FOB or FOBulous OR IGNORANT

Okay it's 220am on the west coast.. and I thought I'd add more to my confusion as a youngster...

I think one of the problems I fell into growing up was the seperation between FOB and Fil-Ams...

This never became more apparent to me until I moved back from the Philippines and back into American Lifestyle...

The one thing I noticed the most was Filipinos who could speak.. and Filipinos who couldn't.. and alot of the times I found myself not wanting to associate myself with fluet speaking Filipinos.. you know that ones that spoke Tagalog really well...

I don't know about you, but for me.. I got caught up in a crowd we're if you spoke our language it was almost seen as a bad thing.. bad in the sense that they were not "Americanized".. they had an accent.. they "looked" different.. "acted" different...

And boy was that wrong of me to think that way... Just because you spoke fluently didn't make them any different than me or any other American.. if there was any one ignorant, it was ME!

It was like.. hey you have an American Accent just like me.. you're cool... so even if you spoke the language it's okay because you don't have an accent...

As I grew older, I began to realize.. CRAP.. WHY DIDN'T I LEARN WHEN I WAS IN THE PHILIPPINES.. I was there for 5 years.. and never learned... I grew envious of the people who knew.. spoke and wrote in our native tongue...

It's so ironic now.. because just for fun, I'll speak with an accent.. just because I love our accent and I just love poking fun at our culture (in a good way of course)... I envy the people who speak (but i'm lazy to learn .. hahaa.. more ironcy)

The ironcy here is that I lived in the Philippines.. I knew people who spoke fluently who had deep accents.. I hung around these people.. and never had a problem with it.. it wasn't until I moved back that I got caught up.

Joyce brings up one hella of a point.. To Be "ENOUGH" Filipino for the FilAM community and and "too" Filipino for the FilAm community.

I completely got caught up in that scene and the sad thing was, I saw both sides.. I lived both sides.. then I come back to the US and I find myself choosing "sides"!

I'll just call this the Dark Ages of my confused ignorant mind... I was too busy trying to "fit in" with FilAm culture that I lost the true meaning of who and what a Filipino is.

If I knew the language now.. and you called me a FOB.. I'd be proud of it.. but such wasn't the case when I was younger. From what I understood, to be called a FOB was being a social outcast from the FilAm generation I was growing up with. You just weren't cool!! Who knows what it was.. but I was a fool to think such a way. Maybe it was just my way of thinking.. going through an identity crisis... thinking you had to think one way in order to be "cool"...

Nowadays it's no longer like that. To be true to yourself is now "cool" in my book. That was something I never came to grips with until my early adult life.

I was just plain ignorant!