‘Indonesian? Chinese? Malaysian? Thai?’

It’s baffling how our looks sometimes pin us down to the wrong map, which could turn out to be a good thing—like getting two turkey slices at a recent buffet where friends and I strayed into in Atlantic City. 

They and others who lined up carried back their plates to the table with just one thin slice, hence, their conclusion? The Chinese chef who tended the roast must have mistaken me for a countryman.

Or the right geographical sphere and finding a lift out of ennui as during a long wait to board Jet Blue at SeaTac International airport, where staring at people’s shoes I had not sensed an Asian-looking woman slink by my side, startling me, when she tried to guess, “Indonesian? Chinese? Malaysian? Thai?”

Notice that she left out “Vietnamese”; I suppose she knew I couldn’t be like her the way we do our kababayan. It had seemed to me a formula that works for her because before I could shake my head, she had blurted out with glee, “Filipino!”

With a kababayan, who jab you with, “Saan ka sa atin?”, being ID-ed could thumb-tack one deeper into a map, quite irksome, though, when asked out of context, like by a cashier at Mucho Burrito in Vancouver after she swiped my credit card; or an elderly Filipina who seemed to browse the same canned goods I did at London Drugs for prices—where her incidental comments soon turned pushy.

In both instances, “Ilocos,” for an answer had not been enough; which province and what town, soon followed and a chain of more, as the cashier’s barrage: “Ahh, may mga pinsan ako sa Batac na siguro kilala mo…magkalapit kayo di ba?”

She had rattled off names before I could point out the chasm in miles between Batac and Bacarra. I could have embellished my response with geographical and historical ties by mentioning how the yet-unburied “Great Ilocano” spent part of his childhood in my hometown, where his mother taught and his sister was born. But I held back uncertain how further she would shove me.

My identity as Filipino pegged me for a while in a historical era that, for most, now seems ancient—Marcos’s dictatorship. In bus stops and Vancouver seminars that I used to attend, my experiences of crushed freedom or my opinion on Imelda’s shoes would be kneaded out of me.

I also moved around with an inescapable identity linked to Manny Pacquaio’s wins, none I had watched but whose mother’s singing my sister once clicked on TFC by chance and her fairytale mansion I had ogled at TV Patrol.

But being ID-ed has taken me much relieved beyond both and into culture. At a writing course I took at New York University’s Continuing Education program, a Long Islander circled me out, flashing a pleased-with-myself smile when I confirmed what turned out to be his not-too-wild guess.

When asked how, he said, “Oh, it’s easy…your Spanish name,” leaving out this detail, a woman behind me in a line to the cashier at Safeway once completed—“…and your Oriental looks,” which like most Filipinos made me sneak into a mirror because I do have doubts.

I had not thought of diction in writing as a sonar locator in the map but learned it could be when encouraged by an instructor from San Francisco “to plumb” my memories and write the way these took shape, I unleashed a “distinct voice” that my classmates thought Hispanic.

Rethinking about their perception since, indeed, how could not Spanish colonization of the Philippines—a discovery (or exploration) which proved the earth was round and opened Asia to the West—have molded our spirit that, even if often denied, resonates with the world? My classmates did pin me down on the map so obliquely it had felt rather surprising as a kind of priceless wealth.