Manila Days. Growing up kana-pinoy in Manila

We didn’t ask to come, but my Presbyterian parents came, so we grew up in Manila, teeming cheerful grimy Manila. I loved Manila with an alab ny puso, an impassioned heart.

Everyday at flag ceremony, my siblings and I pledged to be tunay na Pilipino, a true Filipino.

This memoir braids the entanglements of those seventeen years as a Taglish-speaking kana-pinoy, white in a brown world, American in a edgy former colony, Protestant among Catholics, a missionary kid informed by tree spirits, dreams, and the Bible, who wanted to be a virgin anthropologist.

Our family arrived in 1957 at President Magsaysay’s plane crash, and left in 1972 in the midst of anti-Marcos, anti-American rage. The shift was inevitable, my parents told us. They were post-colonial Presbyterian “Fraternal Workers” for the UCCP, United Church of Christ in the Philippines. My father, a New Yorker and democratic socialist, was committed to worker justice and the right to housing; my mother, a Midwestern intellectual with a League of Women voters mother, taught Christian Education at Ellinwood Malate church and Philippine Women’s University.

It was a “New Day” for postcolonial mission, until it wasn’t.