A writer’s letter to her younger self on embracing her Filipino roots.
You are eight years old when you first try to scrub the melanin off your toes, still blissfully unaware that melanin can’t be scraped away but instead lives inside of you. You had just finished playing piko (or hopscotch) outside as your hands and feet got dirty. Now in the shower you use an old toothbrush to clean your toes and get them back to tip-top shape. If “tip top” meant appearing lighter in tone and slightly pink instead of their natural sun-kissed brown.
You do this to be just like your titas and ates who always come back with their cuticles looking a little flushed after getting their nails done. You later learn it’s the merthiolate, an antiseptic containing mercury, that creates that look on their hands — rosy and blushing, like they’re sensitive to touch, more like a white person’s.
These same titas show you how to massage your nose: to pinch your bridge with the tips of your thumb and index finger, encouraging it to grow taller and more pronounced. “Do it while your bones are still soft,” they say. “So that you won’t be as pango (flat-nosed) when you get older.” You massage your nose through your early teenage years, often after cutting your own bangs to look just like Hallie and Annie from The Parent Trap. White girl hair, check. Nose, still working on it.
By the time you’re 12, you use Eskinol, a popular facial whitening toner sold at the local Filipino market in Los Angeles, your new home where you’ve recently immigrated. It smells like alcohol and stings like alcohol but hey, the bottle says using it two times a day will lighten your skin. Dirt from the playground rubs off on the Eskinol-soaked cotton balls and you’re convinced it is working. Your color really is coming off.
In hindsight, you can’t quite remember when exactly you started trying to look white, but there was a time when you didn’t. A time when you hadn’t yet understood the latent colorism behind being called nognog (a derogatory term for people with dark skin) by your cousins after swimming. A time when you were still too innocent to know that beauty was a currency that could get you inside certain, powerful rooms, or that beauty meant being fair-skinned and having dimples and a pointy nose.
Slowly you begin to question it all. The whitening toners, the nose massages, the ever-present urgings to try and present as anything but Filipino. You begin to ask yourself why, in a culture as storied and rich as yours, where the land is a tropical archipelago composed of over 7,000 islands surrounded by the sea and bathed in strong sunlight, did your titas, your lolas, and every woman and girl around you electively decide that to be beautiful meant to look as unlike yourselves as possible? As un-Filipino as possible? Eventually you learn the answer: centuries of colonization by the United States and Spain. Our occupiers viewed us as less human and beautiful. Over time we internalized their prejudices and started to believe them.
Finally, a fissure begins to form. You notice when you’re trying to change your appearance. You start spending more time in the sun again without caring if your complexion turns a shade or two darker. You welcome the shift as it happens, thankful for your skin’s ability to withstand the sun’s rays without burning or peeling the following day. You notice how lovely cream and ivory look against your rich, brown hue, and make a note to look for a dress in that color.
You forget all about the shape of your nose and instead learn to breathe in everything around you. The smell of wet grass in LA, long missed after an extended and worrying drought. The smell of your partner’s cologne which brings you right back to your first date. The smell of durian harvested from the land you grew up on, ripe and ready for the whole family to dig into.
At 35, you understand that beauty isn’t about having a tall nose or fair skin. You’ve been in the presence of enough women now to realize that some of the most beautiful care the least about how they appear, like your mom’s cousin, whose dark complexion and curvy figure are far from meeting Filipino beauty standards yet whose vibrant energy and love for herself brighten every room. You learn that the most arresting women don’t shift themselves to accommodate others. They radiate beauty simply by being at ease in their skin.
Now as you near your 40s, you find comfort in the fact that despite all of the ways you tried to erase proof of yourself and where you come from, you never really succeeded.
Always yours,
Patricia
Patricia Lagmay is a stylist and art director living in Los Angeles. Read about how the curly girl method changed one’s writers hair — and self-confidence.
