The heirlooms in our bones

in

In middle school, we were asked to bring a family heirloom to present to the class. A classmate asked what an heirloom is, and my teacher said it’s something that carried meaning in our family’s story and our history.

Of course, I went straight home to ask my parents. I’m sure they were as confused as me, though they didn’t show it on their faces. They immigrated to the US in the 90s, so this idea of an heirloom might have been foreign. Within a few days, my mom procured her dad’s pocket watch. It was a simple and small gold pocket watch, with a knob to adjust the time. It was big in my hands, small and precious in hers, but it never felt cold.

“Would this work?”

I said ok, though I wasn’t sure. This presentation was for English class, but I didn’t have the words to say it wasn’t quite right. School doesn’t prepare you to have conversations like that anyway. I took it with me, wrapped in its original pouch, housed in its original box, in the deepest part of my schoolbag. I couldn't afford losing it.

When the time came, I presented:

This pocket watch belonged to my grandpa. He was an airport mechanic from the Philippines who fixed planes for the US on Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. I never met him, and he died of leukemia a few years before I was born. His service helped my family get US citizenship, and this pocket watch is one he brought with him during his work.

My mom asked me what my grade was later. It was a B. Maybe. I don’t remember because I thought the assignment was weird and innately knew it wasn’t what my teacher was looking for. As an adult, I feel grief. That grade must have felt like rejection—of my mom’s personal history, and in it, her own grief.

 —

Immigrating to the US requires sacrifice. For my parents, it meant giving up their pasts and the lives they’d built, for a future—for us.

But what are the rules of that sacrifice? What parts of your culture do you give up to assimilate properly? What parts do you keep to survive? You can only bring what you can carry. The people you’re leaving behind won’t know what you need. The new people you meet might not understand what is valuable, what is necessary, from your old life. The most thrilling and terrifying thing is that you get to decide.

This is most deeply exemplified in the language we lost. My parents knew English, which made their assimilation easier. They learned it in college. Dad expanded his vocabulary with crosswords, Mom through her own work as a marketing executive. Their words never sound accented to us, until someone pointed it out. As children, we laughed at Tagalog. Not out of malice or mockery, but as children do. New sounds are new playmates, fun and exciting until they’re as familiar as your family.

Fun to us might have looked like shame to them. My mom says we always laughed, so we were never taught and we never learned. I see now that what was safe in our own home was a symbol of otherness outside. My parents left comfortable lives to give us more potential in our futures. If speaking English meant our family’s success, then we would be the blank slates they practiced on.

It was just another offering to the American dream.

 —

We found ways to our culture in different ways. Food is the obvious way, but in so many other unnamed ways too. Counting them doesn’t make me more or less Filipino, but I know that there are parts of it in me.

The legacies of our families don’t live in the items passed through generations. Families like ours, from countries deeply and perpetually altered by imperialism and colonialism, don’t get to carry material proof of our stories. Our stories are kept safe within us, breathing with us, dying with us.

Our stories are intertwined with our survival, as fundamental as the DNA that binds us.

My father’s grandfather is a Katipunero. The Katipunan was a society of Filipinos who rejected and revolted against Spanish imperial rule. Their success led to the First Philippine Republic, which would later fall to the US in the Philippine-American War. Katipunero kept fighting against this colonization. Even if they failed, they fought. His father, with his hands, would build the Manila municipal buildings, and then the main street of Baguio, where the US Clark Airforce base would be built.

My mother’s family nurtured acres of farmland and the people who lived on them. My grandmother was a teacher, ironically, an English teacher. My grandfather’s work helped them build a business that would support our family and community’s survival. Their farmlands helped them get through Japanese occupation, and martial law enacted by the Marcos regime. My grandfather’s leukemia is undoubtably a result of the US atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands.

Both my parents lived through martial law, and deeply understand the cost of revolution and the privileges of survival. Their own stories of loss and life have influenced my upbringing and my views. What single item could dare to represent the myriad of experiences that make us?

—

Families like ours have a unique position, straddled between past and present; what is and what could have been. If my parents had simply chosen to stay in the Philippines, our lives would be so different. My family has survived because of hard work and because of luck. I often think about how different my life could have been without either. We have developed a gift to hold multiple truths alive within us and see it around us.

The legacy of nurturers, of revolutionaries, of builders, of writers lives in me. It doesn't live in the weapons they used or the tools they used. It lives in the lives they affected and the people they raised. My words can keep these stories safe. For me, and for anyone who could love my family too.

If someone should ever ask for an heirloom again, I'll tell them it's in my bones, deep like the marrow within them. And, better than any object, they can ask me what our story is.

Shut Down Red Hill Fuel Tanks

in

Before this begins, please support community-led mutual aid efforts on Venmo:
@ShutdownRedHillMutualAid

Red Hill
is not named
for the decrepit fuel tanks
rusting above a life-giving aquifer
in service of American conquest,
finished only in history books. 

It is not named
for the rashes that swell on innocent bodies
pumped with diluted gas;
countless futures poisoned by drinking water.

It is not named
for the Navy's blood-stained hands,
eager to wring out more,
as it tightens its grip on our island's throat.

We will not let murderers define this place
with their legacy of casual atrocities.
They use their fuel to gaslight us,
their apathy dripping
from their tanks through our taps.

But as long our bodies hold breath,
we will not suffocate in silence.

Kapūkakī
is where hills glow with dirt,
Red with the same iron that
binds breath to our blood. 

Kapūkakī
is where water drips through
ancient mountains pathways
Ready to sustain us with its generosity.  

Kapūkakī
is filled with countless stories
passed from heart to ear.
Stories I have yet to learn,
and perhaps some we might never hear.   

We will not let Kapūkakī be another place
defined by military casualties.

We will take up each other up in arms
and scream
and shout and
resist
until their indifference turns into shame,
and justice returns to this land,
and it rests peacefully
in Hawaiians hands.

__

I couldn’t sleep for a few nights last week because this was weighing on me heavily, and I felt compelled to write. I am pretty nervous sharing it.

Some things I read to learn about Kapūkakī.

Kapūkakī from Ka Wai Ola
Kapūkakī from Office of Hawaiian Affairs

I recognize that many locals know it as Red Hill, and it is commonly known as that. I was compelled to use Kapūkakī, because I wanted to use its Hawaiian name, one that recognizes it’s a whole area that encompasses an entire ecosystem and stories. I didn’t want to use the name associated with fuel tanks. I hope that intent was clear.

It can’t do justice to the rage that Native Hawaiian people feel towards the illegal annexation and militarism that has extended US imperialism into this century. Maybe this is a hot take, but many of the US bases on Pacific island nations are akin to modern day colonies.

I love Hawaii and I’m so lucky to call it home. But I recognize the grave injustices against Hawaii’s land and people. While I cannot be there, I offer up this writing as a call to action for those who are home and can be present in ways I can’t.

If you can help in anyway, please support community-led mutual aid on Venmo: @ShutdownRedHillMutualAid