Tapa, Taglish, and love
Representation has been something I’ve cared about for longer than I can remember, even if at the time I didn’t know that what I was fighting for was representation. All I knew was that I loved the movies I watched but I wanted more and knew there could be more.
And with the huge successes of Black Panther and A Wrinkle in Time, for recent examples, the importance of representation in mainstream media became even more obvious than it already was to everyone. Seeing the photos of children crying, dancing, and exclaiming with joy at the sight of people who look like them being the heroes, dictating the story, it did more than warm my heart. It left me awe-stricken and inspired.
Given the constant whitewashing of Asian/Asian-American roles in media as well as the erasure of them in history and the prevalence of the White Savior complex in stories where we are included, I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself fully represented. Which is why I felt so much pride seeing the Huangs on Fresh Off the Boat or The Joy Luck Club or Mateo on Superstore or Josh and his family on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
So I knew why representation was so important but I never felt how powerful representation can truly be until this past weekend. Samantha Lee wrote, co-produced, and directed this beautiful, indie film called Baka Bukas (Maybe Tomorrow in English) a few years back and ever since I found out about it, I’ve been trying to track it down in theaters or online. I never had any luck, but this weekend in LA at their Outfest:Fusion Festival, they were airing the film again and I made damn sure I’d be there.
But walking into the theatre, I was anxious. Not to just see this movie I’d watched the trailer for hundreds of times, but also see what it’d feel like to watch this in theatres.
I’m still having trouble describing what those 84 minutes meant to me.
To hear Tagalog and English flow together as naturally as it did in my house growing up. To see two young, millennial Filipinas on screen depict the intimacies and deep feelings of friendship, love, and romance. To see the painful realities expressed through characters I knew all too well. To see myself on a massive screen in front of people who might have never even been exposed to Filipinos or Tagalog before.
To experience that made my heart swell.
It made me feel heard and beautiful and seen. It made me feel like I wasn’t abnormal or alone. It made me proud to be Filipino, to speak Tagalog. And I think that’s what got me and what’s still getting to me today.
Because I’ve seen fragments of myself before but I’ve never seen the whole thing. I’ve never seen a queer love story between two Filipinas also struggling with their careers. People my age, people who look like me, people who love like me.
And seeing people enjoying the movie, clapping, laughing, crying, talking about it, appreciating it — I felt like maybe my story was worth being told. Maybe I was worth writing about. And not in some sob story, not in some drama, not in some stereotype but just as I am, as we are. Humans who love and want to be loved; who laugh and cry and make bad decisions and good ones and are just trying to make their way in this world like everyone else.
I could go on and on about the nuanced ways they captured the beginnings of that type of intense, romantic relationship between two girls, the intimacy, the secrecy, the closeness. The way it makes those first few days, months, year feel like its just yours. Like you’re both in a world all your own and nothing can touch you. And you don’t want to share it with anyone just yet but at the same time want everyone else to know. Like you’re scared to come out of this secrecy because you’re not sure what will happen next.
I can talk about how well the music accompanied the way the characters grew throughout the film or how the colors shifted along with Alex’s world or how the ending was perfect (and frustrating) in its realism and ambiguity.
But what I always come back to is that feeling I had with me long after leaving the theatre. The feeling that people cared about people like me. That they can see themselves in our love stories. That they can hear themselves in our language. That maybe this will cross over into our media or influence it at least and one day a Filipino-American love story like this can be shown in theaters all across the US.
And one day maybe a small girl wondering whether or not she’s worthy will be able to look up to that huge screen and see that she is.
