Asian Bones
by Dani Putney
I know I’m at the Philippine mini mart when I smell fish. Growing up, I’d go with my mom to the counter-serve area of the market so that she could buy freshly cooked tilapia. I remember complaining to her about how stinky the food was.
“How could you eat that? You can see the fish’s head!”
She’d tell me fish was one of her favorite foods in Talisay City. “It isn’t the same in America,” she’d add.
We always went to the same place—what we referred to as the “Filipino store”—to pick up fish and other goodies. Besides the fish, we’d emerge with nondescript plastic bags full of treats ranging from puto to pitsi-pitsî (with requisite coconut shavings on the side). These trips would usually happen after my family’s weekly grocery outing at the McClellan Air Force Base commissary.
I didn’t understand my mom’s Filipina heritage as a kid. Being mixed race on the West Coast, I was simply a tan boy to neighbors. Nobody knew my mom immigrated from the Philippines. If anything, people assumed I was Mexican or Native American. Sometimes people would think I was Spanish. For a while, I didn’t know I was different either.
Your family’s normal becomes not normal when you go to school. I’d talk to classmates about some of the foods I’d eat at home. Pancit and rice was a typical dinner—how was I supposed to know other kids didn’t love sour noodles, too? How could I have guessed it wasn’t an American thing to eat rice with most dinners? To younger me, rice was life. Steam rising from my mom’s rice cooker was a nightly kitchen portrait, an image I can only appreciate fully as a twentysomething reflecting on their childhood.
I recall a conversation I had, maybe in third or fourth grade, about how I thought pizza and ranch was a disgusting combination. A boy was dipping his pepperoni pizza in the heart-attack sauce and getting the stuff all over his face. I had to speak up about this culinary tragedy.
“That’s gross,” I said.
“But don’t you eat weird noodles?” he replied. “You’re one to judge.”
I started to feel shame about my mom’s choices. In fact, I was flat-out embarrassed—did we have to go to the Filipino store again? It smelled bad, I couldn’t understand what people were saying, and I’d only eat some of the stuff she bought anyway. I felt awkward and out of place.
My mom, though, was in her element at the mini mart. She spoke a language I’d never heard at home, but it suited her. She smiled in a casual way I hadn’t seen around my dad and brother. If I could characterize her presence in one word, I’d say she was relaxed. It was like she was at peace.
As an adult finally reckoning with their identity, I can see how white-washed my youth was. The Asian part of me was something I’d learned to hide because it wasn’t congruent with the identities of those around me. As clichéd as it sounds, I wanted to be like the white boys whose dads hosted barbecues and moms wore pretty sundresses when taking them to soccer practice. Why did this other half of me need to exist when it didn’t seem to exist among my peers at school?
My childlike desire to fit in wasn’t the only thing to blame. My dad did an apocalyptic number on our family. He psychologically manipulated my brother and me to side with him against our mom: It was always her fault when something went awry because she was supposedly bipolar—a woman prone to “black moods” that made her a threat to the well-being of our family. And we believed him. I blamed her for never teaching me Tagalog, but only in the past few years did I learn the truth: “Your dad wanted you to be American,” she told me. He thought we’d stand out too much.
My brother and I witnessed an arguably unhealthy amount of family drama in our youth. I remember that during my parents’ fights, Dad would play dead on the floor as if he were experiencing a heart attack. Mom would yell in the background, calling him a “piece of shit” and other choice phrases. Here’s a re-creation:
Dad: Silent, on the floor, breathing in a dramatically labored way.
Mom: “How could you do this to me? Rot in hell!”
But I worshipped my dad as a kid. He was the man with all the ideas: He had an IQ in the 150s, and my teachers and counselors throughout the years adored him. I could talk to him about literature, history, and science, three of my favorite subjects in school. As one of the “gifted and talented” kids, I lapped up all his gesticulations of intellectualism. To me, a smart person was the best person.
Anything he’d tell me, even if it was falsely accusing my mom of being bipolar, carried with it the weight of a scholar. I believed everything he said. He was the intelligent parent, after all, with a bachelor’s degree in education, a minor in psychology, and a high Stanford-Binet to boot. My mom came from a farming family in the Philippines, and although she had an associate’s degree in secretarial science, it didn’t mean anything—“education wasn’t as good over there,” according to my smart dad. Everything was apparently worse in the Philippines because it was a “third-world country.”
I now know my dad barely used his education degree; I think he taught for less than three years. For most of my childhood, he was a security guard. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a career path unrelated to your education, but I can’t help but feel like my dad pulled that infuriating “I’m smart but won’t use it” move I’ve seen many of my peers, especially in high school, do as well. Ah, people like my dad love to let everyone know how smart they are but hesitate to do anything of import with their intelligence.
Alas, my mom loved him despite the gaslighting only I seem to believe he inflicted. She also thinks it’s a tragedy for him to suddenly die from a heart attack. I may be heartless, but I know eating greasy fast food every other day doesn’t bode well for your health. There was nothing sudden about his death.
“How could you eat that? You can see the fish’s head!”
She’d tell me fish was one of her favorite foods in Talisay City. “It isn’t the same in America,” she’d add.
We always went to the same place—what we referred to as the “Filipino store”—to pick up fish and other goodies. Besides the fish, we’d emerge with nondescript plastic bags full of treats ranging from puto to pitsi-pitsî (with requisite coconut shavings on the side). These trips would usually happen after my family’s weekly grocery outing at the McClellan Air Force Base commissary.
I didn’t understand my mom’s Filipina heritage as a kid. Being mixed race on the West Coast, I was simply a tan boy to neighbors. Nobody knew my mom immigrated from the Philippines. If anything, people assumed I was Mexican or Native American. Sometimes people would think I was Spanish. For a while, I didn’t know I was different either.
Your family’s normal becomes not normal when you go to school. I’d talk to classmates about some of the foods I’d eat at home. Pancit and rice was a typical dinner—how was I supposed to know other kids didn’t love sour noodles, too? How could I have guessed it wasn’t an American thing to eat rice with most dinners? To younger me, rice was life. Steam rising from my mom’s rice cooker was a nightly kitchen portrait, an image I can only appreciate fully as a twentysomething reflecting on their childhood.
I recall a conversation I had, maybe in third or fourth grade, about how I thought pizza and ranch was a disgusting combination. A boy was dipping his pepperoni pizza in the heart-attack sauce and getting the stuff all over his face. I had to speak up about this culinary tragedy.
“That’s gross,” I said.
“But don’t you eat weird noodles?” he replied. “You’re one to judge.”
I started to feel shame about my mom’s choices. In fact, I was flat-out embarrassed—did we have to go to the Filipino store again? It smelled bad, I couldn’t understand what people were saying, and I’d only eat some of the stuff she bought anyway. I felt awkward and out of place.
My mom, though, was in her element at the mini mart. She spoke a language I’d never heard at home, but it suited her. She smiled in a casual way I hadn’t seen around my dad and brother. If I could characterize her presence in one word, I’d say she was relaxed. It was like she was at peace.
As an adult finally reckoning with their identity, I can see how white-washed my youth was. The Asian part of me was something I’d learned to hide because it wasn’t congruent with the identities of those around me. As clichéd as it sounds, I wanted to be like the white boys whose dads hosted barbecues and moms wore pretty sundresses when taking them to soccer practice. Why did this other half of me need to exist when it didn’t seem to exist among my peers at school?
My childlike desire to fit in wasn’t the only thing to blame. My dad did an apocalyptic number on our family. He psychologically manipulated my brother and me to side with him against our mom: It was always her fault when something went awry because she was supposedly bipolar—a woman prone to “black moods” that made her a threat to the well-being of our family. And we believed him. I blamed her for never teaching me Tagalog, but only in the past few years did I learn the truth: “Your dad wanted you to be American,” she told me. He thought we’d stand out too much.
My brother and I witnessed an arguably unhealthy amount of family drama in our youth. I remember that during my parents’ fights, Dad would play dead on the floor as if he were experiencing a heart attack. Mom would yell in the background, calling him a “piece of shit” and other choice phrases. Here’s a re-creation:
Dad: Silent, on the floor, breathing in a dramatically labored way.
Mom: “How could you do this to me? Rot in hell!”
But I worshipped my dad as a kid. He was the man with all the ideas: He had an IQ in the 150s, and my teachers and counselors throughout the years adored him. I could talk to him about literature, history, and science, three of my favorite subjects in school. As one of the “gifted and talented” kids, I lapped up all his gesticulations of intellectualism. To me, a smart person was the best person.
Anything he’d tell me, even if it was falsely accusing my mom of being bipolar, carried with it the weight of a scholar. I believed everything he said. He was the intelligent parent, after all, with a bachelor’s degree in education, a minor in psychology, and a high Stanford-Binet to boot. My mom came from a farming family in the Philippines, and although she had an associate’s degree in secretarial science, it didn’t mean anything—“education wasn’t as good over there,” according to my smart dad. Everything was apparently worse in the Philippines because it was a “third-world country.”
I now know my dad barely used his education degree; I think he taught for less than three years. For most of my childhood, he was a security guard. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing a career path unrelated to your education, but I can’t help but feel like my dad pulled that infuriating “I’m smart but won’t use it” move I’ve seen many of my peers, especially in high school, do as well. Ah, people like my dad love to let everyone know how smart they are but hesitate to do anything of import with their intelligence.
Alas, my mom loved him despite the gaslighting only I seem to believe he inflicted. She also thinks it’s a tragedy for him to suddenly die from a heart attack. I may be heartless, but I know eating greasy fast food every other day doesn’t bode well for your health. There was nothing sudden about his death.
~
I can’t ignore the gratitude my mom feels for being able to live in the US. She was my dad’s picture bride. He responded to an advertisement, and a few weeks later, my parents were married and living in California. My brother was born. Then I was. Dad bought a small house out in the Sacramento countryside.
I try to imagine what the ad looked like. Was it featured in a catalog that listed several other women? Did my mom appear extra youthful in her picture? I’ve seen wedding photos, so I know she was a stunning young woman. However, the entire process of “acquiring” a bride via mail order feels—no pun intended--
foreign to me. I’m not even sure where I’d look to find such a
document.
All I know for certain is this: Asian women were my dad’s American dream.
I think my dad acquired a taste for Filipinas during his military years. He was stationed at Clark Air Force Base on Luzon island during the 1960s. He met his first wife around that time and had six children. Before he died, my dad told me his first wife wanted to kill him, so he had to return to the States to protect my half-brothers and half-sisters.
He raised his first six children in Texas. Eventually, he married a white woman. His second marriage didn’t last. I think he said she got fat, but I firmly believe he divorced her because she was white. Once you develop an Asian fetish, you always have an Asian fetish. That’s why I’m here: good ol’ wife No. 3.
The doting son I was, I didn’t question his story at the time, and I immediately assigned the label of “crazy” to his first wife. My poor half-brothers and half-sisters, I thought. They had to grow up in fear of wild Filipinas.
Today, I’m less forgiving. I wonder what he must’ve done to his first wife, a woman whose name I don’t even know, to make her want to kill him. I may not have all the answers, but I’m smart enough to know straight white men are the best liars. There’s no way my dad was blameless, especially after I witnessed his faux fainting spells and heard his lies about my mom’s mental capacity. The only conclusion I have is that his first wife saw through his bullshit and could no longer put on a mask of subservience. There’s no reason to wait around when you have weapons and a posse of angry kapatids.
I try to imagine what the ad looked like. Was it featured in a catalog that listed several other women? Did my mom appear extra youthful in her picture? I’ve seen wedding photos, so I know she was a stunning young woman. However, the entire process of “acquiring” a bride via mail order feels—no pun intended--
foreign to me. I’m not even sure where I’d look to find such a
document.
All I know for certain is this: Asian women were my dad’s American dream.
I think my dad acquired a taste for Filipinas during his military years. He was stationed at Clark Air Force Base on Luzon island during the 1960s. He met his first wife around that time and had six children. Before he died, my dad told me his first wife wanted to kill him, so he had to return to the States to protect my half-brothers and half-sisters.
He raised his first six children in Texas. Eventually, he married a white woman. His second marriage didn’t last. I think he said she got fat, but I firmly believe he divorced her because she was white. Once you develop an Asian fetish, you always have an Asian fetish. That’s why I’m here: good ol’ wife No. 3.
The doting son I was, I didn’t question his story at the time, and I immediately assigned the label of “crazy” to his first wife. My poor half-brothers and half-sisters, I thought. They had to grow up in fear of wild Filipinas.
Today, I’m less forgiving. I wonder what he must’ve done to his first wife, a woman whose name I don’t even know, to make her want to kill him. I may not have all the answers, but I’m smart enough to know straight white men are the best liars. There’s no way my dad was blameless, especially after I witnessed his faux fainting spells and heard his lies about my mom’s mental capacity. The only conclusion I have is that his first wife saw through his bullshit and could no longer put on a mask of subservience. There’s no reason to wait around when you have weapons and a posse of angry kapatids.
~
Ever since Dad passed away, my mom has stopped making lumpia. If you’ve eaten any Pinoy food, it’s probably lumpia. And I know, random white person who’s trying to say they understand my heritage and relate to me, the crunchy spring rolls are to die for. When I was younger, I’d help my parents wrap lumpia. If we exhibited any sign of family bonding, it was during lumpia nights in the Putney household. My parents were smiling at the same time in the same physical space. Of course, this observation is an anachronism—as a kid, all I wanted was for the lumpia to be done already.
I visit my mom once a week to check on her and help her out if she needs it. I also make sure to peruse the freezer to see if she’s made a dent into her stockpile of frozen lumpia wrappers. It’s always the same amount, tucked in the corner behind instant dinners and cartons of ice cream.
“I thought you were going to make lumpia this week,” I say.
Her go-to reply, with some variation here and there: “I was too tired.”
I then shake my head and smile at her.
Honestly, I get it. Working retail can be tiring, especially when customers inherently suck. I say this as a customer who sucks. But I fear that she feels displaced in her culture. No matter what I think of my bastard dad, she loved him. He was her lumpia buddy. I know she derived a lot of joy when she could share her favorite treats with him.
I’ve simply gotten good at pretending my dead dad doesn’t haunt me and my identity. For instance, during a recent team-building activity at work, I surprised myself by admitting to colleagues how haunted I feel. Isn’t it fucked up that the man who tried to suppress my heritage is forever tied to my understanding of it? Perhaps it’s more fucked up that he’s forever tied to my mom’s understanding of her own background—she never asked to become emotionally attached to a man whose ghost inhibits her from enjoying food from her goddamn childhood.
I wish Mom and I could séance with my dad so that he could tell her it was fine to make lumpia again. It’s funny because when he was alive, I wasn’t this close to my mom. I certainly didn’t feel so protective of her as to imagine supernatural situations to ensure her emotional stability. She was my dad’s parrot, replicating his problematic BS about undocumented immigrants, supposed welfare abusers, and various racial groups. My dad’s faux libertarianism must’ve radiated from his skin like spores looking for a host; they happened to land on my mom. To be truthful, I disliked her.
That’s why I think I care about her so much. Not only did my dad pit my brother and me against our “crazy” mom; he also sculpted her in his image. I’m no hero though—like most of my stewardship, it arises from a sense of guilt. Always making amends, this one.
More important than my guilt, I think, is that Mom and I survived my dad. We’re still standing. Shared trauma brings people together. It’s almost like the bond among abuse survivors is a silver lining for all the fuckery.
I’ll never tell my mom any of this. My framework of guilt and survival doesn’t represent her feelings of loss and grief. Any time I try to mention how terrible my dad could be, she’s quick to redirect the conversation toward his positive attributes:
“He gave you so many opportunities when you were younger,” she tells me. “You can’t forget that.”
“Yes,” I interject. “But—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
To her, my dad was a man trying his best.
I visit my mom once a week to check on her and help her out if she needs it. I also make sure to peruse the freezer to see if she’s made a dent into her stockpile of frozen lumpia wrappers. It’s always the same amount, tucked in the corner behind instant dinners and cartons of ice cream.
“I thought you were going to make lumpia this week,” I say.
Her go-to reply, with some variation here and there: “I was too tired.”
I then shake my head and smile at her.
Honestly, I get it. Working retail can be tiring, especially when customers inherently suck. I say this as a customer who sucks. But I fear that she feels displaced in her culture. No matter what I think of my bastard dad, she loved him. He was her lumpia buddy. I know she derived a lot of joy when she could share her favorite treats with him.
I’ve simply gotten good at pretending my dead dad doesn’t haunt me and my identity. For instance, during a recent team-building activity at work, I surprised myself by admitting to colleagues how haunted I feel. Isn’t it fucked up that the man who tried to suppress my heritage is forever tied to my understanding of it? Perhaps it’s more fucked up that he’s forever tied to my mom’s understanding of her own background—she never asked to become emotionally attached to a man whose ghost inhibits her from enjoying food from her goddamn childhood.
I wish Mom and I could séance with my dad so that he could tell her it was fine to make lumpia again. It’s funny because when he was alive, I wasn’t this close to my mom. I certainly didn’t feel so protective of her as to imagine supernatural situations to ensure her emotional stability. She was my dad’s parrot, replicating his problematic BS about undocumented immigrants, supposed welfare abusers, and various racial groups. My dad’s faux libertarianism must’ve radiated from his skin like spores looking for a host; they happened to land on my mom. To be truthful, I disliked her.
That’s why I think I care about her so much. Not only did my dad pit my brother and me against our “crazy” mom; he also sculpted her in his image. I’m no hero though—like most of my stewardship, it arises from a sense of guilt. Always making amends, this one.
More important than my guilt, I think, is that Mom and I survived my dad. We’re still standing. Shared trauma brings people together. It’s almost like the bond among abuse survivors is a silver lining for all the fuckery.
I’ll never tell my mom any of this. My framework of guilt and survival doesn’t represent her feelings of loss and grief. Any time I try to mention how terrible my dad could be, she’s quick to redirect the conversation toward his positive attributes:
“He gave you so many opportunities when you were younger,” she tells me. “You can’t forget that.”
“Yes,” I interject. “But—”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
To her, my dad was a man trying his best.
~
I intellectually understand why I tried to disavow my Filipinx heritage as a kid—now I’m proudly in the process of reclaiming my Asian bones—but my body is still a mess. Why is it that I feel slightly queasy when catching a whiff of fish at the counter-serve area of Reno’s Manila Hongkong store? Why is it that my stomach turns when I see Filipinas in the nearby cafeteria devouring meals with their hands? I feel like my dad’s ghost controls me in these moments; he’s making my body react this way. I’m haunted the second I step into a Philippine mini mart. His phantasmagoric touch accompanies every roll of hopia I grab, every bag of pan de ube I place in my cart.
I already don’t feel Asian enough because I’m mixed race, so it’s doubly troubling to carry my dead dad’s white supremacist spirit on my shoulders. Perhaps the easiest solution is to buy a container of my mom’s favorite, dinuguan—pork blood stew—and rub it around my face. I can make up for the years of Filipinx celebration I lost by absorbing the rich nutrients of pig organs.
Maybe my identity is a fad. Queer? Check. Non-binary? Check. Vegetarian? Another big, fat check. I’m all the things millennials and Gen Z have “made up.” I’ve even been accused of not being Asian, period—I’m half-European from my Dad’s side, so it’s unreasonable for me to claim a full identity when I’m only a Mudblood.
Words like “liminality” help, as I feel there’s academic validity in existing as the mongrel I am, but that’s it—any affirmation I receive is from the academy. Out in the “real world”? People are annoyingly black and white. I want to bury myself in mud when somebody tries to use grammar as an excuse for not respecting my gender-neutral pronouns or when a Filipinx acquaintance glares at me once I reveal I don’t eat meat. I’d rather disappear than suffer billions of microscopic cuts of an invisibilized oppression.
What gets me through most days is my mom. I think about everything she’s experienced—her husband’s death, for one, but also the deaths of most of her relatives in the Philippines. Yet her heart beats. It might be a little weak because of her family’s history of heart problems, but she’s alive. She lives a quiet life in an apartment in Reno with her dog, and she holds down a part-time job at the local Stein Mart. She seems happy.
Sometimes I have the honor of accompanying her to Manila Hongkong. I visit this store by myself or with my partner (ironically, a white man), but I feel different when I go with her. It’s like every time I patiently wait for her to buy dinuguan, I’m making amends for every time I complained as a youth. It’s also an opportunity to fight off my dead dad’s spirit. Mom usually doesn’t buy fish nowadays, but when she does, I smile at the little head that pokes out from the Styrofoam container. Mabuhay, friend, I think.
I already don’t feel Asian enough because I’m mixed race, so it’s doubly troubling to carry my dead dad’s white supremacist spirit on my shoulders. Perhaps the easiest solution is to buy a container of my mom’s favorite, dinuguan—pork blood stew—and rub it around my face. I can make up for the years of Filipinx celebration I lost by absorbing the rich nutrients of pig organs.
Maybe my identity is a fad. Queer? Check. Non-binary? Check. Vegetarian? Another big, fat check. I’m all the things millennials and Gen Z have “made up.” I’ve even been accused of not being Asian, period—I’m half-European from my Dad’s side, so it’s unreasonable for me to claim a full identity when I’m only a Mudblood.
Words like “liminality” help, as I feel there’s academic validity in existing as the mongrel I am, but that’s it—any affirmation I receive is from the academy. Out in the “real world”? People are annoyingly black and white. I want to bury myself in mud when somebody tries to use grammar as an excuse for not respecting my gender-neutral pronouns or when a Filipinx acquaintance glares at me once I reveal I don’t eat meat. I’d rather disappear than suffer billions of microscopic cuts of an invisibilized oppression.
What gets me through most days is my mom. I think about everything she’s experienced—her husband’s death, for one, but also the deaths of most of her relatives in the Philippines. Yet her heart beats. It might be a little weak because of her family’s history of heart problems, but she’s alive. She lives a quiet life in an apartment in Reno with her dog, and she holds down a part-time job at the local Stein Mart. She seems happy.
Sometimes I have the honor of accompanying her to Manila Hongkong. I visit this store by myself or with my partner (ironically, a white man), but I feel different when I go with her. It’s like every time I patiently wait for her to buy dinuguan, I’m making amends for every time I complained as a youth. It’s also an opportunity to fight off my dead dad’s spirit. Mom usually doesn’t buy fish nowadays, but when she does, I smile at the little head that pokes out from the Styrofoam container. Mabuhay, friend, I think.
Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, Asian American, and neurodivergent writer exploring the West. They’re often lost in the kaleidoscope of their intersectional identity. Their work most recently appears or is forthcoming in The Chaffin Journal, Cold Mountain Review, Foothill, and Noble / Gas Qtrly, among others. Presently, they’re infiltrating a small conservative town full of cowboys in the middle of the Nevada desert.
A 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee, Dani's essay can be found in Issue 20 of Glassworks.
