Five stories

Natural History, March, 1998 by Han Ong, Nahid Rachlin, Orlando Cruz, Sanjay Nigam

You tell people you were born in Manila, and immediately they conjure up this wonderful, exotic childhood, conflating Manila with the million verdant, sunlit resorts of their imagination. Or they run you through the perils of a place that is no more than a pastiche of the nightly newscast, a Marcos here, an Aquino there, and of course, Imelda with her shoe factory, giving your life the patina of danger and excitement it never possessed. And all the while you're standing there, and you're thinking: Heck, everybody's got to be born somewhere.

You nod on and on, telling them that you now live in New York City, that although you came to this country at sixteen you already spoke near-perfect English (only a giveaway accent to be worked on, sloughed off), and that, although you came with your family and the act of coming here together gave you a temporary closeness, you are now estranged from them. They'll take the last two admissions as independent of each other, not realizing in their frenzy of free association that these two things are the ones most closely linked in your life.

I did not know what coming to America would actually involve, except in a fuzzy, Third World, gospel-swallowed-whole sense of "improvement." In my mind, what I saw was a sky bluer and with fluffier clouds than the actual sky above our heads in Manila. Looking back on it, I can see that this is exactly like a child's belief in heaven: it's above you and you climb a staircase to get to it. My parents' version of America was probably more sophisticated, but that did not make them any more prepared.

They came to make our life better, but to their way of thinking, America was a place of "evil." Since my parents were both Chinese and Catholic, this "evil" largely meant great personal freedoms, which they hoped their children would not partake in. They wanted to remain the sole arbiters of right and wrong for us, consequently drawing lines around our conduct that, in the harsh light of America and its emphasis on personal liberty, were revealed to be outdated, unfair, inhuman. Still, their hold on us would have remained firm had we not felt that they were in some sense weakening, their authority manifestly cracking, when required to confront white people and a country whose language and systems exposed them as mere virgins: so many tasks, like having to talk to the phone company people, say, to ask about a bill; or to the grocer to finesse the difference between one brand office and another tasks for which we, the children, had to intercede on their behalf - turned us into the new adults of this new place and our parents into infants, their threats and injunctions growing day by day into watery things.

We translated our parents' Tagalog. It wasn't that they didn't speak any English but that their speech was hampered by self-consciousness - knowing that their accents obscured certain words, that they dropped off crucial syllables and rounded off words that needed a delivery closer to spitting, that they had a limited vocabulary. They learned the word "good," for example, but none of its synonyms, which turned conversation into redundant music - good, good, good, on an endless, unvarying loop, All this (and the thought, too, of money, which meant that what they said had better be clearer than anything else in their life) made their mouths dry at crucial moments. So they turned to their children, and to me, their son, in particular, as I possessed a sharp tongue and an exactitude they found consoling.

I'm not sure that my parents did find anything about America consoling. To improve our lives they were willing to give up many things. In America they would live in what would be politely referred to as "reduced circumstances." But they never imagined that among those things they had to give up would be their authority, seeing their children take over roles that in the old country were theirs and theirs alone.

We had come to Los Angeles a month after the 1984 Olympics. The city was going through a fever phase of optimism, and everywhere you turned you heard about plans for "expansion," "meeting the twenty-first century," "reorganization" - catchphrases I now realize applied to us, the children, as well. We learned how to take the bus, familiarized ourselves with schedules, routes, length of travel. Exploring the city, we learned, for our own safety, how to ignore public commotion; we learned the danger signals on the street; we learned to escape the hassles of our daily household at the movies, which took us even farther away.

But mostly, we learned the language, sharpening our skills through constant practice in the outside world, a world we - unlike our parents, who remained hemmed in - grew to trust, and a world that took us, or I should say, took me, beyond their fear-filled stranglehold.

Playwright and performer Han Ong's work deals largely with urban American life. A high school dropout, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1997.

In 1964 I left Ahvaz, a hot, dusty town in southwestern Iran, to attend college in America. At last I was going to the place where you could do what you wanted. This was the America I had learned about, not from the Americans who were employed at the oil refineries in Ahvaz, who basically were segregated from the Iranian population, but from American movies. By the time the films came to Ahvaz, they were already more than ten years old. (I saw All About Eve in the 1960s.) Still, the women in these movies made their own decisions, married whom they wanted, had careers, were outspoken - leading me to realize that there were other possibilities in life besides getting married (as soon as the right suitor, approved by my parents, came along), having children, and settling for passive domesticity. My own parents at least allowed me to watch the movies. Most others forbade their daughters to watch them in fear that they would be led astray. (It is significant that one of the first sparks of the Iranian Revolution, fifteen years after I left, was the setting on fire of a movie theater in a town near Ahvaz that used to show American movies.)