My family moved to New Zealand in 2007. I did all of my high school years here and earlier this year, started university as a fully fledged citizen.
I may have considered myself a Filipino and a New Zealander long before I took the oath, but did I really believe it? Did other people?
If the answer to both questions is yes, then why did I blanch when a Pākehā man - in my household, a well-loved one - earnestly reminded his viewers that the Filipino community in New Zealand are genuine New Zealanders too?
My mother was fascinated by the attention Campbell Live was devoting to Filipino stories during this two-week fundraising drive. She remarked to me in Tagalog: “Nakilala tuloy nang mga Kiwi ang Pilipinas.”
“Kiwis got to know about the Philippines [because of this].”
Did she mean that they didn’t know about us before?
Filipinos are not particularly hard to find in cities like Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. In Auckland alone, there are a handful of restaurants serving Filipino cuisine. I attended a school with Filipino students making up 10% of the roll. My brothers’ schools have 20% and 15%, respectively. Several Catholic parishes across the city are served by Filipino priests. There are even Tagalog masses held every week, standing room on Sundays.
Even if New Zealanders don’t know much about the Philippines, they must know Filipinos, right?
Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome. I first came across this term while reading posts by Asian-American bloggers, who discuss the rather unusual marginalisation that Asian-Americans have experience in US society.
Asian-Americans - and by extension, Asian-New Zealanders - are the model minority. We are expected to occupy the middle class, to be academically inclined and to be, pretty much, law-abiding citizens. Notice that in this stereotype there is that hidden footnote that we achieve what Māori and Pasifika apparently are too lazy to.
But that doesn’t mean that the institution of whiteness favours us any more than other groups of POC. It’s a divide and conquer tactic. Because we’re made to think that we’re better than the others, we don’t want anything to do with them. Speaking from personal experience with my family and our circle of friends, Anti-Māori and anti-Pasifika sentiments is very much alive in the Filipino community.
It doesn’t mean that we’re considered to be true blue Kiwis, either. Which leads me to circle back to Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome. Blogger Julian Abagond writes:
Two ideas underlie the perpetual foreigner stereotype:To an extent, this can be applied to New Zealand. This is a society that still fears the “Asian invasion”. Our imaginations conceive snapshots of everyday life under this “invasion”: Chinese owning the takeaway store, or the Indians owning the dairy, the Asians walking up and down Queen Street, the international students taking over the University of Auckland - these are examples of the racist New Zealand mentality which perceives Asian immigrants as a threat.
- America belongs to white people.
- Race and culture are pretty much the same thing.
Our politicians are also not above scaremongering their constituents of the impending “yellow peril”. The New Zealand First Party are notorious for this, with leader Winston Peters espousing anti-Asian rhetoric on a regular basis.
Be it shitty driving on the roads, more shop signs written in Chinese or Korean script, or the rising house prices - the Asians are always here to blame. We’re often told, “Go back to where you came from!” As if we didn’t uproot our lives to move at the bottom of the world in a new society that we try to integrate into as best as we could.
What my mother said struck me in another way, too. She referred to “Kiwis” as an “other”, a group which she did not belong to. I suppose it did make sense. In our community, talking about “Kiwis” almost always refers to Pākehā people. We snort about their weird habits, their almost naive curiosity when it came to unfamiliar things. We’ve learnt to allow them a certain degree of ignorance about us and our people.
Why? Because we’re the foreigners. It’s our job to assimilate and learn the ways of this country, and we don’t expect anything in return.
With family and family friends in front of the Philippine Consulate in Wellington. It is widely believed that the Philippine government chose this particular house as it has the same "feel" as President Aguinaldo's home in Cavite, where the Philippine flag was first unfurled.
The Filipino community generally tends to suffer from self-inflicted Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome. Yes, I acknowledge that it’s different for everyone. Case in point: my youngest brother came here as a toddler, yet if I ask him if he considers himself a Filipino-New Zealander, he says that no, he’s just Filipino. On the other hand, my father, who came here in his early forties, identifies as a Piwi - colloquialism for Pinoy-Kiwi - in a manner that is equal parts pride and self-deprecation.
Most of the Filipinos whom I’ve come across share more of the same mindset with my brother than they do with my dad. We may spend the rest of our lives in New Zealand, but we can’t shake off the feeling that we’re only here as visitors.
After all, the Tagalog word for foreigner is dayuhan. Its root word, dayo, loosely translates to “visit”. In New Zealand, we are dayuhan.
The show during the culmination of the fundraising drive was one heavy with solidarity and celebration. The Campbell Live team travelled to schools all over the country to check out students’ fundraising efforts. Several Filipino students in different primary schools were interviewed, and during one of them, Campbell says, “They are just two of the 40,000 Filipinos in New Zealand.”
I suppose that it had been a subtle response to people who have been vocal on social media, opposing Campbell’s focus on the Philippines and Typhoon Haiyan. “Why should we care about the Philippines? There are people here in New Zealand who need help, too. Why are we so fixated on a distant land instead?” they asked.
40,000 is not a big number. That’s approximately 1% of the entire population of New Zealand. It seems insignificant in a mathematical point of view, but we’ve made a life for ourselves here, and people know that. We’re your government employees, your teachers, your nurses, your accountants. In the cities, and even in the bigger provinces, people are hard pressed not to even be acquainted with a Filipino. We’re not relegated to a distant land. We’re here.
There's a Filipino concept we learn early on in primary school. Bayanihan. Simply put, it refers to a group of people working towards a unanimously desired objective through the spirit of unity and cooperation. For bayanihan to be successful, it involves individuals finding solidarity through a shared identity or a share experience.
And without even knowing it, bayanihan is what John Campbell and his team managed to achieve with their fundraising efforts.
Through the generosity and compassion exhibited by other New Zealanders, New Zealand may finally feel like more of a legitimate home for Filipinos. You are home with people who care about you, after all.
Highly recommended read
Yasmin Chilmeran wrote an article about her experiences of Perpetual Foreigner Syndrome in New Zealand on The Pantograph Punch.
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