"I have been a stranger in a strange land"

The Beaver Moon is supposed to signal a time of reflection, preparation, and gratitude, but the recent super moon was obscured by a leaky, relentless murk of clouds. I could blame the moon's absence for why my disjointed thoughts refused to be prioritized that night as I sat staring blankly at my screen, rain thrumming steadily outside, the heat from my ginger turmeric tea radiating through the ceramic mug to warm my frozen fingers. I could, but the truth is my disjointed thoughts often refuse to be prioritized, regardless of moon phase or visibility.



When I was living in California, where I grew up and spent most of my life, I used to yearn for the kind of weather that made hot tea as much a physical necessity as it is a ceremony.



I have a faraway memory of one brisk autumn day, wandering Downtown San Diego with a likable college art prof. I was maybe 19 or 20. He must have been in his mid-forties. The details of his face have long been blurred by time, though I do recall he had a square jaw and crew cut, dark hair peppered with silver. He walked with a casually confident gait, hands shoved in the pockets of his sport coat except for when he'd point, enthusiastically, to an interesting architectural feature or design element in city planning.



We stopped at a little red brick cafe I'd never been in before and have never gone to since. Across the street, a row of Japanese maples shed brilliant crimson leaves in the wind, something else he noted with enthusiasm. Til that moment, I'd not really given a thought to Japanese maples, but he candidly loved lovely things in a way that made them hard to ignore. 



He began to head inside but I went to sit at a table in the brick patio, where a low concrete wall was all that separated it from the nearby trolley tracks. Before entering the cafe, he addressed me, curiously, "Don't you want a cup of tea or something?"



"I'm good," I replied, "I'm not really thirsty."



"You don't drink tea because you're thirsty," he informed me, in mock dismay of my naïveté. 



He returned with an extra cup of tea for me, anyway. His good-natured verve made his presumptuousness welcome. It's a quality I continue to find appealing when I meet it in other folks.

It's only my second autumn in Washington, so the novelty of half my year characterized by rain and relative cold is something I'm still somewhat enamored by. There's a Japanese maple on the corner of my property that I adore but have no idea how to properly care for, and I've exhausted more boxes of tea in one season here than I did in all my adult years living in California.



I love living in the Pacific Northwest.



I don't know that my internal sense of foreignness will ever completely disappear, though. It's been with me long before this most recent move, long before my several moves up the west coast, since my earliest memories of childhood. My dad enlisted in the U.S. Navy before I was born, and my parents and I emigrated from the Philippines when I was a toddler. My mom says it made her want to cry when I used to entreat, "uwi," which is the Tagalog word for "home." My parents tried to console tiny me with the promise of U.S. citizenship, but of course I was too young to understand what that might mean. 



I've been a United States citizen since I was 13, but naturalization didn't particularly give me the sense of belonging implied by my parents' promise. If anything, it seemed only to highlight that I was too American to be Filipino and too Filipino to be American.



Once, when I was around 8 years old, I was alone in a department store, guarding a shopping cart for my mom while she used the restroom. I was approached by an angry old white man who spat at me, "Go back to Mexico." It was bewildering to be ordered to return to a country I had never been to and certainly wasn't from, and I had no idea what I could have done to provoke such ire from an adult stranger.



I think about these things, sometimes, when I come across news segments about how ICE has abducted people without due process, even deporting children who are citizens by birth. I don't live in fear that I will be picked off the street, but I also can't rule it out as a possibility.



I no longer have much command over Tagalog, and the home my toddler self so viscerally desired to return to no longer exists. That home that I knew briefly, my mom's childhood home: a building on stilts with no climate control or even indoor plumbing, was razed years ago for something more comfortably modern. My maternal grandparents have passed away. The aunties and uncle who used to inhabit the non-existent house and no doubt contributed to my sense of "home" have all moved to California. My family owns the property in the Philippines, still.



I do not belong there.

I won't continue to enumerate the instances that have highlighted my sense of isolation from being suspended between cultures. My experiences are simultaneously unique and common: unique in my perspective, yet common in the sense that everyone has stories about their own alienation. It's easy for me to feel an affinity for people who have shared those stories: other immigrants compelled to assimilate, possessed of conflicting feelings of pride and shame, of shifting identities.



There's a pulchritude in the futile sanguinity with which one attempts to open to another, hoping that other could traverse their impassable psyche. Communication is such a slippery thing. Everyone perceives different shades of meaning. Everyone is wearing a mask.



Sometimes I wake up crying in the middle of the night consumed by the loneliness of this thought.



I'm still grateful for the attempted closeness. It's meaningful when people show up and make space for whatever version of your potentially messy self happens to appear.



So, I hope you show up to Alberta Street Pub Monday evening, if you can. It will be my privilege to open to you at A Strange Salon: an evening of eclectic music and art curated by Stephanie Strange.