“AM I FILIPINA ENOUGH?

How I Overcame Racial Impostor Syndrome and Answered the Question, "Am I Filipina enough?

By Jinji Sayson

Dude, you are Filipino as f*ck.” I’d been spilling my guts to a friend about how insecure I used to feel about owning my heritage - and how, for so long, I thought I didn’t deserve to claim it. Although the affirmation was gratifying to hear, I felt serene knowing that it was no longer needed - and reflecting on how, five years ago, I would’ve saddled such sentiments with a disproportionate amount of validation, because it was what I so desperately craved at the time, re-affirmed that I’d reached the end of a decade-long scavenger hunt for the answer to this question: am I Filipino enough?

For the majority of my childhood and early twenties, I constantly wrestled with the specter of Racial Impostor Syndrome - a phenomenon described by writer Arden Yum as, “when your internal sense of self doesn’t match with others’ perception of your racial identity and gives rise to a feeling of self-doubt”.

“For the majority of my childhood and early twenties, I constantly wrestled with the specter of Racial Impostor Syndrome..”

The first seed of uncertainty was planted when I was six and sprouted from my insecurity around losing the ability to speak Cebuano (the inherited language of my parents) when I began public school. The loss was the result of Western assimilation, and was my parents’ paper-maché solution for their own insecurities about raising a child in a new world - they were merely doing what they thought was best at the time, and unfortunately, like many other immigrants who came to the U.S. believe(d), they thought that learning English would be especially challenging for me if I was bilingual - though we now know that research has shown the exact opposite to be true. So, they chose to speak to me solely in English from Kindergarten onwards, and as a result, though I can still understand most of it, I can no longer fluently converse in their native tongue.

Growing up, I began to feel a perpetual undercurrent of shame whenever my relatives spoke Cebuano around me, and I could not respond in kind. Additionally, mocking comments from others about how my accent “sounded weird”, or jeers and laughs whenever I actually worked up the courage to attempt “to speak it (an attitude known as “crab mentality” in the community) served to make me feel further alienated from my roots.

“The first seed of uncertainty was planted when I was six and sprouted from my insecurity around losing the ability to speak Cebuano..”

By the time I was a teen, I’d developed a habit of subconsciously distancing myself from my culture. When someone would ask me what my ethnic background was, I’d look away, and mousily respond, “Filipino” and I’d pray for that to be the end of it, because I didn’t want to discuss the topic any further - I didn’t want to continue the conversation for fear that I would be “exposed” as someone who wasn’t a “real” Filipino.

“When someone would ask me what my ethnic background was, I’d look away, and mousily respond, “Filipino” and I’d pray for that to be the end of it..”