Dear Grace Talusan,
When reading your memoir The Body Papers, I’m struck, as I’m sure all your readers are, by the contrast between experiencing prejudice in the United States and privilege in the Philippines. Your recounting of grappling with privilege in Manila, especially economic privilege in a place where the U.S. dollar affords expats and visitors to hire care workers including cleaners, drivers, and more, contrasts with your experience being othered in the United States as a child, severed from classmates and potential friends as they confined themselves to their WASPy circles.
I am drawn to the way in which you describe your mother taking these tasks upon herself not only because the cost of care work is more expensive in the United States, but because of the determination and assimilation goals of the immigrant. You write the following:
When we were born, my mother hired one yaya each for my sister Tessie and me. Their only job was to care for us. Others—the lavandera, the driver, the houseboy, the cook—performed the many household chores. But in America, my mother noticed the other women doing it all themselves. She was determined to become like them (194).
During my childhood, I questioned my mother about the reasons why she did not speak any other language besides English, to which she would reply that her mother and father believed firmly in the idea that “We live in the United States, so we must speak English,” despite this country not having an official language. They believed that this was part of their assimilation journey, something that I can only assume was a driving force behind your mother’s determination to perform house and care work for your family.
I would also like to highlight the following lines: “When I was a teenager, fit and tight, I recoiled at the nude bodies of older women, loose and lumpy, straining against their garments… I had not seen the real bodies of women before” (149).
To state it bluntly: I was not a skinny child. In fact, during a long period of my adolescence in which I threw myself into the depths of meeting with talent managers and agents to achieve my musical theater dreams, I was told by a photographer being paid to take my headshots that I wouldn’t step foot onto a stage or into a camera’s frame with the curves I had. I was slightly pudgy, prone to injury, and anxious: Hollywood’s nightmare. Still, I had not seen real bodies either. I saw teens who were under-eating and under-sleeping, clawing at their own claims to fame before adulthood. We were confident, myself less than others, that being triple threats would get us cast, given our SAG cards, and immortalized on the screen or stage, but we were not real and neither were our coaches.
I am confident now that the lack of role models, especially women, with bodies that are healthy and age normally, create this notion in young girls that they need to slough off their baby fat as soon as possible and become pencil-thin — to stay pencil thin until they reach their coffins. None of that pregnancy or menopausal weight gain.
Seeing real, unaltered bodies of aging women is vital. We see what we will become if we live and take advantage of life — if we are able to balance a healthy life with one of pleasure and joy. I wonder what it will take for us to be okay with this, and I hope it is looking like the woman you describe in the gym. We would be lucky to be active and aging, and I believe that our goal should be to follow in her stead.
Warmly,
Carlin Steere
