An Education
& more reasons why, and I can't say this enough, representation matters
In October 2020, the movie Yellow Rose made its theatrical release across the nation. While still in the middle of a pandemic — and after days and days of going back and forth in my mind about whether or not to go — I decided to, essentially, risk my life to watch it. Written and directed by Diane Paragas (Filipina American) and starring Broadway’s Eva Noblezada (Filipina and Mexican American), Yellow Rose is the first Filipino-led film backed by a major American studio. Its story centers on an undocumented mother and daughter duo living in Texas. Rose, played by Noblezada, is an aspiring country music singer-songwriter with big dreams and even bigger talent. Their world gets turned upside down when Rose’s mother, played by the renowned Filipina actress Princess Punzalan, finds her fate at the hands of ICE. It’s a beautiful story about self-discovery and navigating identity in spaces where one doesn’t exactly “fit in.” Needless to say, I cried the entire time.
Watching Yellow Rose was the first time in a long time I felt seen in a big picture film. Even if I couldn’t entirely relate to Rose’s specific hardships, there is a piece for every Filipina American to connect to. Like, when Rose’s aunt, played by the iconic Lea Salonga, sings Dahil Sa’yo — basically the I Will Always Love You of the Philippines — I damn lost my mind. In the 20 year gap between Yellow Rose and 2001’s The Debut, we’ve had little to no representation of our stories told in mainstream media. We’ve only had our resilience and determination to rely on, finding web shorts or indie releases by word-of-mouth. Needless today, Yellow Rose was a big fucking deal.
Asian-Americans, in general, have had to fish in the deep waters of entertainment just to find small pockets of ourselves. Luckily, we now have shows like Fresh Off The Boat, PEN15, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (whose showrunners made it a point to get a Thanksgiving food spread right), and most recently, the new reboot of The Baby-Sitters Club (where we get a fantastic Claudia Kishi story line). Of course, there’s also The Good Place, where we’ve got Manny Jacinto playing a flat out dipshit who…just happens to be Filipino. Last year, Twitter did its thing (as it always does) and exposed some of the most racist, Anti-Asian / Anti-semitic tweets from the show’s producer, Megan Amram. I then realized that Jacinto’s entire subplot was completely informed by her xenophobic misconceptions, maybe even pointedly at Filipinos. Message received, bitch (also, your show sucks).
When Crazy Rich Asians came out in 2018, I saw it in theaters three times. Yes, three. I experienced a new set of firsts back then: 1. paying to see a movie more than once (mind you, sans MoviePass, R.I.P.), and 2. actually seeing a movie where basically 99% of its actors were Asian. Each time I saw it, the theater was completely full. A stark contrast to the theater I was in when watching Yellow Rose, where empty seats surrounded me as I ugly cried into my mask and sweater sleeves, and just a handful of people (mostly Filipino) in attendance scattered feet away to give me reassurance that I was not alone in my feelings. I thought, “if this weren’t the time we were living in, how full would this theater be?” Crazy Rich Asians was such a global success and was even said to have paved many more paths for our AAPI voices to be shared and heard in our generation (shoutout to The Farewell and Minari). May I remind you that the last blockbuster success starring Asians was The Joy Luck Club in 1993 — a whopping 25 years of invisibility in mainstream entertainment.
What happened in 2018 was a collective realization across Asian-American communities. We got so used to not seeing faces that looked like ours, that when we finally did, the surrealness of it was almost numbing. We needed more, deserved more, and demanded more — the proof was right in front of us. Despite Asians having the second-highest rate of movie-going (behind the Latinx community), we represent only 1% of lead roles and 4.8% of speaking roles in Hollywood films, according to GoldOpen. The cold truth is that because the gatekeepers of the industry are predominately white (and by “predominately” I mean almost exclusively), the chances of us getting our stories greenlit become far too slim and explains why shows like Girls and Emily In Paris get the support and accolades they scam themselves into getting.
The last few weeks have been particularly painful for Asian-Americans. I don’t have to tell you about the rise in the number of hate crimes because that brutal percentage has already been imprinted over and over again in our brains and our feeds. I don’t have to tell you that this really isn’t new, but rather an escalation because of the defamatory language surrounding COVID. I don’t have to tell you that this is not just happening here in the U.S., but in places like the U.K. and Madrid. I don’t have to tell you that maybe all of this is white supremacy at play or an apparent confirmation that not enough people (outside the AAPI community) give a shit.
Before I go any further, let me be clear that when “us” is used, that often doesn’t really entail all of us. No, the “us” by Hollywood and mass media standards isn’t the same “us” that includes all Asians. Because the “us” that we typically see represented is usually that of East Asian descent. So, where does that leave Filipinos? For me, the answer is a feeling of being “othered” within an already “othered” category. Simply, whiteness at work.
When I was growing up in the ‘90s, the only AAPI history I learned about was a brief mention of the Chinese railroad workers. During my sophomore year in college, it was the Japanese internment camps. Last year, as a 31 year-old, the intricacies of Philippine colonization. Our history, as Asians and especially Filipinos, doesn’t get passed down to us unless we seek it or are surrounded by elders who fully understand it themselves. For those like myself, whose family grew up under a heavy influence of American culture in the Philippines, the way ahead was not completely rooted in our heritage (outside of food and learning traditional folk dance) but rather assimilation in order to survive. White supremacy permeated itself in the Asian community for hundreds of years and it reveals itself to this day by way of anti-Black and self-hating rhetoric. I listened to a podcast recently where a Filipina DJ revealed being an eighth Irish, yet rounds up to a full half to — and I’m paraphrasing here — “give the people what they want.” Of course, I’m in no place to tell someone how they should identify but prioritizing whiteness over your predominant ethnicity is…………a choice.
The way whiteness works in Asian spaces is so deeply rooted that we often forget that we have our own histories to study, embrace, and be proud of. I’ve heard countless stories of Asian and Pacific Islander parents suppressing their hard truths of the homeland in order to move on and start a new life in the states. Understandable, yet another reason why many AAPI’s do not get exposed to our own stories. Instead, the whitewashed version of U.S. history gets shoved in our throats, we succumb to the model minority myth, and uphold anti-Blackness by lightening our skin, pinching our noses, and, oh, idk…offering a $25,000 reward for tips leading to the arrest of a suspect as if more policing will solve anything (newsflash: it won’t). I have to think if this could possibly be a reason for the othering of Asians from the overall anti-racism discourse, and even more so, othering Filipinos within the Asian narrative — so visibly brown, yet so invisibly acknowledged.
While Filipino nurses make 4% of the nursing workforce, they constitute nearly one-third of nursing deaths due to COVID and are not at all represented in entertainment. In a recent piece, Anthony Ocampo asks the brilliant question, “Why Are There No Filipino Nurses on Medical TV Shows?” The short answer:
Racism, obviously. But a deeper dive reveals that from creation to casting, there’s a lack of awareness in the television industry of who Filipinos are and how they fit into the American racial landscape—as well as an unwillingness to reimagine what Filipino American stories can offer.
There’s been a recent uptick of Asian storytelling via none other than my favorite medium: reality TV (fight me). Earlier, I mentioned how the success of Crazy Rich Asians presents it self today, where we now have several shows taking this exact formula and finding actual examples of how this very specific lifestyle plays out IRL (again, a clear example of how the dominant media thinks we’re a monolith when we most certainly are not). House of Ho is one that caught my attention in particular. It centers a Vietnamese-American family in Houston, Texas with a rich backstory of immigrant, refugee parents raising their first-gen children. As a stamp of American pride, they named their children after U.S. presidents (all but one, their daughter Judy…lol). Now remember, we all grew up reading similar textbooks with the same whitewashed curriculum, so it’s no wonder that the tradition carries on in the Ho household with the grandkids. Aside from the subtle hilarity of it all, I had to think about something deeper that’s going on here (because it’s in my nature to ruin the potential innocence of this whole thing). Had we been taught in grade school about Roosevelt signing the executive order to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans during WWII, or McKinley seizing control of the Philippines and pushing for its further colonization…would this family’s penchant to be named after these white men have changed? Would the tradition have existed at all?
The discourse happening across many Asian-American communities is the simple message to “pay attention to us” or “show up for us.” The fact of the matter is, how can we force people to care, even those within the AAPI diaspora, when many of us aren’t showing up for each other to begin with? The conversation has been hyper-focused on our elders, but how would the reaction change if it weren’t? Both Black Asians are and South Asians are almost entirely erased, marginalized, and deemed out of scope from the narrative. Questions of whether or not it’s time for Filipinos to separate from the umbrella arise, yet I’m still out here with a belief that, despite where we’ve failed to really come together as one, complete camaraderie is still possible (remember how I watched Crazy Rich Asians three times???). Alas, all fingers point to white supremacy.
Over the holidays, I made it a point to watch Yellow Rose (now on demand) with my family. As we gathered in my mom’s kitchen, our communal choice of preference, the movie played and I paid close attention to their reactions. I wanted them to feel just as seen as I was, the first time I watched it just months prior. A few minutes in, my Lolo (‘grandfather’ in Tagalog) — after some explanation of the plot and using the ultimate selling point of having both homeland faves, Lea and Princess, on screen — retorted, “Who would want to watch this?” He was completely stunned that any non-Filipino would be interested in seeing our lives and stories in a major Hollywood film. In his 95 years of life, it was completely novel. About halfway through, he then made another comment, but this time about the guitar, “You know your mom used to play? We still have it here.” He disappeared into the basement and 15 minutes later appeared with that very guitar, which he began to strum in complete joy.
That right there, is exactly why we say representation matters.
As if that wasn’t enough to chew on…here is this week’s curated list of stories found across the internet 👇
some favorites from the year (so far)
This Google Doodle celebrating Audre Lorde by artist Monica Ahanonu
Watching Saweetie blissfully review and react to new music from Asia
Raveena serving Limited Too realness in her music video for “Tweety”
Olivia Rodrigo’s very raw performance of “Drivers License” (take heed if watching on your cycle)
NOODLES DIY-ing the shit out of everything on TikTok
Burberry’s unexpectedly, emotionally riveting Chinese New Year spot
This Asian Pacific Portal Meditation by artist Jess X. Snow and scored by Apok
up in my tabs this week
Why justice for anti-Asian violence should not be at the expense of Black people
An incredible piece on the Haenyeo (‘sea women’ in Korean) a.k.a. Grandma Divers a.k.a. my new personal heroines
The case to decolonize bird names (you read that right)
A note to follow more influencers who look like you. Period.
Why I’m now fully invested in Naomi Osaka & Cordae’s relationship
Kehlani gracing the cover of Playboy, beautifully embracing femininity and masculinity
& finally, a reminder to protect our elders
Thanks for reading and for your support. Salamat, as always 🤙
If you know someone who might like this, feel free to send it their way:
You made me cry too! I can very much relate to the story
Excellent Coy, and so very true and an eye opener! I enjoyed reading it! Always looking forward to COY in my mailbox❤️