Wednesday, April 8, 2020 // The Statement
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Erin White

I

t was a Saturday afternoon. My family had been 
playing mahjong — a complex game in which players 
form sets of matching tiles — for an hour or two and 

we’d just finished a round. We shuffled the tiles for the next 
round, shifting the pink and white pieces around the length 
of the table for a few minutes. I wasn’t really good at the 
game: My brother and I had just recently been introduced to 
all the rules. My hands were still getting used to the feel of 
the tiles’ plastic, smooth against my fingers. As I stacked my 
row of tiles, the blank pink sides facing up, my mom spoke.

“You can pass this on to your children,” she said. 
As I’ve grown older, I’ve thought and worried more about 

the idea of passing on something — like clothes, old dolls, 
recipes — to my own kids in the future. The actual question 
of having kids isn’t necessarily a subject of concern for me 
right now. But, if I were to have kids, I’ve always been afraid 
that I wouldn’t be able to pass an incredibly important aspect 
of culture: language. 

My parents immigrated from the Philippines in the ‘90s. I 

was born in Chicago, which makes me a second-generation 
immigrant. I was raised speaking Cebuano (colloquially 
known as Bisaya), an official language of the Philippines 
that is closely related to Tagalog and mainly spoken in the 
country’s southern regions. We ate traditional Filipino food 
like adobo and lechón, practiced various holiday traditions 
like receiving ang pao — red envelopes — and occasionally 
attended Filipino parties where karaoke was the main event. 
But the presence of Filipino culture overall was lacking. 
Growing up in various states across the American Midwest, 
it wasn’t often that I found Filipino culture in places outside 
our home, save for the occasional trips to Asian grocery 
stores and the few times that I heard snippets of Cebuano 
when we’d go on vacation to New York City or visit our old 
friends in Chicago. Most of my extended family lived in the 
Philippines and those who lived in the United States were 
living in California, Washington or Texas, so any exposure 
to Filipino culture was limited to the confines of my house.

When I was still very young, my parents spoke to me in 

both English and Cebuano, aiming to raise me to be bilingual. 
As young children usually do, I learned quickly, but there 
was a problem: Cebuano and English mixed together in my 
brain and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between 
the two. In preschool, I tried to explain to my teachers that 
my favorite food was pancit — noodles — but 3-year-old 
me didn’t know how to convey that. In another instance, I 
babbled to my babysitter about being sick and throwing up. 
She didn’t understand me, because I kept using the word suka 
— to vomit. I didn’t realize there was an English equivalent. 

After my teachers sat down with me and my parents to 

talk about my tendency to slip from language to language, 
my parents eventually started to use more English around 
me instead of Cebuano. I stopped mixing Cebuano words 
in my sentences. With no other Filipino children like myself 
at school, I hardly spoke the language at all. This isn’t a 
particularly unique situation. Many second-generation 
immigrants lose their ancestral language at some point. 

In fact, according to a study conducted by the Pew 
Research Center, while nine out of 10 second-
generation immigrants are proficient in English, only 
four out of 10 second-generation Asian Americans 
say that they can speak their parents’ native language 
decently.

I didn’t lose my grasp of the language entirely, I just 

kept listening but stopped speaking. I still know the 
words, and can fully understand spoken Cebuano, but 
I can’t speak it. While I can comprehend my mother’s 
instructions for help around the house or my dad’s 
sarcastic commentary on movies, the glottal stops of 
words like tuo feel strange in my mouth and my tongue 
stumbles over the language’s ng sounds. 

I’m stuck, in a way, between being monolingual 

and bilingual. Any conversation with Cebuano that I 
hold now is stilted by the fact that I know what’s being 
said, but I can only respond in English. As I’ve grown 
older, I’ve found myself becoming more aware of how 
this holds me back, especially when I interact with my 
grandmother, whose knowledge of English is present 
but minimal. When I’m with her, there are often so 
many things I want to say, like how my day’s been, or 
that I’ve been working on a cool project at school. But 
there’s no easy way for me to get any of it across to her. 

Due to my lack of fluency in Cebuano, I know I wouldn’t 

be able to pass on my knowledge of the language in the way 
that my parents could, especially with the likelihood of me 
continuing to live in the U.S. or some other English-speaking 
country. I’ve felt guilty about this for some time. Language 
has such an intimate connection to culture and Cebuano 
was one of the few things keeping me close to my Filipino 
roots. While my family still had Filipino-style meals and 
occasionally attended festivals hosted by Filipino-American 
organizations, I felt that language was something indicative 
of true connection to a culture. In some ways, I saw it as a 
tether. 

At the same time, I’ve always questioned how strong of a 

tether I actually have if I can’t even fully speak my parents’ 
language. When I visit my cousins in the Philippines, I can’t 
help but feel a disconnect between us. At times, when we sit 
together for dinner, someone will say something that I don’t 
particularly understand and the others will laugh while I just 
listen, smiling as if I know what they’re talking about. They 
know both Cebuano and English and often slip between the 
two when they speak to me, but there are certain things — 
like jokes, references — that I can’t fully comprehend because 
I’m not a native speaker. 

This inherent difference, of course, has never been 

something that anyone could change; it’s simply a result 
of the way things are — my parents decided to move to 
the U.S. while my aunts and uncles chose to remain in the 
Philippines. Regardless, it still makes me feel inadequate at 
times, like I’m not as “Filipino” as my cousins are. In a way, I 
suppose I’m not. I was raised an ocean away. Even still, I feel 
pride in being Filipino as much as I am American.

At times, though, I find myself struggling to fit myself 

into either category. Would the generation after me feel even 
more separated from Filipino culture? Would my parents feel 
disappointed in their daughter for not sharing their culture 
enough? It’s not necessarily out of the question for them to 
teach my future kids, but I’ve always seen that scenario as 
me admitting defeat. 

That Saturday afternoon, when my mom told me that I 

could pass on mahjong to my children, it almost felt like a 
form of reassurance. It was as if she knew that I’ve felt guilty 
about my lack of skills in Cebuano. 

As I sat there, I realized she was right — there was an 

entirely different facet of culture that I hadn’t considered. 
I’d been placing too much emphasis on language, when 
elements like Filipino delicacies, ang pao and even karaoke 
are just as important, if not more so. Even though language is 
definitely a large part of culture, it doesn’t encompass all of it. 
Certainly mahjong, a game that I’ve seen Filipino adults play 
at family gatherings and parties, could be considered a part 
of our culture. Perhaps culture doesn’t really have a hard 
definition, and there is no “checklist” of things that you have 
to be or have. Ultimately, feeling connected and legitimized 
in a culture is up to you. 

I know that it’s impossible for me to give the next generation 

in my family the same experience that my parents gave me. 
I won’t be able to give them the language, and I might not 
know or even understand all of the Filipino customs. But I 
can share with them my own experiences and what I have 
learned. While I might not be able to teach them Cebuano 
jokes or show them how to make pancit, I can always pull out 
the old mahjong board with its pink tiles.

statement

THE MICHIGAN DAILY | APRIL 8, 2020

BY CHELSEA PADILLA, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Passing down culture

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHELSEA PADILLA

