תִּקּוּן בֵּית פִילִיפִּינִים

Three thoughts on fish: 

A Chinese aphorism translates roughly to you can’t ask a fish to describe water. A Filipino adage reminds us that those who don’t look back on their past smell worse than rotting fish. In David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon commencement speech, he said, it is unbelievably hard to remind ourselves, over and, over, “This is water, this is water.” It’s is so easy to forget how special and strange life was in Saudi and how beautiful and bizarre in the Philippines and America. 

Until I, a Filipino raised in Saudi Arabia, landed at JFK Airport in 1994, all I knew about America came from TV shows, the library, my American ballet classmates, my penpal Kristen, and J.C. Penny catalogues. I wondered about the kind of American weather that allowed people to wear shorts with their cable-knit sweaters. How does it feel to cruise around suburbia with my best friend and Bon Jovi blasting? What is it like to live — really live — in America where people ate sandwiches and called it lunch? 

Fast-forward almost 20 years and I’m not so far away from getting my green card. I fell in mad, mad love with a hot young(ish) thing. an American Jew from Boston. In conversations with him, I’ve been able to think more deliberately about my childhood in the Kingdom, my passport from the Islands, and the life I’m building here in the US. 

Kosher Adobo is my remembering before I assimilate too comfortably here and forget how, at one time, none of this world was familiar. 

Thanks for reading it. Maraming salamat po, 

K.P. 

P.S. Also, Rob “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo” Schneider is the only Jewish Filipino American we know.