I HAVE lived on and off in the United States for five years. The last time I was there was in 2024, when I taught at the Department of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
En route to Ohio, I stopped over in New York and stayed with two Filipino friends who lived in Queens. I took the train to visit the art galleries and museums. You would see homeless people aboard the trains. There were scabs and open wounds on their legs; their eyes were vacant. People avoided looking at them.
Outside, on the benches, in the parks, were more homeless people. I asked my friends why these people were not staying in homes for the homeless? It seemed that they did not want to stay there because there were curfews and rules to be followed. They did not want anything to bog them down, in their carefree lives.
The other New Yorkers just went on with their lives, striding on the streets and ignoring the beggars and the homeless. You could hear at least 50 languages on the streets of New York, more if you walked longer. Your nose was your guide. As my friend said, if you smelled something stinky, why, you must be near Chinatown.
Stinky because of the rotten fruits and leftover food in the garbage bins, which multiplied as the day wore on. And when night came, there would be grimy people pushing carts, looking inside the trash bins, salvaging scraps of carton, cans and bottles, and morsels of food. This was not Manila, I told myself while walking to my subway station, but New York City.
Like a film, let us then intercut what critics have said about my relationship to America as shown in my books.
“Danton Remoto, the Filipino poet, essayist, novelist and LGBTQ+ rights advocate, has expressed complex and nuanced views about America throughout his literary works and essays. His perspective is shaped by his experiences as a postcolonial Filipino writer and his time studying and living in the US.
“Remoto often critiques America’s historical role in the Philippines, viewing it through the lens of continuing colonial influence. He sees American culture as a pervasive force that has shaped Filipino identity in both liberating and constraining ways. In his writings, he describes America as a ‘seductive empire,’ offering opportunities and freedoms while simultaneously imposing its values and systems.”
It all boils down to the so-called American Dream versus reality. In 2000, I received a Fulbright scholarship to study for one year at the graduate school of the Department of English at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I got accepted at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as at Columbia University and New York University (NYU).
I did not want to study in California, so I looked for universities on the East Coast. Fulbright said that I needed to pitch in with my own money if I wanted to study at either Columbia or NYU — the rent alone would be horrendous. And that was how I landed at Rutgers University, across the Hudson River from New York.
I saw America as a land of contradictions. White immigrants who now owned pizza restaurants would not allow me to use their toilets, claiming these were only for themselves and the restaurant staff. These very same immigrants had grandparents who came to America half a century ago, and suffered the racial discrimination that they foisted on me.
There was also the promise of equality and opportunity set against racial discrimination and cultural alienation that many Filipino immigrants face. I have met many Filipinos working as ticket sellers in cinemas, bell boys and chambermaids in hotels, caregivers and nursing aides in hospitals and homes for the aged. They worked hard and sent money home, monthly, for their old parents’ medical needs and to educate their siblings. They were well-educated but took on jobs beneath their pay grade, their professional dreams deferred as they lived in a society that both welcomed and marginalized them.
America was also a place with freedoms on many fronts. With my friend Bino, I went to Greenwich Village and visited the gay bookstores in New York. There were also drinking bars, dance clubs, go-go bars and piano bars, catering to different sexual tastes and persuasions.
I even found “Ladlad” and the other gay books I have written or edited being sold in New York, as well as in West Hollywood in Los Angeles. American cities like New York, LA and San Francisco offered spaces of acceptance and community that were harder to find in Manila during earlier periods in my life. And the campuses had LGBTQ organizations and hotlines, as well as offices that ensured equality for students of all racial stripes and sexual orientations.
Perhaps most significantly, America is integral to the Filipino experience of cultural hybridity. It is a postcolonial and a postmodern world; our lives are fragmented and atomized. Our selves are multiple and plural; our identities are fluid and slippery.
Filipino Americans are caught between worlds — speaking English with Filipino accents, eating rice with hamburgers, celebrating both Thanksgiving and Christmas in distinctly Filipino ways. My friend’s family in New Jersey has been running a Filipino bakery called “Beverly Hills” in Highland Park for two generations. Every Saturday, I visited them to eat “tuyo” (dried fish herring) with chocolate porridge, and watch “The Sharon Cuneta Show” on The Filipino Channel.
Images abound, and the scenes are vivid: Filipino nurses in American hospitals carrying “balikbayan” boxes filled with Spam and chocolates, or gay Filipino men finding community in American cities while missing the warmth of extended family gatherings in the Philippines.
But lately, before I left, I felt that things were changing. In Ohio, high-school kids screamed at me to “go back to China.” I went to them and told them I am from Thailand and they asked: “Where is that?” A worse thing happened to my African friend. A truckload of high-schoolers stopped before him and imitated the gestures of a chimpanzee.
“In Nigeria,” he said. “I am a teacher. Here, I am just a primate.”
Welcome, I wanted to tell him, to a changed America.
Danton Remoto’s books are on sale at Fully Booked, National Bookstore, Shopee and Lazada; Kinokuniya in Asia; and globally at Amazon.
