two) that has produced, and currently defined, this real nation called the Philippines, and the real people called Filipinos. The Philippines is not a bug frozen in amber, but rather a process, a perpetual becoming that never stops changing. That is what Jo and Raissa discover, to their ultimate joy, and ours.
Did you know? Political scientist Benedict Anderson called the nation an ‘imagined community.’
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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
