Searching for home
What my Filipino food event taught me about being Filipino
Hours ago, I finished co-hosting a series of Filipino food pop-up dinners in Washington, D.C., with Manila-born Chef Yana Gilbuena, a 33-year-old nomad who travels the world cooking the food of her heritage for others. In five meals — four dinners and one brunch — she cooked foods from a self-published coloring book I wrote and illustrated, The Little Filipino Food Coloring Book, while I played host at the front of the house, greeting guests as they arrived.
When I first reached out to Chef Yana on Twitter and decided to collaborate on an event, I didn’t think much about what was driving me to do it. I just thought, I made a coloring book and now this amazing chef wants to cook some dishes from it. Awesome.
But over the course of the event, deeper motivations began to unfold.
Before the first dinner even started on Thursday night, Chef Yana had me peeling green papaya for atchara, deveining shrimp and setting out banana leaves on plastic folding tables. At the meal, I doled out ice cream scoops of garlic fried rice, explaining to newbies to the cuisine that it was a common way Filipinos like to serve their leftover rice. And I got to know the guests as they colored my drawings of siopao and mechado with markers and crayons: How did they find out about the event? Had they ever had Filipino food before? Did they know what it tasted like? Were they ready to eat with their hands?
“How was it?” my friend Alison asked me on Gchat the next day while I was at the office, counting down the hours until the next dinner service at 6:30 p.m.
“I felt like I was really living,” I told her.
And that what it was like for the remainder of the event. I was living. I was using my hands in the kitchen. I was learning so much about Filipino food, culture and folklore from Chef Yana, who regaled me with stories of the Filipinos she met in the far corners of Mexico and the World War II history of our country’s beloved banana ketchup.
And I was meeting Filipinos from across the DMV region.
I was excited to bump into Pinoys who came from Cerritos, my hometown in Southern California. In the eight years of living in D.C., I had never met any. And in less than 72 hours, I met a handful of them. It was an instant connection. Don’t you miss Guppy Tea House? I asked them. Which street did you live on? Do we have any friends in common? Turns out one of them went to the high school in my neighborhood and knew my little sister.
As a half-Egyptian, I was shocked that the event brought in other half-Filipinos. On Friday night, during a meal of salmon heads and sinigang, I met three women who were hapa: one was half-Dutch, one was half-white and another half-Lebanese. I never met such a high concentration of half-Filipinos in my life. We talked about which culture we identified with more, whether people could tell we were Filipino, and what it was like growing up with both cultures.
We also talked about the feeling of needing to overcompensate our Filipino-ness by playing up our culture in our daily lives because we didn’t “pass” as full Filipinos.
For a long time I thought it was a bad thing. If I was a true Filipino, I thought, I wouldn’t need to make a big show of explaining why I didn’t wear shoes around the house or telling my friends about my huge Filipino family in California. But after speaking to these women and a few other fell0w halfies at the pop-up, I realized this identity crisis was a common sentiment amongst us hapas. And being half-Filipino was a completely valid part of the Filipino experience. Filipinos have a history of marrying into other cultures, long before Spanish colonialism and American influence. Yet their children have still been able to gain acceptance as fellow Pinoys in Philippine society.
And last night, at the fifth and last dinner — while giving a thank you toast to our guests with Chef Yana — I finally understood why I wanted to do the pop-up in the first place: Perhaps all along I was searching for home.
I had been living on the East Coast for nearly 12 years. I married the love of my life, who just so happened to be a white Southerner from Tennessee. I met an incredible group of friends. But as my Egyptian cousin Reham pointed out at a New Year’s Eve party this year, “Where are all your brown friends?” she asked. I knew she was kidding, but she was half serious. “I don’t have any,” I confessed.
I’ve made more connections to local Filipinos in the last three days than I can count on my hands. I met Gem, a Filipino history professor at the University of Maryland. He’s invited me to attend one of his lectures in the fall. I met Dennis, a volunteer at the pop-up who teaches traditional Filipino dancing on the side and seems to have his finger on the pulse of every major Filipino-American event happening in the area. And I met Paolo, a chef who hosts his own monthly Filipino food pop-up dinner at his home in D.C. I found my community by engaging my community.
My uncle who helped raised me, Tito Maro, flew into D.C. from Los Angeles for the weekend. I wanted him — one of the people I dedicated my coloring book to and the person who taught me mostly everything I know about Filipino food — to witness the event.
“Look around,” I told him, motioning to a full communal table of 30 brunch guests. “All these people, all this food, this whole event: This is the result of the seeds you planted. This is the result of your influence.”
