Jen Soriano Plumbs the Depths of Filipino Heritage and Healing
/“Filipino-Americans are individuals of Filipino descent who reside in the United States. They represent a diverse community with a rich cultural heritage. Filipino-Americans have contributed significantly to various fields, including academia, arts, business, politics, and entertainment. They maintain strong connections to their Filipino roots while embracing American values. Filipino-Americans have established vibrant communities across the country, fostering cultural celebrations, social organizations, and support networks. Their unique experiences and contributions have enriched the American fabric, contributing to the country's diversity and multicultural tapestry.”
The answer is flattering yet formless, as you might expect of a community that achieved its parents’ goal of seamless, unobtrusive assimilation. Because of the incestuous tendency of AI to recycle its previous answers and to embrace idle chatter as fact, this generic, impersonal definition will become the standard citation in term papers unless a more authentic perception of Fil-Ams enters the mainstream.
Colonial Nurses 150 Years After Clara Barton
Any inpatient who has asked a Filipina nurse how her day is going will concur that Filipinos are complex human beings. Filipino nurses make up 4 percent of the profession nationwide but they comprised one-third of all working nurses who succumbed to Covid. It’s too late to extend a token of appreciation for their sacrifices, but we can try to address the singular difficulties surviving immigrant nurses still endure after the pandemic.
Filipina author and activist Jen Soriano is unsparingly frank about why a disproportionate number of Fil-Ams become healthcare professionals.
Jen Soriano (Photo by Naomi Ishisaka)
“There is a sociopolitical reason that there are so many Filipinos in healthcare and it boils down to colonialism. The American education system in the Philippines was designed to create an English-speaking workforce that could fill gaps in the US labor force, specifically in areas considered less desirable by American workers. This is why a lot of Filipino doctors ended up in rural areas in the United States and why, to give a more recent example, Filipina nurses were disproportionately on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Purging a Painful History of Naïve Admiration
Some Fil-Ams have been wandering the desert without bearings, but a guide may have arrived in the work of activist writer Soriano, age 47. Her combination memoir and scholarly book, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing is due from the HarperCollins Publishers imprint, Amistad, on August 22, 2023. She was born in Oak Lawn, Illinois, to Lydia Soriano, a pharmacist from Bunlo, Bocaue, Bulacan, and late father, Danilo Buenaflor Soriano, a neurosurgeon from Tondo. She and her mother live in Seattle. There, Soriano and her husband, Juan, are raising their nine-year-old son Little T.
Jen Soriano’s “Nervous”
The Harvard graduate has written a primer on the historic, cultural and physical aspects of the Fil-Am identity for the post-pandemic era. Her essays are not an editor’s compilation of career writings strung together by a title. There’s a logical progression that begins with a narrative timeline of Philippine history and moves onto her own experience as a Fil-Am nonbinary femme, bandleader activist, and parent.
A central theme is her lifelong battle with debilitating pain from scoliosis and a compressed neck and sacrum. She doesn’t present her pain as a sociological metaphor for the destruction of the indigenous soul of the Philippines by five hundred years of colonial rule. She explores the physical side effects clinically attributed to transgenerational trauma. She is able to expose this internal disunity that all Filipinos suffer in silence.
In her book, she states, “Unresolved grief is a legacy of colonization and war. Over time it can wear at the soul like uncontained floodwaters can erode earth, long after the end of the storm.”
Water plays a luminous part as seen in her visit to the Pasig River, a 16-mile waterway that joins Laguna de Bay with Manila Bay. She quickly dispels the image of the United States emulating a kind kuya during its tenure as a steward of the Philippines. A battle was more like a massacre as untrained fighters were outgunned against the West’s advanced weaponry and sociopathic disregard for human life. “During the Philippine-American War, American soldiers stacked the bodies of Filipino soldiers on the bank of this river like ballast.”
Soriano makes it painfully clear that America’s identity is more wound up in the Philippines than even history textbooks without Trump-era revisions would admit. She scrapes away the detritus of denial and omitted betrayals to name and clarify the inner turmoil and subconscious grief that afflict Filipinos whether or not they experienced war and colonial oppression firsthand. Real wounds can no longer be dismissed as imaginary or histrionic but are felt and seen as the starting line of a communal odyssey.
“The Filipino’s ability to laugh in the face of adversity shows strength but also harmful roots.”
In the early 2000s, she joined the Bay Area band Diskarte Namin and found performing to be “an analgesic that made my dopamine and endorphin levels rise up.” In her song “100 Years” she calls Filipinos “our homeland’s revenge.” Soriano explains, “I mean revenge in the form of breaking the silence imposed by colonization. This is an inheritance we can and should cast off like a yoke. All forms of colonization require silence in some form to survive, because silence under tyranny is often a desperate means of survival, though in my grandfather’s case,” she says of her grandfather who disappeared after he was captured by the Japanese during WWII. “As I write about in the book, it was an act of honor to remain silent under torture. But when we are in times of peace, we no longer need to be silent to survive.”
If My Smile Seems Out of Place
Her vulnerability and search for a purpose of pain that nearly drove her to suicide brought her to a wider wisdom that encompasses the Filipino Diaspora. The Filipino’s ability to laugh in the face of adversity shows strength but also harmful roots. “I think our capacity for joy and laughter as a people is one of our greatest cultural superpowers. I also think that it can be deflective and avoidant, a way to push down pain without ever actually processing it.
“Kevin Nadal, who is one of our greatest psychologists and thinkers around Filipino American mental health, coined the term ‘smiling depression’ to describe this phenomenon of Filipinos putting on a happy face while hiding internal feelings of sadness and unworthiness.” For some Filipino Americans, smiling depression could originate from transgenerational trauma. Transgenerational trauma in turn can predispose current generations to complex post-traumatic stress disorder, or C-PTSD.
Filipinos might take a morbid pride in their tolerance of inner pain, but outsiders are more inclined to interpret their strength to the needless agony of a metal cilice. Soriano says, “What we actually do have to face are the statistics that show disproportionately high rates of depression and suicidality among Filipino American populations, as well as direct experiences that many of us have of losing ones to mental health crises.”
One of Soriano’s heroes is historian Merlinda Bobis and her concept of “storying back against colonial erasure.” Soriano says, “Colonialism erased our ability to grieve. We can tend to stay silent about mental health and all that we have lost. But what if Filipino communities opened our throats and storied back, which means telling stories into a void of experiences that colonialism has erased?”
Her history with pain and C-PTSD has given her the special understanding she needed to raise her neurodivergent son, Little T. “We may be able to bring more compassion and a healthy sort of vigilance to raising them. I understand perhaps better than some neurotypical parents might that he was struggling with different wiring and a baseline of nervous system dysregulation.”
Reading her book Nervous goes further by allowing fellow Fil-Ams to benefit from the knowledge gleaned from her mental health struggles and chronic pain.
Anthony Maddela, the writer, is nearing the end of a long novel and also enjoys writing grants for an inner-city nonprofit and public housing agencies.
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