How is this for Art
Renee and her twin sister's baptism in 1994
In accepting the invitation to write this blog in respect of Asian Heritage Month, I grappled with what to speak about.
Partly because I had never before been asked to write anything that was meant to speak to my heritage, but more so because speaking as an Asian person about Asian heritage, in any capacity, carries a responsibility to make understood that my perspective is only one of the hundreds and thousands of perspectives that belong to Asian heritage; Perspectives that are so easily relegated to an umbrella term that renders them invisible even as it tries to celebrate them.
No one of Asian heritage should ever be burdened to speak to the vast and multiple cultures of the geographic region that extends as far as Kazakhstan in the northwest and Timor-Leste in the southeast; Turkey in the far west and Papua New Guinea in the far east. These nations and the peoples that make them are infinitely dynamic and beautifully unique and must never be taken to interchangeably represent each other.
That said, I was given full agency to write what I felt I needed to share, so in writing this now, there was no pressure to represent all of Asia.
I suppose I write this long-winded preamble more for you, dear reader, whose own background and expectations I do not know, but whose understanding I wish to secure in my offer of what may be a very limited narrative.
So yes, I am Asian but even deeper than that, I am Filipino, and having grown up in my beautiful 7,500+ island country, can only really ever speak to that heritage. But perhaps in making a little space for this story, you will hear about yours too.
The Fajardo family in a cross-countries zoom call last Christmas
My story of Asian heritage is not unlike the many Filipinos who live here in Canada: I am born of Filipino parents and grew up with very Filipino values. Some, like the respect of family and community, I keep as a way to ground myself and a way to survive. Some, like strict adherence to a colonial faith practice that oppresses as it tries to teach love, I am learning to give myself distance from.
My Asian heritage is built upon generations of folks, like yours perhaps, who have tried to create better worlds for those they love, wherever they were planted.
Where I speak two languages, my folks can speak three, maybe four; in our regular family calls, a glorious cacophony that all at once mimics birds of every shape and color, the dark earth that births the rice on our table and the cool, broken waters that speak always of an eternal summer.
My maternal grandparents were fisherfolk on a tiny island called Culion. They wove my mother’s dreams in nets that were stitched and re-stitched in the early hours of daylight or by the soft glow of gas lamps at night.
My father’s folk lived on the mainland called Luzon; bankers, teachers, and soldiers whose wives came home to the province of Bicol with their many children when it was time to birth another, and whose elder children roamed the growing capital of Manila, unbound and riding the promise of fast-changing worlds.
My Asian heritage, perhaps much like yours, is the story of dreamers and workers.
Where once my grandparents dreamed the prosperous lives of their progeny now stands a family connected through over 10,000 miles of land and sea, across four countries and equally as many nationalities.
Renee backstage in a press event for ‘Noli me Tangere, the Opera’ in 2014
Yes, it is a story of pain and separation, but more than that, a story of how love is kept and triumphs are celebrated with hearts that are always halfway across oceans; A story of resilience, yes, but more than that, of the often hard-won joy that comes with the stubborn ability to thrive.
My Asian heritage lives in the prayers of the often-biased but (generally) good folk that populate your churches and celebrate your faiths, in the hands of the innumerable women who take care of your loved ones in good health and in bad and in the hearts of the artists and workers who are equal parts born of this land and born of the soul of our mother country.
We are not always wiser, not always enlightened, not always kind, and not always truthful but we understand that generosity, sincere or otherwise, starts from one’s table, and one’s ability to find abundance even when outwardly, there seems only lack.
My Asian heritage lives in my people’s ability to create worlds wherever they land, and, to borrow another writer’s words, to see the world in a grain of sand.
“...She is more than our punctuation and our language,
We might be able to paint pictures and write stories
But she made an entire world for herself
So how is that for art?”
-Rupi Kaur
Renee Fajardo (she/her)
Ontario Provincial Coordinator, Opera InReach