“There is increasing urgency [...] to better understand the histories, cultures, languages and economies of Southeast Asian countries.”

—Harvard University Asia Center

1. On a date with a man whose name I’d soon forget, he asks me where I’m from. When I make my origins known, he promptly replies, Oh, mahal kita! Oh, I love you! He smiles with childlike glee. I take in the shape of his boldness. My language, his party trick. His confession of love, just a trained contortion.

2. For the first time in its near four-century existence, Harvard University will offer Tagalog language classes to its elite white student body this fall. Despite the delight of my mother, their intentions are not pure. The reason for this change: expansion of the USmilitary presence in the region.

3. When the Americans came in 1898 they began to build military bases, constellations of greed and control. This time, the plan is to add four more bases. They promise that this time, they will not stay forever. The US Defense Secretary (tries to) assure: The addition will not be permanent, but it will be a really big deal. My my, have they not learned the nature of damage?

4. As fate would have it, the two white men in my Tagalog language intensive have Filipina wives. It should come as no surprise, then, that the two white men in my Tagalog language intensive both have half-Filipino babies. They are in this class to learn their women’s native tongue, to be able to conduct their research more fully.

5. My lover and I share a colonizer. It is the reason why a chair is a still chair and why what is delicate is also dangerous. When I ask him if he loves me, he responds with a firm surely. What he does not know is that in saying this, he loves me only maybe, perhaps, probably.

6. Being an archipelago, the Philippines is a country of many piers. Wherever the white men ran rampant, so did the local women: joyrides in their jeeps, promises of futures overseas. Like anything said in a learned language, these men did not fully understand the weight of their words. And so as their ships undocked, the women wept at the piers—the feeling of being left is the same in every language.

7. Against my better judgment, I’ve believed every white man when he tells me he loves me. No matter how many times I am left, broken, I can’t seem to learn my lesson. Even as history continues to prove its point. Rapture overtakes reason as I find shelter in the comfort of being owned.

8. A souvenir from the last occupation: the word boondocks. Boonies. Original word: bundok. First meant to denote connotations of bewilderment and confusion. Now used as a slang term for a place far from towns and cities, where civilization is the confusion. Where the backward people live.

9. My grandmother was born in 1940 in the province of Bulacan and educated in the heart of the American occupation. As a child, she did not sing of love for her country but for the colonizer’s, for its amber waves of grain. Even now, eight decades later, she will remind us of Douglas MacArthur’s thundering promise: I shall return.

10. In this next iteration of domination, the tongue is only a gateway to the land. I wonder how many times they can do this and still call it love: for democracy, for sovereignty, for the people they’ve worked so hard to make everything but. The little brown brothers whose tongues they’ve deemed too stupid to speak for themselves.

11. The problem with white men coming into your life is that it is also their imperative to leave. And in their abandon, there is always the thing that gets left behind. In Angeles City, that “thing” is children, a whole generation of half-Pinoys pining after white fathers who will never return. Their sorrow-songs identical to their mothers’, the yearning threaded into their DNA.

12. In preparation for the new bases, American and Filipino troops train at Fort Magsaysay in the biggest joint military exercise to date. The program is named Balikatan, or shoulder-to-shoulder. Photographs of the annual exercise show soldiers in exactly this position, jovial as they aim and fire at tanks—heartwarming depictions of brotherly love.

13. When the white men inevitably come in droves, they will be greeted with the traditional Tagalog welcome, Mabuhay! The welcome committee’s mouths will curve into smiles, some of them lipsticked, all of them beaming. They have no choice but to cheer these Americans on, to shout, Long Live! as the nation, ever the abandoned child, braces for destruction once again.

‍