This Wouldn’t be Funny in The Homeland

Written by McKenzee Manlupig for Align Magazine

I don't yearn for the homeland. I am Asian American. My people reside along the United States’ West Coast, where pine trees kiss the Pacific. Across the ocean, they mirror the fanning palms cooling the scorching Filipino beaches. Despite having these likenesses, both evergreens and palms stand tall on their own.

Cackling fills the room, as students of the Kultura Pilipinas (KP) club shake their hips in figure eights at the Pilipino Cultural Night. “Otso Otso” or “eight eight” is a song and dance that is a 2005 staple that is known to be a hit among Filipino communities. In that moment, the pearly smiles of Southeast Asia shone on the second generation, bridging a past I never fully lived with a present I do.

Later that night, I sent the video of the performance to my brother, knowing I wouldn’t get a response for hours. I stared at the moon before I closed my eyes. 

On the other side of the world, the Philippine morning rays hit his eyes as I entered REM. He has class in about an hour.

“Haha. That’s hilarious,” he texts back “but now I think of it none of my local friends would find this funny,” 

I do not have the lived experience to understand the deep cultural embedding this song had in Filipino American communities in the early 2000s. However, I can trace the divulging paths it took: drifting out of the motherland’s cultural space while still conjuring joy in Filipino-Americans. I find inspiration in my homeland but it doesn’t need to define me.

My connection to the Philippines is neither complete nor static; it is stitched together from family stories and the rhythm of dances performed at cultural nights, and the laughter shared with cousins across oceans.

Identity is not a checklist, it is living and breathing, honoring the past while embracing the present. I carry fragments of tradition while shaping them into something uniquely my own.

Yesterday, the KP club had another event, “Fil-Am Showtime”. An event specifically honoring Filipino American culture. 

The crowd watched in awe as KP members performed to budots, a Filipino edm genre and street dance performance born from the neighborhoods of Davao. These beats were the foundation of the melody while Bruno Mars and Beabadoobee sang overtop. The bass thumped through the auditorium, its pulse unmistakably Filipino. Arms swung, shoulders bounced, knees bent into that signature controlled-chaos groove. It wasn’t an imitation, it was an evolution.

This is heritage. Not the kind preserved in textbooks or guarded by gatekeepers, but the kind that grows wild and invents itself. The kind that laughs at its own inside jokes. The kind that is allowed to be loud.

I used to think identity was something inherited, passed down in full like a family heirloom. But as I watched my peers transform a street dance from Davao into a Fil-Am spectacle under LED stage lights, I understood: identity is also something we remix. Something we make room for. Something we dance into existence.

I don’t yearn for the homeland because the homeland isn’t behind me. it’s moving with me. It’s in the spaces we create, the rhythms we reinterpret, the confidence we cultivate as children of two worlds. Palms and pines, budots and hip-hop, archipelagos and coastlines.

We are not half of anything.
We are whole in a way that’s entirely our own.