what's cereal? a life-changing event

As a single woman with no children, I can think of only two major events that have significantly changed the course of my life. In my thirty years on earth, events here and there have influenced decisions I’ve made but there are two that I am certain had they never occurred my life would be completely different in a way I can barely imagine. Perhaps these two events are different from say, getting married, having children or divorcing which are some of the most common events that change the course of one’s life, is that I had no say or control. I don’t often think about what life would have been like because that almost feels like saying, “if only” or “I wish” and those are sentiments of regret. I have a long-standing policy of trying not to live a life of regret. Every now and then though, particularly when life gets difficult—but in a sense that life is hard for a gainfully employed healthy American woman, so that means I can’t fit into some of my clothes, I have work troubles, social troubles and a feeling of something lacking, I ponder where I would be—who I would be. The two “life-changers” I speak of are the death of my mother when I was 17-years-old and the other I’d like to elaborate on goes back farther to the age of seven when my parents decided to pack up our comfortable lives in Manila to move us to the US.


I don’t know if I will ever fully understand my parents’ reason for immigrating to the US but I imagine it’s like any other immigrant family—they saw America as the land of opportunity. We had a fairly comfortable life in the Philippines. We lived in a two bedroom, two story apartment in the city, which is a decent size home for a middle class family. My brother and I both attended a Christian private school and we had two live-in nannies which was pretty common. My parents visited America often and brought us back boxes of toys and candy—life was good.

In 1988 I visited America for the first time for an entire month and my most vivid memory of it is not so much visual and what I did but how I felt. I remember I felt cold all the time (mainly in the California bay area), puking in the car a lot from car sickness and I especially remember how the eggs tasted; weird. They looked like the eggs I normally ate back home and were even prepared the same way but they had a funny indescribable taste to them as if to remind me that I was in a strange land. We also visited Hawaii which was a lot less like America but more like the Philippines. I enjoyed my visit to America though I did not want to stay but little did I know that less than two years later it would become my permanent home.

The only thing I remember about the day I moved was saying goodbye to my best-friend who lived next door, who I am still friends with and now lives in Hawaii, and posing for a lot of pictures. At the time, I couldn’t fully grasp how seminal for my life immigrating would be but all I knew was that things were going to be different. I don’t remember who was at the airport to say goodbye and I don’t remember who greeted us at the San Francisco Airport when we arrived because I have a terrible memory that way. I do remember exactly how I felt when I stepped off the plane; scared, nervous, excited and to sum it up, I felt like a stranger.

For a long time I kept track of how long I've lived here and less as I got older. This June will make it 23 years. As a kid I imagined a lot, and every now and then as an adult, what if my entire life here has been one long dream? What if I woke up one morning and I was still that seven-year old-girl waking up next to my parents in our apartment in Manila?


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I thought it would be fun to list the things that were new to me, found strange and had to get used to:

1.) Russians, Indians, Mexicans, Vietnamese, Laotian and Hmong. I have never encountered any of these ethnicities in the Philippines and I didn’t even know Hmong was a race. I know for certain I would not be culturally sensitive and open had I stayed in a more ethnically homogeneous country.

2.) Cereal. I saw commercials of kids eating this thing (Cheerios) in a clear bowl with white under it and I thought to myself, what is that white stuff? Turns out it was milk and I couldn’t for the life of me grasp why anyone would eat anything with milk in that manner.

3.) Milk at the school cafeteria. I didn’t grow up drinking milk, I still don’t like milk and I hated that milk was my only option in school.

4.) Mustard on my burger. Mustard was a very odd taste to me and I didn’t eat burgers for a long time because of it. Now I love mustard.

5.) Pizza. Non-sweet tomato sauce was also another odd flavor for me.

6.) Potato chips, which I obviously started a love affair with.

7.) Rap/Hip-Hop culture.
8.) Halloween and Trick-or-Treating.

9.) Thanksgiving.

10.) Christmas without Santa. For some reason my parents stopped doing the whole Santa Claus thing when we moved even though I already knew it was them. It’s like they wanted to fool us into thinking that Santa doesn’t exist in America.

11.) Fourth of July.

12.) The schooling system particularly the student teacher dynamic. I was shocked that kids could address their teachers informally and even talk back to their teachers without fear of punishment.

13.) Winters in Sacramento. I remember my mom would dress us up in our layers of sweats that we would wear the next morning to school so we wouldn’t have to get undressed in the cold morning.

14.) Squirrels and all the different types of birds and animals that roam about.

15.) People who sleep in a tent outside for fun – camping.