Abby

So, what is Filipino food? What does it mean to me, and what memories do I have of it? What have I learned from my cooking lessons and this project?

These questions have laid behind my project even as I thought the answer could be easily imparted to me with my Titas’ wisdom. Like the sense of Filipino identity in the diaspora, it evades easy encapsulation. It represents the life of my family in the Philippines, a life that I have always wondered about but could never experience. But it begins to seem that my Titas find it hard to define what is Filipino. Tita Nette remembers burns while frying fish, beheading chickens, and goto at funerals. Tita Ria has no association of goto at funerals, but she remembers shared drives to school and pungently sour sinigang. Tita Marcia’s Visayan sinigang is not to her taste. Tita Angie remembers Filipino food as it was in the US, at family parties, or with her husband and daughter. 

Dana Collins, in her chapter in Halo-Halo Ecologies, calls this “an imagined homeland:” (p.39) the romanticized landscape of the mythical Philippines from where comes the “authentic” Filipino food. This imagined homeland produces a national rather than regional conception of Filipino food, despite the rich cultural diversity of the Philippines. It inspires a chronic anxiety in Filipinos in the diaspora that their food, and, by extension, they, are somehow inauthentic because of their disconnect from that homeland. Every person I asked to teach me to cook expressed some form of doubt of their abilities. “Why me?” they asked. And while they were quick to praise the skills of their sisters, they faltered in a personal pride. Their dwindling connection, and my struggle to create connection, betray an insecurity stemming from culinary nationalism and a deeper longing from the diaspora to find somewhere to fit. 

Collins’ article includes several snippets of interviews from Filipino restauranteers in Los Angeles. Isa’s story resonated with me: “My parents’ generation… wanted to be accepted and blend in…. Their goal was to leave that country to make a better life for themselves here. Somewhere down the line, they were taught that the way to make a life here was to be American, whatever that meant.” (p.45)  Her chefs echoed the sentiment that I had felt from my family all my life – parents who did everything they could to assimilate, and children who were chronically insecure in their cultural identity. “Homeland is their heritage and a place for which they hold pride, but it is also an imagined space where they were not born or grew up and where some have never visited.” (p.45) Although I am trying to learn Tagalog, to learn Filipino history, and to cook the food, I will never be a native Filipino. I think my mom is proud that I am a born and raised American, but there is still that part of her that feels disconnected from my completely different upbringing, just as I struggle to understand her. It’s why she pushed me to learn Tagalog when I showed off my German skills. 

I have learned that Filipino food is not just lumpia and pancit. It is goto, sinigang, menudo, kare kare, and much much more. I have learned that sometimes, Filipino food is just food, as much as any other kind of food, with its own memories and tastes. It is a reminder of a tough life, an unnecessarily complicated process standing over an unsafe stovetop. It is a bowl of rice with dried fish and a little bit of salt, something to get you through the week. I have also learned that it is a lifeline to a homeland that exists in memory, a source of identity and nutrition. Sometimes, it is the only thing that can settle your stomach. It is a cuisine that you want your children to grow up on. It is something that is served at parties and get-togethers, something that tastes like family. It is the product of hard work and a deep love, assembled to feed the mouths that mean the most to you. It is the most natural thing in the world, something that you crave just as you did when you were a child. 

I have learned that there is no one right way to cook Filipino food. This semester, I took a Filipino language class at college. Once, we had a cooking session, learning to cook adobo and sinigang. This adobo had potatoes in it, which I hadn’t seen before. The sinigang was made with fish, not pork like I thought. It tasted different from the food I remembered. I recognized the dish, but it didn’t inspire the same memories as the food I grew up with. To me, Filipino food is inextricably linked with my own childhood, with what I grew up eating at family parties but never outside of that. So, like everyone else, my understanding of Filipino food is really a reflection of my own memories, emotions, and attachments. In this way, I don’t think I’m too different from my Titas. 

I will take these recipes with me to the future, where I can share them with others. To my cousins, I hope you enjoy cooking these recipes and I hope they bring you good memories.