My Story & Background

Filipino Mangoes, School Buses and Service

While Hong Kong taught me about competition, speed and rigidity, my summers in the Philippines taught me about community, kindness and fun.

Every year, I would return to my parents' home province of Pampanga, which didn't have an international airport for much of my childhood. Back then, we had to take a 1.5 hour flight to Manila then drive about 2 hours to get home.

Though my mother had a high-flying job at Mattel handling collector Barbies, my role model became my mom's eldest sister, Tita Chat. She was an elementary school teacher with three kids who lived on a modest salary.

While she didn't have my mother's corporate resources, she practiced a radical kind of generosity that still inspires me to this day.

Before we arrived, she would spend hours cooking our favorite meals, and purchasing the Philippine mangoes and balut I was absolutely obsessed with. She woke up really early in the morning to go to the market and other locations where she knew specific vendors would be. She made sure all of our favorite foods were ready for us as soon as we got home.

My parents would typically return to Hong Kong for work after a few days, leaving my older sister and I in the Philippines for the rest of our summer vacation.

School was still in session for local students during this time, so her husband, Tito George, would let me ride along in his school bus to pick up students from the elementary school. Sometimes, they'd take me to their favorite sari-sari store (a small mom-and-pop type of grocery store) and treat me to an ice-cream popsicle or food from a street vendor.

Their son, who was a year younger than me, also introduced me to other kids in our subdivision so I got to play a lot of Filipino street games and experience the sorts of mischief that a kalye (street) kid would—chasing other kids in the fields, running around in the rain, biking down a hill or away from an angry dog in a rushed panic, climbing over a house fence to get into my Tita's home while the gate was locked, buying a plastic bag filled with iced water to drink, and so many other things that were not possible in Hong Kong.

In the earliest summers I can remember, Tita Chat made time outside of work to teach me Tagalog—traveling all the way to my grandparents house, where we were staying, to sit down with me at the dining table so I could learn the abakada (Filipino ABCs).

My family in the Philippines really made sure that I was taken care of and had something to do. I got to be an actual kid during my summers and experience the joys of play. It was the kind of respite where I was free to just be myself.