I sit here in this fucking house in the colonized town of Cerritos, California with the same Che shirt I’ve been wearing for three days and the beret that still smells like the Amazon package it came in, and I can feel the empire pressing in through the drywall.
My whole family is Americanized. They order pizza without guilt. They watch the Lakers and talk about fantasy football like the plantations never happened. They speak English at the table like Tagalog is some embarrassing cousin they don’t invite anymore. They look at me like I’m the problem when I try to remind them that every white boyfriend a pinay brings home is just another flag planted in our blood.
They don’t get it. They never got it.
I can’t leave this house. Not really. The second I step outside I’m surrounded by the same settlers who took everything and then had the nerve to make our women prefer them. I see it every day online. Another Filipino girl with some tall white guy whose ancestors probably owned the ships that brought the first guns. She posts the picture like it’s nothing. Like it isn’t a personal betrayal. Like it isn’t the final stage of colonization happening inside her own bed.
I tell myself it’s ideology. I post the essays. I quote the theory. I say the words “settler-colonial desire” until they taste like metal. But under all of it is the same quiet, rotting truth I never say out loud:
No one wants me.
Not the girls from the old neighborhood. Not the ones at the Filipino market. Not the ones who still speak the language better than I do. They scroll past me like I’m already dead. They choose the white ones every single time and then have the audacity to call it “preference.” Preference is just the polite word for surrender.
I can’t keep a job because every workplace is just another outpost of the same machine. I tried. I showed up. I lasted until some soft-handed manager told me to “smile more” and I felt the centuries of occupation rise in my throat. So I quit. Or they fired me. Same difference. The empire doesn’t want men who see it clearly.
My family looks at me like I’m broken. They don’t understand that I’m the only one still fighting. They think the war is over because they got cable and Target runs and the ability to say “I’m Filipino-American” without choking on the second half.
I hate them for that. I hate the way they laugh when I talk about liberation. I hate the way my sister rolls her eyes when I explain why dating white is violence. I hate the way my brother calls me “Che of the Valley” like it’s a joke instead of a warning.
Most of all I hate the quiet that comes at 2 a.m. when the house is asleep and the only thing left is the knowledge that no woman is ever going to choose this. Not the body that hasn’t seen sunlight in months. Not the mind that can’t stop cataloguing every historical wound. Not the man who still lives in his parents’ house because the outside world is already lost.
So I stay inside. I keep the beret on. I keep the posts coming. I keep telling myself the rejection is political instead of personal.
Because if it’s personal, then I’m just another lonely brown guy in Los Angeles who can’t get laid and blames the entire history of the world for it.
And that version of the story is the one I can’t survive.
Leave a Reply