“LA Travel Log” : An Inadvertant History

Unfortunately, or fortunately, my weekend trip to LA was canceled. Due to this, I cannot regale you with any amusing stories of that sea of asphalt and neon. Instead, I’ll be taking you on a journey back in time, to my recent travels through Asia.

TO.BE.CONTINUED…

[im putting this entry on hiatus now, to let my boyfriend use the computer for work stuff. i'll be going through my trip notes and i'll be back to write more later.]

After rummaging through the myriad of receipts and scraps of paper that I wrote my vacation notes on, I didn’t know where to start. A while later, in the shower, I realized that the true beginning is my present situation. So here it is.

People often find me culturally disappointing. When someone of another ethnicity finds out that I am Filipino and French, they invariably attempt to speak to me in whatever bits of French or Filipino that they know. Unfortunately, I usually can’t understand them. I speak four languages in varying levels of fluency; English, Spanish, Japanese, and Chinese, none of which are related to my ethnicity. The plain explanation for this is that although I love languages, neither French nor Tagalog (now techically known as Filipino) was accessible to me. Neither of my parents speak a language other than English, and I have no other relatives in the United States except my aunt, who lives in LA and only speaks English, and an uncle who is institutionalized in another part of the country. My father and his immediate family came alone to Redwood City from the Philippines, and my mother hitch-hiked to California from Canada. I believe that family is an undeniable factor in the creation and understanding of one’s identity, and my lack of relatives or culture to identify with has contributed to the identity crisis that is now plaguing me. Part of my reason for traveling to Asia this past year was to discover more about my heritage on my father’s side, and hopefully to get closer to finding my own identity.