Elias Dakila Schmitz was born on July 1, 2023. He is 75% of the brown race, his father, Andreas, being 50% German and his mother, Vigile Marie, being 100% Filipino. His birth was a moment of great joy for his grandparents. But my own joy was tinged with trepidation. What will his life be being of mixed race among the white and German majority? Germany is not the USA where, if you are in Anaheim, California, every other pedestrian you meet is your color; you can immerse yourself in the brown community and its sometime petty quarrels all your life and never miss your regional or even your town dialect. Except for your greenback income, it feels as if you have never left. Not so in Germany, or even Cologne at its most cosmopolitan. Fortunately, Elias Dakila has two older cousins with whom he can run and play when old enough.
But not Roger. In the haunting story “Scent of Apples” by Bienvenido Santos, Roger was the son of Celestino Fabia and his American wife, Ruth, living in the farming heartland of America. Their farm was 30 miles from Kalamazoo, Indiana. Here, Roger was a person of mixed race trapped in the world of staunch Anglo-Saxon protestants at the time when the Ku Klux clan was still ascendant and respectable.
Bienvenido Santos was a Filipino scholar of the US government who got stranded in America by WWII; he was recruited by the US State Department to give talks to anxious US audiences whose sons were mired in the jungles of the Philippines and Asia by the anti-Japanese war. Celestino had read in the local papers of the upcoming talk by Bienvenido Santos and came to Kalamazoo to hear him. He asked a lot of questions.
Before they parted after the talk, Celestino invited him to come visit. “Please!” His wife, Ruth, he promised, will be very happy; they haven’t seen a “high-class Filipino” in a long time. “Ruth is a country girl and hasn’t met many Filipinos younger than I and cleaner looking. We’re just poor farmers, you know, and we don’t get to town very often.” A coded message perhaps that they were not very welcome!
Celestino ached to show Ruth and his boy Roger a “first class” Filipino. That they, Roger in particular, could hope to rise to the level of first class and need not despair over their lowly status. As he tells it, when he returned to pick him up, “I says to her, ‘I’m bringing you a first class Filipino and she says, ‘Aw, go away, quit kidding, there’s no such thing as a first class Filipino.’ But Roger, that’s my boy, he believed immediately, ‘What’s he like, daddy? Like you daddy?’ ‘No, no… your daddy ain’t first class.’ ‘Oh, but you are daddy,’ he says.” Children all over believe their dad is first class; only in time and, sadly for most, including me, to grudgingly be reality-checked into letting go.
I could not help my eyes welling up every time I read these lines. Obviously, Celestino and Ruth have resigned themselves to feeding at the bottom of the barrel in a land where the very constitution claims that “all men are created equal.” They accepted their socially constructed social standing, if not their God-mandated birth-fate, as in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. But for Roger, daddy was first class no matter that his car was battered, and his clothes had known better days. I could not help muttering a muffled applause: “Way to go Roger!” Was Roger confirmed in his belief about his dad, or was he disillusioned after the Bien Santos’ visit? We are not told. As they were leaving the farm, the author catches a whiff of rotting apples. Another coded clue to grinding poverty? It would have been nice to know if the Fabia’s were landowners or sharecroppers in Indiana. We are not told.
How Celestino and Ruth met was left completely to the readers’ imagination. Filipino farmworkers in Delano, California in the 1930s could truck with the opposite sex only in “taxi dance halls” where Caucasian women were brought in as taxi dancers for hire for 10 cents per dance. Filipino men, who earned hardly a dollar a day as fruit and vegetable pickers, dressed in their MacIntosh suits and polished leather, flocked to these dance halls for a few hours of reprieve from laboring six days a week under the hot California sun. Taxi dancers were mostly impoverished young women themselves, largely from the Midwest farming communities that were ravaged by drought that turned them into refugees from destitution. J. Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath made the flight and plight of the “Okkies” (refugees from Oklahoma) the stuff of national conversation. In the taxi dance halls, the refugees from the East and the refugees from the Midwest met to mutually drown their sorrows.
The stirrings of the flesh remained just that for most Filipinos into their old age, now become Manongs (elder brothers) to new arrivals. But for some, the stirrings of the flesh turned into stirrings of the heart, progressing into lasting partnerships in the shadows or even marriage, if they could find a state where the anti-miscegenation laws (no mixed-race marriage) did not bite.
Was this latter the case of Celestino and Ruth that produced Roger? We will never know. One can just imagine the dread that the little boy, Roger, felt come class days when he had to board the school bus in the company of overtly or covertly jeering children of rednecks. No comparison was the confusion and shame I felt when, as a grader in a free school where closed shoes inspired hushed laughter (one-peso-a-year tuition fees) in Bacolod City, I was mistakenly bundled in a school bus for affluent De La Salle students (P15,000 a year tuition fee and mandatory leathers). Fortunately for me, unlike Roger, I was able to switch conveyance.
I always regretted that I did not meet Bien Santos before he died in 1996. Celestino Fabia would have corresponded with his first-class Filipino and apprised him of their journey. I would have asked him how Roger fared in life. Did he turn the tables on adversity by his achievements? Did he manage to recompense CeIestino and Ruth by attaining “first class” himself at the head of his class? Or did he crumble and turn bitter in the face of adversity?
I know one who turned the tables on adversity. As a mixed-race kid in Holland, Marco, was belittled and one day in the harvest season was purposely buried in potatoes by his white cousins to show their contempt; as he struggled to extricate himself, he vowed to one day buy out his cousins and wholly own the family farm himself. He did, showing his white cousins who, at the end of the day, was “first class.”
How will Elias Dakila’s life turn out? I don’t know. What I know is that humans, Caucasians included, grudgingly embrace those who beat them at their own cherished game. That’s how the Japanese, the South Koreans, and the Vietnamese did it. That’s how Marco did it. I hope and pray, Elias Dakila will be as good as any of his cohort in Germany’s cherished game: science and technology.
Raul V. Fabella is a retired professor at the UP School of Economics, a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology, and an honorary professor at the Asian Institute of Management. He gets his dopamine fix from tending flowers with wife Teena, bicycling, and assiduously, if with little success, courting the guitar.