My friend Teri has an article in the latest Ricepaper, titled Between Representations: Filipinos in Canadian Literature. Teri’s one of my favourite writers so I am always eager to read anything she writes, but I was especially excited to read this.
She and I are both half-Filipino, and have talked in the past about how we express that in our writing. For my part, I’d say about half of my stories have either fully Filipino or half-Filipino characters in them, but for the most part they’re still pretty “Canadian,” which is a term that I personally find fairly fluid, depending on who’s using it.
In the article, Teri writes about the difficulty in finding portrayals of Filipinos in Canadian writing that go beyond the usual nanny or maid cliché, or address it in a deeper way. With my own characters, I wonder sometimes if having these first-generation Canadians of Filipino background is enough. Shouldn’t they be doing something more? And then I can’t think of what that could possibly be. Do I want to have the characters in there to teach the world about pancit, or maybe about the cultural repercussions of hundreds of years of Spanish rule followed by a shorter period of American influence? Or do I want to have them just there playing their parts in the story, being a little bit Filipino and a little bit other things, like me and all the other first-generation people I know? Maybe having them just there is enough, maybe it’s more than enough right now.
I don’t have an easy answer to these questions, but I do know that not having these characters in there at all seems weird and wrong to me, and I like having them, these little blips of a world that some people might not know too much about.
Anyway, I didn’t intend for this to be a huge post about myself. I highly recommend picking up a copy of Ricepaper and reading Teri’s article! You can order print and digital copies here if you can’t find any in your local bookstore.