Wednesday, 19 March 2008

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  Utopia, 90703

  A couple of years ago I met a boyfriend/girlfriend couple named Anderson and Kortney.  They moved to Los Angeles together from the east coast.  Anderson moved to attend grad school at USC, and Kortney moved for work.  I met Kortney through work, and I met Anderson sometime soon afterwards.  After our initial meeting two years ago, I have probably only seen them two or three more times, so I don’t know them well enough to consider them my “friends”, per se.  We have mutual friends, so I suppose I could consider them “acquaintances”. 

   

  I met a lot of people a couple of years ago, and I’ve seen these same people more times than I’ve seen Anderson and Kortney, but none of these people have fascinated me as much as A and K.  The thing about Anderson and Kortney is that they might possibly be the world’s most perfect couple.  Anderson is a swell enough guy.  He’s polite, caring, and pleasant.  He is receiving a magnificent education at USC, and he has a bright future in the entertainment industry.  He is 6’4” and has the physique of a world-class athlete.  Kortney is just as swell as Anderson.  She is funny, sociable, and intelligent.  She has an outstanding career as a doctor and is well known in her field.  She is 5’10” and is in top physical shape as well.  Both of them are stunningly attractive.  If these two were to procreate, they would most likely produce a breed of alpha children who would possess all their admirable qualities.  Being that Anderson is African American and Kortney is Caucasian American, their children would also be strikingly gorgeous and would embody every human race and ethnicity known to us today.  (This is assuming that in the spectrum of human races, Africans occupy one end and Caucasians occupy the other end, and every one else is somewhere in between.  This is probably erroneous, and possibly racist, but I still think it’s kind of valid.  But what do I know?  I’m not an anthropologist.)  Their spawn would be the conclusion of the great human experiment.  The gene pool would be complete and purified.  These pulchritudinous superchildren would be the true “children of the atom”.  Human existence as we know it would be solved.    Similar to how Kevin Federline thinks about being black, I probably think about this couple a lot more than I should.

   

  Time will tell if A and K’s offspring will be the Adams and Eves of a new utopia.  Until then, we have our heterogeneous, multi-cultural world.  Growing up in suburban Cerritos, California was a dynamic cultural experience.  When I was growing up as a young kid way back in the 1900s (specifically, the 1980s), Cerritos was largely a white community with a large Filipino American population.  By the early 1990s, there was a large influx of Korean, Chinese, and Indian Americans, and the white people headed for the hills (such as Chino Hills.  These white people eventually moved to further hills, like Rancho Cucamonga, when Snoop Doggy Dogg moved to Chino, as famously chronicled in “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”.  But this is purely conjecture.)  Because Cerritos had such a strong Asian American community, it was easy for me to embrace my identity as a non-Caucasian American.  I’ve always heard terrible stories about Asian Americans who had trouble “finding” themselves in white America, but I never had that problem.  I never had a Filipino/American dual identity crisis.  Growing up in Cerritos was fucking awesome.
  

   

  When I left Cerritos to go to college in San Diego, I took my uber-exuberant Filipino pride with me, and, naturally, I joined the Filipino student organization.   I was highly active in this organization throughout my college career, and I served as President during my senior year.  The idea of me lionizing someone like Anderson, and adorning someone like Kortney, and ennobling their children as the kings and queens of a new world order would probably shock a lot of people I went to college with.  I recently had a conversation with an old college buddy, Cathy, and while we were catching up on lost time she mentioned that she always thought I was a bit “nationalistic” about my ethnicity.  She even said that she felt that I didn’t approve of her white boyfriend during college.  This came as a shock to me because she was essentially telling me that she perceived me as a racist.  Did being President of a Filipino club construe me as a bigot?  In my heart I know I’ve never been a racist, but I suppose your existence is never defined but is always contextualized.

   

  I suppose I didn’t realize what kind of person I was in college until a few weeks ago, when that Filipino club had their 20^th anniversary gala.  I attended this event on the urging of a friend, and we made the trek from Los Angeles to San Diego.  I didn’t know 99.9% of the people there, as most of the attendees were current students or alumni from no earlier than the class of 2004 (I graduated in 1999).  So, I was marginalized to the back of the auditorium, and it was from there I observed the evening’s entertainment.  For the most part, I didn’t pay attention to the evening’s events because, for the most part, the speakers were clichéd and the performances were redundant.  The highlight (or lowlight) of the night came when a female student, who looked like she just came from a poetry convention, spoke about the “direction” of the club, and she was essentially arguing that the club had lost its definition and had no identity.  I didn’t really listen to what this bozo was saying, but she kept whining and using words like “struggle”, “identity”, “struggle”, “define”, and “struggle”.  This made me realize three things: (1) Spoken-word bullshit is still considered as a “cool” and valid form of expression among some people, (2) College students are idiots, and (3) I was an idiot in college. 

   

  The spoken-word hippie who was complaining about the club was simply doing the same shit me and my friends were doing 10 years ago.  I suppose that in the context of a Filipino club, your goal would be to declare and define your ethnicity.  And I guess that’s what this girl was trying to do.  I don’t know.  And maybe that’s what people thought I was trying to do 10 years ago.  I don’t know.  (Note: I was never into spoken-word.  I must make that point perfectly clear.)  The fact is that this girl will only complain for a few more years until she graduates, and then she’ll realize that she’s looking to define an identity that can’t be defined.  The fact is that a Filipino is a Filipino whether he/she likes it or not.  It’s genetic.  Therefore, a person’s actions cannot make someone more or less Filipino, and their actions can certainly not define their ethnicity.  College students are always going to argue about shit like identity and definition, and that’s fine, because that’s what college students do.  But, sooner or later they’ll realize that college, and Filipino clubs, is simply about meeting friends, getting stoned, learning about social issues, and becoming a fiery liberal.  The real highlight of the night came when another student, a pretty Chinese girl named Melissa Chan, took the mic and said, “I joined this club because I just want to have fun!”

   

  I suppose I was perceived as somewhat “militant” in college, and it’s mostly because of my association with that club.  I don’t know.  I seem to vaguely recall someone calling me a “Filipino Malcolm X”, but I don’t know if that is a true memory or a bad dream.  I was drunk or stoned 60% of the time between 1995 and 1999, so I really don’t know what people perceived me as.  The truth is probably that I am more militant and liberal now than I ever was in college.  The difference is that in college I was an idiot and now I’m just less stupid.  College students are like Kanye West.  But, although he’s a college dropout, he’s still an idiot.  On speaking about the government's response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, he famously once said, “George W. Bush doesn’t care about black people.”  That’s idiotic.  I say that George W. Bush only cares about white people.  That’s intelligent.

   

  I can’t wait for utopia.

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