Storytelling and Parenting Third Generation Filipino Americans with Mental Health Clinician Maria Dolorico
Show Description (also the podcast Intro):
Hello and welcome to the BOSFilipinos podcast. I’m your host, Trish Fontanilla.
Each episode, we celebrate Filipino and Filipino American culture, identity, and community in greater Boston.
Today’s guest is Maria Dolorico. Maria is the daughter of Filipino immigrants - as she said to me in her pre-interview, she can’t tell you who she is without telling you where she’s from. She’s a mental health clinician and a PhD student. In this episode, we talk about the cultural nuances of growing up in New Jersey. Maria also shares her journey from teaching to becoming a mental health professional. We also explore Maria's dissertation, which focuses on parenting third-generation Filipino Americans and the need to reclaim cultural identity through storytelling.
I’m so excited for you all to get to know her. Enjoy!
Stay in touch:
BOSFilipinos - IG: @bosfilipinos, Email: info@bosfilipinos.com
Maria Dolorico - IG: @mariadolorico_mentalhealth
Trish Fontanilla Hello, and welcome to Maria. Thank you so much for joining the podcast today.
Maria Dolorico Hello. Thanks for having me.
Trish So we highlighted you on our Instagram one million years ago…
Maria A million.
Trish It was during the pandemic. So we actually highlighted you before I even met you in person. And I was surprised to find out the person that nominated you was a friend I know from tech, Meredith Sandiford.
Maria Yes, yes. Well, and I remember she just pinged me on Facebook and said, hey, you know, I have this friend who does this really cool thing, and she shouts out, Filipinos! I was like, she what? She shouts out Filipinos! So can I nominate you? And I was like, yes, sure, that's fine. I had no idea that it would, lead to this and all of these things that you are aware of in Boston, and I swear, you know, every single Filipino in this entire state.
Trish I do not. I feel like I might be one of the Kevin Bacon's of the Filipinos in Massachusetts.
Maria Okay.
Trish Because I always asked, who is your other Filipino friend?
Maria Mhm.
Trish I'm one of your Filipino friends, you know, another one. Who is that? So BOSFilipinos is just like BOSFilipinos, parentheses, who are your other Filipino friends besides like the founders of BOSFilipinos?
Maria I love that.
Trish So, that was fun because I've just been tracing back some of these. And…
Maria And that's also the most Filipino thing ever, right? Yeah. Like you're from the Philippines. What's your last name? Oh. Do you know the family that has the same last name that is from, like, the Leyte province? Are you related to them? Yeah. So that's very Filipino.
Trish And and you want to say no. And then a percentage of the time it is yes.
Maria It is absolutely yes. Yes. Actually, she's my godmother.
Trish Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Maria I did meet Doloricos on Facebook, who had no idea who my branch of Doloricos were. And I just thought, I don't think that's actually possible, like you must have. They're younger than me. They're like, maybe whatever, two generations younger than me. So it's like, you must have an aunt or a grandmother or a great grandmother who knows like my grandmother or something, because I. I just don't believe that that can actually happen because Dolorico is not you know, it's not like, Castro or something. It's a name that you don't hear very often. But I asked my family, as far back as generations as my family goes right now. And they went to ask their lolos and lolas and nope, no Doloricos. There was no connection.
Trish There's got to be like a whole other Filipino Ancestry.com type thing. We kept in finding Fontanillas for years because of World War II. And the cousins just that were children they just never found, you know, I think a lot of these young folks don't realize Facebook and those types of tools are really new. So if people aren't on any of these social networks if they haven't input their information into somewhere. The data isn't there, and then they won't be tracked. Especially folks that are in the Philippines. If you're, you know, in a village, we're not going to find you unless someone gets you on a TikTok and it goes viral, anyway.
So welcome. I was looking back, and I always forget this you’re a fellow tri-state girlie.
Maria Born in the Bronx, grew up in New Jersey.
Trish So tell me a little bit about what it was like being Filipino American, growing up in the tri-state.
Maria Well, I grew up in a town called North Caldwell, which is where the HBO series The Sopranos is based. It's like half Jewish and half Italian. And then I think in my town at the time, there were like three or four Filipino families. And of course, we all knew each other because my father and the other fathers, they either went to medical school together or they had mutual friends who went to medical school together. So it's kind of amazing that we learned that this other Filipino family was moving into town, and we already knew them for, you know, a couple of generations. And it turns out that when we went digging back, see, this is so Filipino that there's this one family, their maternal family is related to my grandmother's family. And actually my grandmother has the same first name as my friend's mother, and they were named for my grandmother. It's not like Maria. There are a billion Marias. Her name was Monina, which is her nickname. And so when I met her mother, I was like, wait, why is your name Monina? I don't how many Moninas are there in the world? And it turns out that. There you go. She was named after my grandmother.
Trish That's amazing. And I think another, it's not strictly Filipino, but I think I've heard this a lot in immigrant families, is we make up a lot of names, too. Like, one of my cousin's kids is named Milan because one parent's name is Milagros, and then the other one's name is Ann. And so it's absolutely.
Maria Yeah.
Trish And so to find another person with your same name doesn't, outside of nicknames, doesn't happen a ton. So that's so cool.
Maria Yeah. So it was a beautiful town, maybe fifteen miles west of Manhattan. But again, not many Filipinos. I think this is a story that all of us can tell. Initially I went to high school where people hadn't heard of Filipinos. Everybody thought I was Chinese or Japanese. And there's, all the assumptions that people would make about me, you know, did I eat with chopsticks? The names that people would call me because there really were very few Asian people in my town, so you sort of grow up with these associations of some racism, but it's just part of how you grew up, I definitely learned about this stuff very early on.
Trish Yeah. And did your parents cultivate some sort of Filipino culture? Was it you're here in America, this is how we're doing it. Did you talk about racism or anything at home?
Maria Not really. There were times when it actually got kind of physical, and I didn't want to take the school bus. And my parents were really trying to tell me to toughen up, to stand up to them. I remember my brother flexing his arm. He's like, just punch me. You can do it. Just learn how to punch. And I was like, oh, you know, I think it'll just be easier to walk to school. So that's what I ended up doing.
Trish This is so funny because this is why I love entertainment and media when we actually show up in places. Because I also have this experience. And what happened was someone was teasing me, and then my brother actually started to get into fist fights. So my dad had to start taking me to school because I couldn't be on the bus with my brother because there'd be just too much animosity and physical fighting. Yeah, the, verbal things I never really talked to my parents about, but when a police officer shows up at your front door.
Maria Like, well.
Trish We have like, what did we do? Well, that happened a lot for a variety of reasons, but I wonder if you're at home right now listening to us, raise your hand if you had bus issues because you were Filipino or felt other.
So because you're in this small group, did your family go seek out, you know, you said your dad was in medicine, did they bring community together?
Maria Yeah. So the people that we would spend Easter and Christmas with, or birthday parties, things like that, they were all from the University of the Philippines School of Medicine. My father and my mother came in 1968. There were a whole bunch of people that I know because of the UP class of 1968, the UP medicine class. So growing up, even though none of them were really in my town but they were in neighboring towns like South Orange and West Orange and Livingston, we would spend our weekends and holidays together. So that was really sweet. Those are the best memories that I have of New Jersey, actually. Like my mom's best friend, her daughter is probably my oldest and best friend. My mom had an American best friend, and she had a Filipino best friend. And that's sort of what I did, too. So my mom's Filipino best friend, her daughter was my Filipino best friend, and she lives in California now. But we're each other's, godmothers to our children. So those memories of my peers. I didn't go to school with them, but they were definitely a part of my life growing up.
Trish So how long were you in Jersey, and then what brought you up to Boston?
Maria I was in Jersey, until I was eighteen. I graduated from my high school, and then I went to college in upstate New York, a very small school called Hartwick College. I think I came home for two summers, and then once I graduated from Hartwick, I came to Boston to go to Emerson for graduate school. So took me a long time to figure out what I was going to do when I grew up, but, I have an MFA in creative writing from Emerson.
Trish What brought you to what you do today? Yeah, because…
Maria It's.
Trish Different.
Maria It's very different. Well, I was one of the few people who graduated with an MFA and had a job waiting for me. I got a job at Bristol Community College in Fall River. It was a tenure-track position, in the English department. So everybody was talking about it. Did you hear about the Maria god? Did you hear about the job? And I was there for four years. It was an amazing job in so many ways I worked four days a week. I did not have to work in the summers. I had a whole, you know, academic calendar. I never had to work weekends and at some point, I figured out it was a great job for somebody else. It was not what I really wanted to do and I think one of the most exciting things about being an English teacher, because I had to do a lot of freshman comp classes, was that I was encouraging people to write and to tell me their stories and, you know, helping them arrange their stories to into some sort of a format that flowed. But I realized that once I was asking people to tell me their stories, I had to be prepared for the stories they were going to tell me.. Um, and once I knew that job was not for me, I had a state benefit that I could go to any state school for free. So I picked a night that I had free, and it was an abnormal psych class at UMass Boston, and it stuck from there. I got my master's degree in mental health counseling.
Trish That's incredible. Do you have your own practice now, or are you part of a practice?
Maria I'm in private practice. So I'm a perinatal mental health counselor, meaning that I work with people who are trying to conceive a baby, they are pregnant, they are postpartum or parenting an infant. That is pretty much my wheelhouse right there. So I see people really from, I guess, from preconception all the way to parenting.
Trish That's amazing.
Maria Mostly women. But I also see some couples.
Trish That's interesting to hear that it's predominantly women. But good to hear that you see some couples.
Maria Well, yeah. In fact, I really enjoy working with couples. because there's this sort of place where I get to sit, you know, metaphorically that I am not a referee. You know, I tell people, if you're looking for a referee, you can find one, but it's not going to be me. I ask couples, what is your goal as a couple? Why are you here? What are the things you want to work on? And if we meet for six sessions. For eight sessions, tell me what you want to be able to say six or eight sessions later. These are the things that we learned. These are the things we still need to work on, but let's, like, think ahead and tell me what those things are, because those are the goals that we're going to set up. And that's who my bias is towards. It's the couple that made those goals. And it's my job to sort of say, hey, you know person A that's not exactly going in the direction that we wanted to go in. Or person B how does saying that or how does doing that action, how does that help you move forward towards those goals that we created in the first session? So it's almost like I have a contract with my clients. So that makes it nice and clear in many ways. So there's a level of accountability, I think, that I have when I'm working with couples. That is not, as it's a little bit more the accountability is a little bit more subtle, I think when I'm working individually with people and I also think with my couples, I didn't notice that this happened and I didn't seek for this to happen, but it is probably, I would say one hundred percent of my couples are biracial or, you know, or they're bicultural and they are navigating how to raise a mixed child, in this city and in this culture and in this world. I did not market myself that way in any way, shape, or form, but that is exactly who my couples are.
Trish Yeah. I mean, if you show up into a room as you, you're saying the marketing, but your face card is, it's part of the marketing.
Maria Yeah. It is. I mean, I think it's true when, when people decide that they want to work on whatever their challenges are, whatever their growth, whatever they want to grow with, they often look for people who could totally understand their experience. I think also as a person who has had therapists, I realized that I really needed people to understand my own background, my upbringing, that, you know, being a rebellious teenager is one thing, but being the daughter of immigrants when you're a rebellious teenager is something entirely different. Being an adult in this world, in this country is very different when you have parents who are immigrants, and separating yourself, the whole process of individuation, it's very different. I think when you come from a family that comes from a collective culture.
Trish And so it's not to say that because we are Asian we can't go to a white therapist, etc., but for the goals that you have, you want to find someone that understands the goals that you're looking to go to.
Maria Yeah, I, you know, a lot of people will look back and say that this is a therapist who really changed my life. And I did have a white therapist, and I think I started seeing her when I was about twenty four or twenty five, and I was having some kind of conflict with my father, and I remember she said to me, you just have to be able to speak up. You have to be able to tell him what you want and that it's not what he wants. And I just thought, whoa, you know what it's like. I mean, it's kind of laughable, right? I'm fifty-five and I don't want to tell my father like that. This is what I want, and it may not be what he wants. I'm going to find any other way to not say that to him because I'm Filipino, and I told her that, and she really understood that. She said, okay, well, you know, if if you still want to work with me, I appreciate you telling me that. And let's just, I have learned from this. So keep telling me the ways that your culture will not work with some of the recommendations that I have for you.
Trish Which is an amazing response, but not the standard response.
Maria Not the standard response at all. Not at all, not at all.
Trish I love that for you, that interaction that happened to you. Because I think many of us, and probably in other circumstances for you as well, that is not the response that we get. It's either very, very defensive or let me relay a story that is five percent what you told me.
Maria Yeah.
Trish Instead of talking to certain people, you're like, oh, it's not one-to-one, but it's like seventy five percent. Yeah. Instead of this little baby sliver.
Maria Or they'll say, you know what? Let me tell you the story that, I guess it's part of that defensiveness. But let me tell you the story that shows you that I'm actually not racist.
Trish Yeah, okay.
Maria My couples are mostly Asian women and white guys, and something like the subject of divorce will come up, you know, if the couple is experiencing that kind of tension and to try to explain divorce to an Asian, like, for my Asian client to tell her family that she and her husband are contemplating divorce, that is. Yeah. It's just something that's completely off the menu. Like, this is not a selection on your menu. So you cannot order that whatever. You know, we don't do off the menu ordering.
Trish Yeah.
Maria It's just not possible. And the same thing goes, when I have clients who are dealing with fertility challenges, right? That what it costs for them to go through fertility treatments and try to have a baby, that is like the gross national product of some of those countries that our people are from. It's the expense, and just the concept of needing technology to have a baby again, not on the menu.
Trish Yeah. Not to mention mothers are mothers. And in every place of like, when are you having a baby? No shades to Filipinos. The tact of… why aren't you pregnant?
Maria Oh, when's your baby?
Trish Yeah, yeah.
Maria You're getting old, huh? Where's your baby?
Trish It sometimes can feel a little bit different. It can be. You just need to relax.
Maria You need to relax, and then you'll get pregnant.
Trish Apologies to listeners that are experiencing some feels from Maria's accent and what she's saying right now.
Maria Whoops. This is why I'm Filipino American and not Filipino.
Trish So you don't just have your own practice. You're also a PhD student.
Maria I am a PhD student.
Trish Tell me a little bit about that. And then also, your dissertation sounds very interesting, so let's dive into that as well.
Maria Yeah. So, at the age of fifty-one, I thought that I would go to graduate school and get a doctorate. I have to make a joke that I know I'm not going to be a medical doctor, going to be a doctor of psychology.
Trish That still counts. So someone in my family is like...
Maria But I’m not a real doctor. And, you know, there are Filipinos out there who are saying, oh, she's not a real doctor. But yeah, so I was fifty-one and people asked me, why did you do this when you were fifty-one? And I just said, because I was busy working and raising kids. And when my kids were in high school and off to college and independent, that's when I found the time that I could go for a PhD in psychology. My dissertation, and I actually pulled up the title because I wanted to make sure it's a little bit of an elevator speech. It took me a long time to come up with this working title of my dissertation. And again, just a working title, but it is Parenting the Third Generation of Immigrants, storytelling as a pathway to reclaiming cultural identity in Asian American families.
Trish I love this so much, especially as we head into the holidays. For me, it felt right to do this interview with you in the fall. So tell me how you came up with it. I'm assuming this is research, but this is very much a part of who you are and your identity, and exploring that.
Maria It is, one of the reasons why this is so important to me is that as I'm raising my children, who according to the vocabulary of genealogy, my children are third generation immigrants. I was born in this country, so I'm a second generation immigrant. it's really important for me to pass the Filipino culture onto my children. And I think the reason why I have this untold stories in my mind is because I think there's so much that I don't know about when my parents came. And I think that that's not an uncommon story. I mean, I know the bones of it, right? My father came here to do his medical residency. He and my mother were married back in the Philippines. She was a nurse. They came together. She found a job as a nurse. So typical. Um, and my dad went into his residency. They actually left my brother behind. I think maybe he was a year old when they left him behind because they didn't know what kind of life they would have. And they figured he was good with, you know, splitting time with his. With his Lolo and his Lola's.
Trish So is it just him at that point?
Maria Yeah. And I So that's why I was born here. My brother was born there.
Trish Gotcha, gotcha.
Maria So I know that and I know about how hard everybody worked. And I know that the hard work made the rest of my life possible. Right. I know that story. Everybody knows that story about hard work and the American dream. I don't know stories about my mother missing my brother. Right.
Trish Mhm.
Maria I don't know stories about what it was like for them to leave him. I don't know what my brother was told. I don't know, and I'm sure they did. I'm sure they had experiences of racism.
Trish Mhm.
Maria Even if they can't identify it as racism because I think we have a different vocabulary now than they did about racism. But I don't know those stories. I don't know stories about being bewildered in a new country. I don't know stories about missing their family. And I think that's an important part of the story to tell, that this wasn't all just, you know, this road to good fortune, that there was hardship. I do fundamentally believe that the act of immigration is traumatic. You know, you take somebody away from their family, out of their culture. There's language differences, there's food differences. I'm curious what it was like for my parents to be in New Jersey in February, back when it still snowed. Right? Like, how do they manage that? Any kind of bewilderment about being in the United States, I don't know those stories. Anything about pain, anything about not having enough money because my dad was on a resident salary, and my mom was a nurse. They were living in apartments. I don't know any of those stories. And I think why that's relevant to me and to my clients is that when we become parents and we experience things like postpartum depression, or we experience something very stressful about parenting, we don't have stories to look back on about sadness. We don't have stories to look back on about loss or missing people. The stories that we have are work hard and you will get what you want. Your mood is really not a factor.
Trish Yeah.
Maria And so when I ask people, particularly my Asian, my Filipino clients, what is it like for you to experience this hardship, when you're, you know, all the things that you'll hear about parenting, about not sleeping, about not knowing what to do about work and and how are you a mother and how do you work at the same time? I asked her, what are your role models for that? And my clients will say, my parents just worked hard. That's all I know is to work hard, and this is where you get into mood disorders, that I'm working hard and I am not happy. And raising a baby, you know, raising an infant, like two months old, three month old is really, really difficult. But I have no reference to how hard it is. Nobody talked to me about sadness. Nobody talked to me about loss. And I think It's hard to have an emotional map when the only thing you know about your emotions is that they really weren't a factor. You just worked really, really hard, and you pushed through adversity.
Trish Yeah, I mean, I have been hardcore head nodding for all this. It's funny because you started talking about the stories, and it just reminded me that I had gone to this Asian market. I want to say it was before the pandemic. This is how we think of things now. Are people wearing masks, or were they not wearing masks? And I had gone and met the, I think one of the founders through these cards called, Root and Seed. And it was started because, and reading off their website, we are daughters of first generation immigrants who grew up with unique experience and mixed feelings about our family's cultural heritage. And so they have these little conversation cards, and it's kind of hilarious because I'm like, this sounds amazing. And I bought them, and I have not used them with my mom. Because she, you know, I, I find out these things in history and I ask her about them, and I think it is this mentality of keep your head down, if you do really well, you're rewarded. Otherwise, you're not particularly special and not in a mean way, but in a like, you know, this is life. Everyone's going through it, just kind of hustle on through. But I remember seeing the documentary at the Boston Asian American Film Festival a few years ago, Nurses Unseen.
Maria Yes.
Trish And I was doing the math because both of my parents came to this country in the sixties, and I think earlier than most. And I was like, wait, I think my mom was one of the first nurses that came to the US.
Maria Amazing.
Trish And she could have been in this. And I asked her about it, and she was like, yeah. Yeah. So how did you feel? She was like, it was hard. Like what? Like you could have been in this movie because this was you. There was four of us to feed and clothe, and It's funny because growing up, you think of your parents as like, quiet or potentially for some folks, even mean. And then you're just like, oh, they're just going through life on one mode. It had nothing necessarily to do with you. Some did not. Not all, but they're just plowing through because that's what their parents and their parents and parents and and these feelings and this. If you feel sad, go for a walk.
Maria Or pray.
Trish Or pray. Walk to church and pray for two things. So this is amazing you're exploring this. Are you doing interviews? Are you talking about methods of how people can start or continue this storytelling?
Maria So I'm not quite at that stage yet. I'm still very early dissertation. So my plan is to interview people. And I think even interviewing people is there's going to be some disruption there. Yeah. Because there are stories, there are reasons why people don't tell stories, right. There are reasons why there is silence around these things, largely because there's some level of pain, and I think….
Trish Shame.
Maria Or shame, and to admit to those things really disrupts that narrative that we came here, we worked really hard, and we got everything we needed, because we earned it. You know, it disrupts that story to say that maybe there was some pain and shame and loss in these stories. But I think we have to be able to accept the whole story. We have to hear the whole story. We have to hear about the difficulties so that we can have the sense that life is difficult, and it's okay to have emotions around that difficulty. And, I think it's part of emotional health. I mean, the reality is that Filipinos and Filipino Americans are the least likely to seek support when it comes to mental health.
Trish Which is bananas considering one of the stereotypes I get is, you're all such a friendly, welcoming, warm people.
Maria Mhm.
Trish It's like, yeah in front of everybody else. Yeah. We're the hosts. We are the karaoke singers. We are the nurses on the front line. We are all these places where we can easily adapt and appear resilient and be warm and happy on cruise ships and every other place.
Maria Right.
Trish Where there's performative warmness.
Maria Yep. We won't talk about these things. Like I said, I come from a medical family, doctors and nurses, and they would be the ones who would be working Christmas. They would be the ones who would be working on their birthdays. This is where that model minority myth comes in, that we are accommodating. We are helpful. We are selfless. And so, yes, if you need to take Christmas Day off, I will work for you so that you can take Christmas with your family.
Trish A hundred percent. I even remember doing that as a teenager. Because one, I was like, well, I need some extra money. Yeah, but the thought that, so everybody needs the day off.
Maria Mhm.
Trish It's more of like, oh you need the day off. Oh I'll work. Yeah. That's okay. It's funny. Holidays like Thanksgiving, I don't actually put a lot of weight around holidays because it was largely dependent on when my mom could get off work from the hospital. And so I don't really celebrate Thanksgiving. And for a lot of people, when I tell them that, it is shocking.
Maria Because it's the most it's probably the most American secular holiday we have.
Trish But they're I don't know, it's one of those I think like having kids and having a house. It's one of those people like, want you to have FOMO. And I'm like, no, I actually don't have this, deep seated, I miss my family, because if I miss my family, I'm going to go see them. I'm not going to wait for this one day.
Maria Right, right.
Trish And even Christmas and New Years, my mom would pick, you know, she's a pediatric nurse looking at the babies. She can't have Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.
Maria No, no.
Trish Let me pick, let me pick a holiday. And for that year, Christmas is number one or New Year's is number one. But I don't have this tie to holidays in a way, and that's for, I think, for a variety of reasons. But it is kind of shocking to talk to friends about it because they're like, what do you mean? And even if I don't work myself, you're right. It does have generational ties. Yeah, absolutely.
Maria It's tied to immigration and, how Filipinos are perceived when they come here. And I think I'm also learning a lot about Philippine psychology and why that is relevant to me, not born in the Philippines, and how it impacts my relationship with my Filipino relatives, or I mentioned my father a lot because my mother died when I was younger. So, if people notice that I'm not mentioning my mother, it's because she died when I was very young. I forget what it literally translates to. I'm sure somebody in the BOSFilipinos world will know what it literally translates to. And I think I'm pronouncing it correctly because I also don't speak Tagalog, but the term is pakikisama, basically is go along to get along.
Trish Oh yeah.
Maria And keep it easy, keep it smooth. Just get along with everybody.
Trish Assimilation is number one.
Maria Yeah, there you go. And I think there is again in that what gets lost in assimilation. Right. I don't have a Philippine language to call my own. My parents spoke different dialects. I, think also and again, I don't know if this is something that I make up in my head as I learn about Philippine history and colonialism and occupation, but I'm pretty sure that when my parents were born or the time when they were in in grade school that their education was in English.
Trish Mhm. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah.
Maria Because of the US occupation in the whatever the forties and fifties. And my cousins who were born in the sixties and the seventies, their education was in Tagalog.
Trish Yeah.
Maria Or I think and there's a whole transition from Tagalog to Filipino, you know, like what is it actually called? So my parents, I mean, they could speak Tagalog, but when they came to the US, I think because their home languages were Ilocano and Visayan. They spoke English here in this country. And they raised my brother and me to speak English. There's Tagalog I know here and there. I can understand, like conversations around the table, but I can't read a newspaper.
Trish Well, it's easy to understand conversations when someone's lips are pointing at you, so…
Maria Right.
Trish But my parents were the same. If they were speaking Tagalog, something was wrong, and they didn't want us to hear because they…
Maria … didn’t want us to know.
Trish They also came from different islands. Yeah. This is fun talking to folks. I'm just even thinking about my dad grew up in World War II, and so he is English, Tagalog, and then he knows Japanese as well.
Maria Yes.
Trish And so he also passed away. I wish I had a conversation with him because when I think about stuff in my childhood now, I'm like, oh, he definitely took that with him for a really long time, to the point where he wouldn't go to Japanese restaurants for a very long time because he was very uncomfortable being there. And he saw a lot of things.
Maria I'm sure.
Trish In the Philippines. And so it is really interesting, again, this is talking to folks of telling them like, oh, my parents spoke English because that was their common language.
Maria Mhm mhm.
Trish And they're like wait what what? Like yeah it's not easy as you're here, where it's like oh do you say soda or do you say pop like pop.
Maria Right.
Trish It's like completely.
Maria There are thousands, thousands of languages.
Trish And then some of them are more Spanish. Some of them are more Chinese. Mhm. Pick your colonizer flavor. And that's….
Maria Exactly.
Trish That's what that you know particular area kind of spoke of. So it is this really interesting culture to be in because we have all these different influencers. I've tasted food, I'm like, this kind of tastes African. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We have the same colonizers, so they probably brought some,..
Maria Broughts some of those stews over.
Trish Like, kare kare, peanuts are not native to either place but we shared the same colonizers.
Maria Mhm.
Trish So we both be making peanut sauce. I was talking to a chef about it, and they were trying to do some research to see who did it first because some of these ingredients are not native. And it's like, oh, someone had to bring some of these ingredients to our place.
Maria Well, I remember somebody telling me that they were trying Filipino food for the first time. And it was rice and whatever the protein was, and then there were tomatoes in the dish, like, where did the tomatoes come from?
Trish Like somebody brought them.
Maria Somebody brought them over.
Trish People get grossed out by SPAM, and you're like, dude, SPAM was made in the US! We’re not making SPAM.
Maria I did not know that. Well, I mean, it must….
Trish Military SPAM.
Maria A military food. Yeah.
Trish Yeah, yeah yeah, yeah.
Maria Requires no refrigeration.
Trish Yeah. P.S. y'all word bubble across this podcast. I found tocino SPAM in Chinatown.
Maria Did you really?
Trish I'll drop the supermarket link. (Jia Ho Super Market!)
Maria Okay.
Trish I was just looking for random stuff, and then I was going down the aisle, and then my, like, my Filipino senses were tingling, and I was like, is that a red can of SPAM? Because if it's red, it's tocino.
Maria Oh, wow.
Trish It's so good. It's sugar and salt and fat. Diabetes and gout on the plate.
Maria Like random random fats that did not make it onto the production floor, right?
Trish Well, I could talk about food and your dissertation forever, but we're starting to wrap up, and I love to end the episode with some shout-outs and some community love. Is there someone that is in the Filipino / Filipino American scene in Greater Boston, Massachusetts that you would like to give a shout out to?
Maria Yes, and I got her permission.
Trish I love that. I don't know if we get permission from everybody.
Maria Well, the funny thing is, is that we were introduced by, we still haven't actually met each other, but we have a mutual, like, bestest kind of friend. And when she gave us each other's phone numbers, she said, listen, I you're both relatively introverted. I don't know if you'll ever actually meet each other, but I know you'll have lots to talk about. So, anyway, her name is Cheryl Rosenberg, and I believe she lives in Roslindale or maybe Jamaica Plain. And she is the owner of Piña Home Life. So she's a Filipina interior designer. And even the name of her company, Piña is the pineapple fibers that barong tagalog are made out of.
Trish Yeah.
Maria So I don't know how many Filipino homes she's designing here in greater Boston, but I know that her Filipino aesthetic is always there in her work, and it's the name of her company, and it's a part of her professional identity. So I definitely want to call her out. I believe her website is Piña Home Life and I believe that is also her Instagram. We can double check that in a bit.
Trish Yeah. Yeah. I think we highlighted her, or she had an event at some point in the universe. . I'll definitely have to check out, I'm assuming pineapple. I'm thinking like I was trying to think of the shells. That's why I was looking up. I'm like, capiz. Capiz shells everywhere. I mean, because I think everybody had or knows someone that had that chandelier that….
Maria Think so, I think so like that. That collapsible…
Trish Yes. Yes, yes. So not in the same room as the large Last Supper wood carving and…
Maria No, maybe not.
Trish And wooden, wooden spoon and…
Maria The spoons, the fork, and the spoon on the wall.
Trish Which is in the BOSFilipinos logo. Well, awesome. Thank you so much for being a guest, Maria. We can't wait to hear more about your dissertation. I think maybe some tips for folks that are, you know, as you're doing these interviews.
Maria Would love to.
Trish Maybe you can do like a follow-up blog post at some point in the next year. You know, as you're talking to folks and hearing how people are getting these stories out of their families because it is so important, and if we're not telling them, you know, nobody else is.
Maria No, they won't be told. And there's a whole other generation of Filipino Americans who are going to be born, and they need those stories, too.
Trish Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Maria.
