There is a street in Quezon City where right smack in the middle is an old tree. In paving the road, nobody had dared uproot it. Not the road builders, not the city engineers, least of all the people in the neighborhood. The tree has stayed there, right in the middle, for the longest time. It is thought to harbor spirits. When you point it out to residents, they just shrug their shoulders. It’s nothing unusual to them. It’s just the way it is. Ganyan ang Pinoy.
What makes the Filipinos do what they do? Much of their way of thinking and doing seems contradictory or illogical but if you understand the wellspring of the Filipino, you will come to understand this paradox and self-contradiction in their strange behavior.
But who will pave the way to deeper understanding? Through no fault of their own, older generations have not done enough to make the past interesting, riveting and entrancing for their offsprings.
I started uncovering this heritage on my own years ago. The more I read and dug into the past, the more my mind got opened to the past and the more greatly my understanding found itself enriched about the kind of culture that the Filipinos had before the Spanish colonizers came to our shores and stayed for good. Today we look at ethnic communities as relics of the past, sort of relegated to the margin of civilized contemporary Filipino society, nothing to do with us. They’re a thing of the past, good to look at or read about but irrelevant to our lives today and tomorrow.
We cannot be more wrong. The values they have can also be found in the most modern Filipino who resides in the most modern city. Many are as ingrained in us as in the Bagobo kid in Mindanao down South or as in the Ifugao farmer up in the mountains of Northern Philippines.
They are not obsolete or dead values. They are part of what defines us as a people. They give us clues as to why we act the way we do now. They can tell us what seems to be not right, wayward, distorted or dysfunctional about our contemporary Filipino society. For many of these values are the basic building blocks that have formed our cultural DNA and to dismiss them outright as garbage is to cut off the root of our tree we call the Filipino race.
The struggle to bridge my old identity with an emerging one has caused me to go back to the bone piles of our ancestors’ wisdom, a constant basis for inspiration. In some ways, I believe we are all being tested. The big question seems to be, what can we learn from each other? Westerners can learn from their Filipino sisters and brothers how to use rituals, sacred spaces and the power of the ancestors, as well as how to build trust among themselves and the importance of creating strong motherhood and brotherhood and bayanihan. Fil-Americans or Fil-Canadians can learn from their Filipino brothers the importance of nurturing and preserving their ancestry and culture. In our attempt to reach out to each other, it is crucial to note several factors that continue to keep us apart: the media, colonialism, and an absence of facts about each other. So many misconceptions about the average Filipinos are brought on by the mainstream media, and we, in turn, perpetuate them. The colonial brainwashing of Asian peoples to believe that the white race is superior has led many of us, even today, to choose to think of ourselves as white and, therefore, better than native Filipinos. We need to learn to grieve together and learn about each other, and discover each other’s world. We need to cultivate awareness of ourselves, of each other and of the world. We need to take pride in our history and stand tall on the shoulders of our ancestors.
I want to go back to the primordial stream of our culture as far as I can go. Then I will do my best to make my discovery of the past not only fascinating and engaging but also vividly relevant to us. Make a connection between what we were and what we are and in street speak, make the past “come alive.” To explain how they have shaped the facets of our world and will continue to inform the future; to understand the basics of our behavior; to provide an ancient window. Take a journey back into the wellspring of rich cultural heritage upon which to draw some refreshing insights. To deepen our understanding of the resources our tradition provides, as well as fail to provide—for enabling us to think and to cope about problems we are currently facing. Why we respond the way we do to our problems.
Filipinos pride themselves in being able to blend into any culture, wherever they may work or reside. The Filipino culture is a mixable and receiving culture. There is a vulnerable side to this, though. Filipino youngsters, growing up in foreign countries and easily making friends in their polyglot communities, are dressing in hip-hop clothing and shedding Tagalog, the leading dialect in the Philippines. As one Filipino father rues, “Our kids have nothing to hold on to. We blend in so well with other groups, we forget we’re Filipino.”
Helping them look at the world from a native viewpoint, and adding native perspective should help Fil-Ams or Fil-Canadians make connections between their world and the mother country.
We must not allow our children born in foreign lands to be completely whitewashed. We cannot allow the West to break down their Filipino identity and assimilate them into Anglo-Saxon culture 100 percent. We need to lead them back and drink from the wellspring of our culture. Learn our story. Find our power. Understanding that Filipino native wisdom can hold its own next to western world canon can foster a sense of pride and help ensure that traditional ancient wisdom will always be fresh and contemporary and passed down to future generations.
There is new interest in the plight of people who have left their homes in Asia and are now seeking to return to their roots. They strive to renew their ties with their homeland that is caught between the islands of Asian diaspora and the circuits of globalism.
Going back to that old tree in the middle of a paved street, that’s the Filipino culture, with deep roots that can’t be uprooted. Right in the middle of the modern, scientific, and progressive world.
I hope that people would stop saying: “Why can’t Filipinos be like the rest of the world.” I look forward to the day when I would hear: Why can’t the rest of the world be like the Filipinos?