Dear America Read online

  There are many parts that make each of us whole. Since I didn’t know who to talk to, or what to do, or how to think about the “illegal” part of me, embracing the gay part kept me alive. If I had not accepted it as early as I did, I don’t know where I would be. Part of the self-acceptance came from what I was reading, watching, and consuming. I’ll never forget seeing the bright and smiling face of a white woman on the cover of Time magazine as I was standing at Walgreens, not too far from our house. It was April 1997. The cover hit me like a freight truck. The headline—“Yep, I’m Gay”—could have been a lighthouse. The woman’s name was Ellen DeGeneres.

  Seeing Ellen on that Time cover had a profound impact on me. She provided a real name, a human face, a specific story. I bought the magazine and stuffed it in my backpack between my algebra and chemistry books, afraid someone at school would see it and figure me out.

  But the sentimental high of Ellen’s coming-out story was followed by the tragic low of Matthew Shepard’s murder.

  Shepard, a student at the University of Wyoming, was beaten, his pistol-whipped body tied to a fence, where he was left to die. This was in October 1998. Shepard’s murder drew international headlines, even catching Lola’s attention. When Lola asked me if I’d heard about the student who was killed for being bakla (gay), I nodded and walked away.

  There’s nothing wrong with being gay.

  I don’t know how exactly many times I must have said it to myself, like some kind of personal anthem, in the subsequent months. There’s nothing wrong with being gay. I said it enough times to myself that, on May 27, 1999, I ended up blurting it out loud as I sat in the back of room 102 during U.S. history class.

  Mr. Farrell had just shown the class a documentary on Harvey Milk, the first openly gay San Francisco city council member, who was shot and killed in 1978. He was just beginning the class discussion when I raised my hand and told my classmates, “I am gay.”

  Some of my classmates turned around. A student named Anna started to cry. She told the class about her gay uncle. Even though I felt how uncomfortable some people were, I remember feeling quite comfortable, as if I had opened a window and let some light into what was a very dark room—the room inside my head.

  With that announcement, I became the only openly gay student at Mountain View High School. The declaration caused even more tension with Lola and especially with Lolo. As Catholics, they viewed homosexuality as a sin. Lolo said he was embarrassed about having ang apo na bakla (“a grandson who is gay”). Equally upsetting to Lolo was that I was making matters more difficult for myself, he said. He reiterated his plan: marry a woman, a U.S. citizen, and “get legal.”

  “I’m not doing that,” I said to him as I sat in the passenger seat of his Toyota Camry. Minutes went by and the air got tighter and thicker. We stayed silent until he pulled over in front of the garage.

  The engine was still running, and Lolo, with both hands on the steering wheel, said: “Bahay ko ito.” (“This is my house.”)

  “Hindi pwede ang bakla sa bahay ko.” (“Being gay is not allowed in my house.”)

  “You don’t own me,” I said.

  He stopped the engine. Before he opened the door, he said: “Wala kang utang na loob. Umalis ka dito.” (“You have no sense of gratitude. Get out of here.”)

  With only my backpack and less than twenty dollars in my wallet, I took off. I walked to the nearest Safeway and found a pay phone. I called “Peter,” one of the older guys I’d met on AOL. We had started chatting for a few weeks before we met in person, at a coffee shop in downtown Mountain View. I asked Peter if I could crash at his place. When he said yes, I took two buses to get to his bungalow in Willow Glen, an upscale neighborhood in San Jose.

  Peter was thirty-eight. He had been married for a few years before deciding to get a divorce, realizing that he needed to come out. We had an arrangement. I needed a place to stay for a couple of weeks, and he needed a companion.

  Some people say that he took advantage of me.

  I would argue that I took advantage of him.

  Part II

  Passing

  1.

  Playing a Role

  I swallowed American culture before I learned how to chew it.

  Being an American felt like a role I had to play, in an extemporaneous one-man play I made up after I found out I was not supposed to be in America.

  Talk like an American.

  Write like an American.

  Think like an American.

  Pass as an American.

  I was the sixteen-year-old actor, producer, and director of this production, inhabiting a character that I honed with the help of a fourteen-inch TV set, a VCR, an audio player that played cassettes and CDs, and library cards from both the Mountain View Public Library and the Los Altos Library. Though there were libraries in the Philippines, I don’t recall going into one while I was growing up. Here in America, the libraries were my church, and I was an acolyte. Between the two libraries—one with an extensive collection of videos of American films, the other boasting every CD you’d ever want to listen to—my education was complete. Lolo bought the secondhand TV set at a garage sale for thirty-five dollars. As a birthday gift, Lolo and Lola bought me the brand-new VCR that could record TV shows.

  What I watched on TV led to what movies I looked for, what music I listened to, what books, magazines, and newspapers I read. The first source of confusion was magazines, which were prominently displayed at both libraries. I was confused about the difference between Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and Commentary, in the same way that I couldn’t figure out what distinguished the TV channels from one another. Deepening the confusion was trying to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which dominated the headlines at the time. I struggled to understand what was going on. There is no such thing as winter in the Philippines—no ice, no snow—so I was instantly drawn to figure skating. I couldn’t believe people were spinning and jumping on a quarter-inch of a blade. The saga of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding made competitive skating more popular; there was always a competition every weekend. Before skaters began their “programs,” the titles of the music they skated to were flashed on TV. Skating was my introduction to Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, Mozart, et al. Did you know there are two versions of Romeo and Juliet, the Tchaikovsky version and the Prokofiev version? I borrowed all of it from the library. It was free. I couldn’t believe it was free. Listening to rap and hip-hop while trying to understand Alanis Morissette and Joni Mitchell was my passport to black and white America; I thought that if I was fluent in both cultures, speaking in both tongues, no one would ask where I was from and how I got here. (It took me a while to discover that Alanis and Joni were both Canadians.) The 1990s was the beginning of hip-hop’s rise as the most popular genre of music, particularly among young people. I convinced myself that reciting the lyrics to every one of Lauryn Hill’s and Tupac Shakur’s songs was proof of my American-ness. When I heard about a thing called country music, and couldn’t find that much country music at the libraries, I went to Tower Records and listened to songs by Garth Brooks and Dolly Parton.

  For me, movies were like a field trip, a way of seeing just how vast the country is. In a span of a few weeks, I watched Goodfellas, Hannah and Her Sisters, Do the Right Thing, and Working Girl. I was floored when I realized that they were all filmed in a place called New York City. How can Martin Scorsese’s New York City be the same as Woody Allen’s New York City, which is not the same thing as Spike Lee’s New York City and Mike Nichols’s New York City? That was my introduction to perspective. After watching Sophie’s Choice, Silkwood, Out of Africa, and A Cry in the Dark, I went up to a librarian and asked: “Is there more than one Meryl Streep?”

  Watching TV was a different kind of cultural immersion. TV Guide, a weekly magazine that I bought at the grocery store, was a bible. TV is where I picked up idioms and mannerisms. I learned how to use “cool beans” from Full House. In order to ac
t, talk, and pass as some kind of American, I studied every show I could watch, from Frasier to Roseanne, from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to The West Wing. Appropriating how Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers spoke on PBS while listening to Tupac and Lauryn in my CD player seemed as far away from the “illegal” Filipino with a thick accent as I could get.

  Airing back-to-back on weekday afternoons, The Rosie O’Donnell Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show unlocked doors in my imagination. Oprah’s show introduced me to authors like Maya Angelou, Wally Lamb, and Toni Morrison—oh, how Oprah loved Morrison, whose books she often selected for her book club. I was drawn to Angelou because she bore a resemblance to Lola, with the same low and rich timbre of a voice. Almost daily, Rosie’s show featured someone from Broadway, including the actress and singer Audra McDonald, whose voice was so expansive—swinging and soaring, walloping and wailing—it seemed to jump out of the screen and into my bedroom.

  I didn’t know what Broadway was, or how the Tony Awards differed from the Oscars or the Emmys, but because of McDonald, I recorded the 1998 Tony Awards on TV, which Rosie hosted. About twenty minutes into the show, just as I was figuring out the difference between “Best Revival of a Play” and “Best New Play,” O’Donnell introduced a musical called Ragtime.

  Over a simple melody, a young boy took center stage, later to be joined by his father and mother and other white people from a place called New Rochelle, New York. Together, they sang:

  The skies were blue and hazy.

  Rarely a storm.

  Barely a chill.

  The afternoons were lazy.

  Everyone warm. Everything still.

  The days were gently tinted,

  Lavender pink, lemon and lime.

  Ladies with parasols.

  Fellows with tennis balls.

  There were gazebos.

  And there were no Negroes.

  A beat later, the music changed to a syncopated tune, and a group of black people danced center stage and sang: “And everything was Ragtime! Listen to the Ragtime!”

  Then a black man sitting in front of a piano took over. He declared: “Up in Harlem, people danced to a music that was theirs and no one else’s. The sound of changing time. The music of a better day.”

  Then the white people, on the other side of the stage, took over the melody and sang:

  Ladies with parasols,

  Fellows with tennis balls.

  There were no Negroes

  And there were no immigrants.

  Yet again the music changed, signaling the arrival of something mysterious as a new group of people—immigrants—take center stage. A bearded man with some kind of accent (I couldn’t place where it was from) said:

  They came from Western and Eastern Europe by the thousands.

  No dream was too big.

  They would be the next J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit or Henry Ford. It would be their century, too. It was only 1906.

  My mind raced as the white people, the black people, and the immigrants crowded the stage and all together sang:

  And there were ninety-four years to go!

  And there was music playing,

  Catching a nation in its prime.

  Beggar and millionaire,

  Everyone, everywhere

  Moving to the Ragtime!

  At this point, members of the three groups started spreading out, then began to self-segregate, before finally moving into separate areas of the stage while the music’s melody turned dissonant and discordant. With white people back at center stage, as black people took stage left while immigrants took stage right, they all sang:

  And there was distant music

  Skipping a beat, singing a dream.

  A strange, insistent music

  Putting out heat,

  Picking up steam.

  The sound of distant thunder

  Suddenly starting to climb . . .

  It was the music

  Of something beginning,

  An era exploding,

  A century spinning

  In riches and rags,

  And in rhythm and rhyme.

  The people called it Ragtime . . .

  Ragtime!

  Ragtime!

  Ragtime!

  I watched this performance so many times that I wore out the tape. The “immigrants” in the performance didn’t look like Mexicans or Filipinos or Chinese or Indians or Pakistanis—what people usually think of when they hear “immigrants.” It wasn’t until watching that performance that I realized that white people were immigrants, too, that they came from somewhere: Ireland, Germany, Italy, Latvia, Russia, etc. Obsessing over Ragtime led to discovering the works of Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Stephen Sondheim, all of whom, I would realize, came from immigrant backgrounds. Ragtime connected dots I didn’t know existed, allowing me to better understand American history in ways my textbooks didn’t fully explain. I would learn that except for Native Americans, whose tribes were already here before the colonists and the Pilgrims landed, and African Americans, who were uprooted from their homes and imported to this country as slaves, everyone was an immigrant. I didn’t know what legal papers they had, or if they needed them, or if they were considered “illegals,” too, but white people were immigrants, like my family are immigrants. After doing some research at the libraries, I discovered that Ragtime was based on an historical novel by E. L. Doctorow, whose book told the changing story of America through real-life personalities and fictionalized characters at the turn of the twentieth century. Each time I watched the tape, every time I listened to the song, I wondered where Latinos, Asians, Africans, Caribbeans, Middle Easterners—the new immigrants of the past few decades—fit on that stage and in the evolving American story. I wondered where my Mexican friends fit. I wondered where Lolo, Lola, and I fit, if we fit at all.

  We spoke Taglish at home—a combination of the Tagalog that Lolo and Lola spoke, and the answers I gave in English. Except for the 11 P.M. local news, Lolo and Lola watched only the Filipino Channel, a cable network that re-aired shows from the Philippines. Sometimes, I watched the shows with everyone. More often than not, though, I was in my room.

  The only time I saw a Hollywood movie starring people who looked anything like my family was The Joy Luck Club, which, I learned later on, was based on a book by a Chinese American writer, Amy Tan. I picked up the movie at the video store, drawn by the VHS cover: the smiling faces of four Asian women and a striking shot of the Golden Gate Bridge. I rented the tape and watched it late one night in the living room when everyone was sleeping. After about a month of living with Peter, I returned to Lolo and Lola’s house. We made peace, uneasy as it was. But the silence was too heavy, polluting the already suffocating air in the house.

  We shared one bathroom. After Lola used the bathroom that night, she saw me in the living room. She sat down in the opposite side of the couch. We said nothing to each other. The Joy Luck Club was the first American film Lola and I watched together. I’m not sure how much she understood the interlocking stories of four Chinese women who emigrated to America in search of better lives. But she understood it enough that she started to cry when one of the characters, Lindo, broke into tears as she explained her love for her American-born daughter, Waverly. I ended up watching Lola watch the movie, wondering how much she had given up to come here, how rarely she got to see her own daughter. At that moment, I realized it wasn’t just me who missed my mother—Lola longed for my mama, too. But I was too selfish to want to see it, too absorbed with my own pain.

  In those early years, passing as American meant rejecting anything Filipino, at least outwardly. Lolo scoffed when he asked me a question in Tagalog, “Saan ka pupunta?” (“Where are you going?”), and I responded in English, “I’m going to the library.”

  Passing as an American was my way of exerting control over a life I had no control over. It was not my decision to come here, acquire fake papers, and lie my way into being in America. But
I was here. At the very least, I felt that I had to control what kind of American I was going to be, what kind of cultural connections I was going to make, which led to what kind of mask I had to wear.

  2.

  Mountain View High School

  The moment I realized that writing for newspapers meant having a “byline”—“by Jose Antonio Vargas,” my name in print, on a piece of paper, visible and tangible—I was hooked.

  There are no writers in my family—not on my mother’s side, not on my father’s side. In the Philippines, we’re a family of farmers, nurses, cooks, accountants, construction workers, U.S. Navy veterans. I got into journalism because of a high school teacher.

  “You ask too many annoying questions,” Mrs. Dewar told me.

  A self-described hippie with a smoky voice, Mrs. Dewar taught English composition to high school sophomores like me. Mrs. Dewar was also the longtime adviser to the Oracle, the student newspaper. A forty-something educator who’d had early aspirations of being a journalist, she informed me of a free, two-week journalism camp for “minority” journalists at San Francisco State University, her alma mater. When I asked her what a journalist does, she quipped, “It’s for annoying people like you who love to ask questions.”

  First, it was a sign of rebellion and independence from my family, a way of rejecting Lolo’s strategy of working under-the-table jobs until I marry a woman and get my papers.

  Second, and more importantly, writing was a form of existing, existing through the people I interviewed and the words I wrote as I struggled with where my physical being was supposed to be. Writing was also a way of belonging, a way of contributing to society while doing a public-service-oriented job that’s the antithesis of the stereotype that “illegals” are here to take, take, take. I didn’t realize it then, but the more stories I reported on, the more people I interviewed, the more I realized that writing was the freest thing I could do, unencumbered by borders and legal documents and largely dependent on my skills and talent. Reporting, interviewing, and writing felt like the safest, surest place in my everyday reality. If I was not considered an American because I didn’t have the right papers, then practicing journalism—writing in English, interviewing Americans, making sense of the people and places around me—was my way of writing myself into America. In the beginning, writing was only a way of passing as an American. I never expected it to be an identity. Above all else, I write to exist, to make myself visible.