entrederivas

[entrederivas]

Funny Girl

In the eyes of many, I am what they call a high flyer. I’ve made something of myself. I’m more successful now, maybe even richer. My English is better—noticeably better. It’s refined, deliberate. I’ve shaped it to be clear, smooth, unaccented. Western. If you closed your eyes and heard me speak, you might think I grew up in the United States. I have that unmistakable twang, that well-trained rise and fall in tone.

But the truth is—I’ve never been there. I’ve never even set foot on American soil.

What I am is a functioning polyglot. I carry two Filipino languages in my bones—Bisaya and Tagalog—one learned at home, one learned in school, both layered into me since childhood . I move through English at a C2 level, with ease and grace, because it’s the language that gave me room to expand. I’ve studied Spanish enough to carry myself in conversation, and Mandarin floats at the edges of my memory from two long, effortful years of study. My brain doesn’t cling to just one world—it’s learned to switch, to adapt. It has developed what I can only describe as a kind of inter-culturality. A mental agility. I don’t just speak languages; I speak contexts. I read rooms. I shift between cultures, wearing whichever identity fits best—or threatens least—in any given moment.

And sometimes, I wonder if I’ve shifted too far. I wonder if I’ve crossed a line that makes me feel distant from my own people. Too Western, they say. Too liberated. Too sharp-tongued, too unafraid. Too much. I started to feel it myself—that ache of not being able to fully belong. So, I tried to close the gap. I went back to the culture I feared I had drifted from. I watched more Filipino media. I immersed myself again in Tagalog and Bisaya—not just to understand, but to feel. I memorized lines from sitcoms, soaked in songs on loop.

I wanted to understand the jokes. I wanted to laugh with people, not after them. I wanted to feel like I was speaking with them, not at them.

They told me I was a funny girl. In the context of being Filipino—I am.

But when I switch back to English, something else happens. The words come faster. The thoughts are clearer. I’m more precise. More articulate. I express myself better in English, and I know it. It’s the language I argue in. It’s the language I cry in when no one’s listening. It’s the language I use when I need to make myself heard without apology.

My English is so good that I married an Englishman. When we argue, when emotions run high, I don’t stumble. My fluency sharpens. My tongue does not falter. “You’re not really Filipino,” he says sometimes—not with cruelty, but as a description. “Your values… your thinking… you’re more Western than you are Filipino.”

Others have said the same thing. And every time, it slices a little differently.

As if I am not one person. As if I am two. Split. Compartmentalized. As if the versions of myself are separate containers I pour into depending on the room I’m in.

But I don’t see it that way. This is not duplicity—it is survival. It’s my mind doing what it has always done: adapting, negotiating, trying to find the safest place to land. Saying what needs to be said. Speaking in the language that people will take seriously. Becoming what is most believable in the moment.

Sometimes I wonder if this is just the legacy of colonialism. This instinct to be pliable. This learned desire to please, to bend, to become whatever version of myself others can accept. Sometimes it feels like servitude dressed up as sophistication.

And I grieve that.

Because how sad it is—that even as a young, successful, and dare I say, bright woman from the Philippines—here, in the city where I live now, in Taipei—when I say, I’m Filipino, people fall silent. It’s subtle, but I see it. I feel it. The shift in posture, the pause in conversation, the soft recoil of expectation.

Because in this place, “Filipino” carries a label that doesn’t belong to me, but sticks to me anyway.

Here, we are seen as caretakers. Housekeepers. Factory workers. Illegals. Underpaid teachers shuttled from one cram school to the next. The loud ones crowding Zhongshan Street on weekends, carrying remittance envelopes and karaoke dreams. We are background noise. Disposable labor. A tolerated presence.

And when I walk into the Filipino corner store, when I quietly buy Silver Swan soy sauce, I feel myself become invisible. No accent. No polish. No C2-level anything. I am just another body among the many. Just another annoying Filipino.

I carry that invisibility with me.

Even when I speak fluently. Even when I earn well. Even when I hold degrees and visas and a western surname. Even when I speak Spanish or smile politely in Mandarin, or write essays like this one.

I carry the shame that was never mine to begin with. And this shame—it is deep. It doesn’t just sit on the surface of my skin; it seeps into the parts of me that I wish could be proud. It catches in my throat whenever someone tries to guess where I’m from. I smile, politely, tightly—bracing.

My mind races. Please don’t say it. Please don’t guess it. Please, oh god, don’t say you think I’m Filipino.

Because once they know, the story shifts. The shape I take in their eyes changes. Suddenly I am no longer the funny girl with the perfect English or the clever one who navigates cultures with ease. Suddenly I become someone else. Someone smaller. Simpler. Easier to categorize.

The other day, I spoke to another Englishman—a friend of my husband’s. We were talking casually, light conversation, until he mentioned how he once had Filipinos clean his apartment. “They do such a good job,” he said. “There were four of them. They even wiped down the walls. I paid cheap. They work very hard.”

They. As if I am not one of them.

As if I am standing safely outside the story he’s telling.

But I’m not.

I am them. I am of them. I carry their blood, their laughter, their language. And yet, in that moment, I was just a third body in the room—something neutral. Something disassociated. It felt strange, almost surreal, to hear my people spoken about that way. Admired, yes, but only in the way one admires a service. A convenience. An efficiency.

He meant it as a compliment.

But it landed like an erasure.

And in that moment, I felt stripped. Exposed. As if all the languages I had learned, all the accents I had refined, all the jokes I could tell—they didn’t matter. Because before I am anything else, I am Filipino. And to many, that means one thing.

Subservient. Cheap. Grateful to be here.

But I refuse to let this be the ending to our story.

Because the narrative doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

And I am tired—so tired—of having to prove, again and again, that being Filipino does not mean being small.

Being Filipino can mean so much more.

It can mean me.

Someone working hard—not to be better than my own people, but better than the limits the world keeps placing on us. Someone who has learned to speak the language of power while still humming the songs of home. Someone trying, every day, to be more than what the label suggests.

In the distance, thousands of miles away, around the globe, Filipinos leave the country of their birth—not because they do not love it, but because it has failed to love them back in the ways they deserve. We leave to survive. To send money home. To seek something less cruel than what we’ve known. We scatter ourselves across the world like seeds—planting care, labor, strength, warmth.

And slowly, after years of being erased, we begin to draw ourselves back in. We fill in the lines. We reclaim the shape of who we are. We color our bodies back into the self-portrait of the world—not as background, but as subjects. As people who belong.

We are still here.

[entrederivas]

Entre Nosotros

Strangely, speaking Spanish doesn’t hurt.

It brings me peace. It brings me closer. Not to who I am exactly, but to something I can’t quite name — something just out of reach but deeply familiar. The sensation is soft, almost sacred. When I speak Spanish, I don’t feel particularly intelligent or accomplished. This language doesn’t define my intellect. But it does something else — something more powerful. It connects me.

It connects me to people I wouldn't otherwise understand. It opens doors to conversations I’d never be invited into if I stayed in English or Cebuano. It’s like I’ve quietly entered a club — not by birthright, but by effort. And that’s how language works everywhere, isn’t it? You speak it, you belong. Whether it’s French, German, or Chinese — the password is pronunciation.

But what’s strange is how easy life feels inside my Spanish-speaking mind.

Not easy in the sense of problems disappearing because I still have all the same worries, responsibilities, and complexities. But in Spanish, those burdens fade into the background. Maybe because my Spanish isn’t advanced. Maybe because my thoughts stay simpler. I don’t spiral. I don’t overthink. I don’t carry the full weight of the world the way I do when thinking in English or Cebuano. There’s freedom in limitation. There’s joy in not knowing too much.

My Spanish mind is a gentler version of me. I smile more. I remember funny moments with friends. I focus on what I can say, not everything I can’t. It’s a temporary kind of clarity. A kind of simplicity and pause that I very much need from the usual intensity of my life.

I don’t have to explain myself deeply in Spanish. When I say “Estoy cansada,” I don’t have to explain why. When I say “No pasa nada,” it becomes true and it feels like nothing really needs fixing. My emotional range narrows, but in a way that feels safe. I can’t articulate complex anger or shame. But I can say I’m happy. I can say I’m tired. I can say I love something. For now, that’s enough.

But there’s a poignant undercurrent to all of this. Because I know — that this simplicity won’t last. The deeper I go into Spanish, the more truth I’ll uncover. Not just vocabulary or verb tenses, but the truth of what this language has meant in my history. I’ve already started to feel it : the ache of recognition when I spot a Spanish word embedded in Cebuano, knowing it wasn’t a gift but a residue. Knowing it came from hundreds of years of control. The commands of colonizers still echo through our speech today all broken, borrowed, but present.

I feel it when I notice how many Spanish verbs have slipped into my first language. Words like halza (to lift), sige (to continue), mandar (to command), lahos (from lejos, to pass through), cerra (to close), and abri (to open) — they live in my mind, spoken as if they’ve always belonged. But they weren’t born here. They were planted — imposed by a language that arrived not to coexist, but to overwrite. And I can’t help but wonder what words we lost to make room for them.

Even the language I speak, what do I call it, really? People often say Cebuano, others say Bisaya. The two are used interchangeably, as if they mean the same thing. But they don’t. Cebuano is actually the Spanish word for Sugboanon — the people of Sugbo, now known as Cebu. But most of us just call it Bisaya, because that’s who we are, and that’s how we know ourselves. Still, the use of Cebuano persists, another reminder of how colonial labels become so normalized that we forget their origins. Even in naming our language, there’s a filter ...a small erasure, as if we always need an easier explanation for others, or a word that fits a colonial history rather than our own. It’s a quiet kind of grief. Not because I lived through Spanish colonization because I didn’t. Neither did my grandparents. But I carry its residue. I feel it in the way we beso our tías as a gesture of so-called respect, in the cadence of borrowed prayers, in the Spanish names we sign on government forms. Even now, 500 years later, we speak with an accent shaped by empire. There’s no clean break from that. No easy way out. No undoing. And yet I keep learning. My eyes are open. I want to keep seeing.

Because in choosing to speak Spanish now, I reclaim something. I don’t learn it to forget. I learn it to remember : clearly, painfully, completely. To understand what was taken, but also what remains. To feel fully what it means to be Filipino in a world shaped by so many others.

Spanish doesn’t hurt. But it humbles me. It holds joy and sorrow in equal measure. And somewhere in between, in that fragile, flickering space

.... I’ve found something close to truth.

[entrederivas]

Allí

In a year, I found myself in Spain.

Not in a dream. Not in a hallucination. But in the midst of real stone, air, and sand. When I glanced outside my plane window, it almost felt surreal, like a fever dream. The clouds had carried me to a place where the language I’d learned to dance with now echoed in the streets. A country that once ruled the world, now a piece of my imagination made real.

As I landed, a strange sense of normalcy washed over me. I was so far from home, yet it felt as though I could melt into this place—disappear into its rhythm.

And for the first time, I used my Spanish in the course of an ordinary day. I didn’t feel the overwhelming nervousness that once made me forget everything I knew. It wasn’t flawless. My grammar stumbled, and when the taxi driver asked me to fasten my cinturón, I had no idea what he meant.

But I said hello to the concierge and asked for the Wi-Fi password while he explained the hotel policies. I spoke with the breakfast lady, told her our room number, and asked her to add the charge to our bill. I approached the metro staff to ask for directions to the nearest exit. I even had a conversation with our Airbnb host about my love for football.

I was speaking Spanish—on a regular day. And I couldn’t believe how natural it felt. It didn’t feel like a foreign language on my tongue, but rather a language I was simply still getting used to speaking. I was in there for a week. Then, Spain was no longer just a destination I had once planned on traveling to; it became a place where I lived each moment fully present. I kept exclaiming "I'm here" as I wandered through the narrow streets of old towns, looked at strangers' faces, navigated through the metro with ease. And slowly, without realizing it, I began to feel less like an outsider. There were still moments of hesitation—phrases I fumbled, customs I misunderstood—but the nervousness I once carried had been replaced by a quiet confidence.

In those brief moments in Spain, I could feel my sense of self shifting. It’s not my second home, as I’ve only been there a week. Maybe this is just another chapter, still open for me to continue writing. Maybe it’s a dance, one I need to keep learning the steps to and listen to the rhythm better. Maybe it’s a fever dream.

I’m back in the Philippines now, and I think about Spain every other day. I feel normal here, but I feel normal there too. And when I close my eyes and think in Spanish, I can almost feel myself back there again.

[entrederivas]

1º

Inspired by the Women's World Cup last year, I decided to spend my Christmas break learning Spanish with a teacher I found online. I wanted to delve deeper into what this language and culture meant to me, and how they would become part of my life. This was a decision I was willing to turn into a long-term commitment. At this point, I knew three things: 1) basic Spanish greetings, phrases, and numbers, 2) "usted" is formal, and 3) I couldn't pronounce the rolling "r."

When I met my Spanish teacher for the first time, I was excited and nervous. I was... jelly, quivering in anticipation and uncertainty. Looking at her through the screen, I didn't know how to start the conversation... or the lesson... or anything. Was I expected to speak in Spanish now? Should I speak in English and hope she understood? My heart raced as I scrambled to form sentences with the minuscule amount of Spanish I remembered from college.

She smiled at me and began speaking in Spanish, her words flowing in a clear rhythm, yet the sounds were unintelligible to me, much like the post-match interviews I watched during the World Cup. Sheepishly, I responded in English, and she would occasionally smile and reply in English to clarify and explain what had just been said. My jelly-like state evolved into melting jelly, losing shape and coherence under the pressure of this first lesson. I felt like I was slowly melting into a puddle of English words, struggling to maintain my composure and keep up with the grammar. The lesson ended after 50 minutes. At this point, I had learned three things: 1) I actually don't know basic Spanish greetings, phrases, and numbers, 2) in Spain, they don't use "usted" in regular conversations, and 3) the rolling "r" isn't the only Spanish sound I don't know how to pronounce. I realized I had a long way to go with the language. But this was only the first lesson. I had six more in the coming weeks.

[entrederivas]

Futbol.

Maybe it is appropriate to start with football or soccer as the Americans call it. A sport that's long been alien to me, could now possibly be one of the most fundamental things that turned my life around completely.

It started with the women's world cup, just a year ago. On pure coincidence and availability of the channel, I watched the final game of the tournament. It started with me rooting for England, my husband's home country. It started with me wanting the English girls take the trophy back home for the first time in 58 years. I was ready to see them win. It seemed like they were a crowd favourite.

It started with England coming out dominant. These girls looked like they were going to win it. In a matter of minutes, I became enamoured with the way the ball was being handled across the pitch. The red and white players' kits just became a blur and I was just looking at bodies kicking one ball around. There was so much running. So much passing. So much excitement. The display of strength and agility was impressive. Then Spain scored the first crucial goal in the 29th minute. A young Spanish girl has scored only her second goal for her country in her whole life. It moved me and my heart swelled with joy for her.

It turns out, that would be the only goal of the match. And Spain won their first women's world cup. They lifted the trophy, and I was moved again. How am I feeling so much for a sport and for women I had no connections to? And why did I feel so much happiness for a young Spanish girl that I didn't know?

It was a curious moment. I wanted to make sense of it. She stepped up to the podium, this girl who scored the winning goal. I was so excited for her and so happy for her.

The television was on and she was there live on the screen, teary eyed and still catching her breath. There was a single microphone in front of her and I could hear her voice. I could hear sounds. But nothing was processing in my mind. I blinked, trying to understand her words. Yet, I struggled to understand her emotions - her triumph, her joy, and her underlying fears. In that moment, I felt a great divide that separated me from the intense feelings while watching the game. It was an inexplicable void filled only with unintelligible sounds. I realized then that none of the Spanish team - the winning team, spoke any English. Should they speak English? Was it even reasonable for me to expect them to? It struck me then that I couldn't fully comprehend the depth of their happiness and their struggles because I couldn't understand their words. And in a matter of seconds, the language barrier became too wide, forming a poignant moment reminding me that their language and all its nuances conveyed messages of triumph, passion, resilience, and determination. And I couldn't receive the message in the exact moment that they said it to the world.

And so after the game, FIFA panned out of the television and the echoes of celebration disappeared, I sat on our couch in a 'half-state' - suspended between exhiliration and contemplation. I've discovered a new sense of inspiration and empowerment, through women coming together and achieving a historical win. In that moment, I knew I had to learn Spanish to understand what the victory meant to them...and to me.