Reflecting on Identity and Representation
Playwright Nicholas Pilapil shares how he discovered his "Asian American" identity through the theatre. Part 1 of 2.
I’ve always felt a strange invisibleness as a Filipino. To the majority, we’re a minority. Under the AAPI umbrella, we’re lost somewhere in between. And even to other Filipinos, sometimes we’re not Filipino enough—whatever that means. Author Anthony Christian Ocampo, Ph.D., calls Filipinos “The Latinos of Asia.” In his 1983 pictorial essay, Fred Cordova refers to Filipinos as “The Forgotten Asian Americans.” It makes you think: can we be seen if we can’t even define where we land?
Before the colonization of the Philippines in the 16th century, the country didn’t even exist. The Philippines, as it was, was nothing more than a sea of diverse islands, each uniquely their own. It wasn’t until Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon our lands and claimed them as a colony for the Spanish Empire that we were even given a national identity.
Our roots are in being erased. Being told what we are. And who we are.
And though many of us have evolved to become proudly and unapologetically Filipino, this dark history still leaves its mark. Unconsciously, we let it dictate how we, as Filipinos, hold our worth, claim our identity, and allow how we are perceived. You may be reading this and thinking, “Speak for yourself!” But am I wrong? If we analyzed ourselves and the world around us even slightly deeper, wouldn’t you see the cracks too? But perhaps, these are my struggles alone. Maybe I read too many books. Maybe I live my Filipino identity too much in the clouds of my imagination rather than the navigation of my everyday life.
As a 1.5-generation Filipino American, I didn’t grow up with “Pinoy Pride.” My parents immigrated to America as elementary school-aged kids in the ’80s. My family arrived as outsiders, and my parents had to grow up fast to assimilate into their new world. They came of age, erasing parts of themselves to be American. And, because of that, they raised me without traces of our culture, language, and deep understanding of who we are and where we came from.
They may not have known it, nor did I, but today, I see it was their gift to me. Because I grew up feeling like I belonged to the world around me. I was raised to believe that my dreams didn’t have to be wild imaginations and that if I worked hard enough, the world would allow me to turn them into reality. And isn’t that the American Dream?
But the world is still the world—and the world is ugly. Which means I still grew up feeling othered. But what made me feel othered was everything outside of my race—like growing up overweight or being the only boy cousin who picked Chun-Li in our many games of Street Fighter. My race was invisible to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew my family was Filipino. I knew my dad was born in Cebu, that I have an aunt who is a celebrity of diva proportions in the Philippines, and that Kare Kare wins over Chicken Adobo any day. But as a kid, that didn’t mean identity to me. If anything, I identified more as “not White” or as a person who eats rice. The term Asian American wasn’t even on my radar until college, and I didn’t feel welcome to use it to identify with it until much later. It wasn’t until I started creating theatre that I began questioning those parts of my identity.
They say theatre is meant to hold a mirror to society, and for me, it was true. When I looked onstage, I saw myself in the stories being told, the worlds being depicted, and the characters living out loud. Although as much as I saw myself in this fiction, I began to see more of the truth. And the fact was that I could see that parts of me were missing.
They say #RepresentationMatters that if you see yourself reflected in media, you can imagine yourself as valid and that you belong. And that’s what happened to me when I discovered Asian American theatre. After graduating college with a Theatre Arts degree and high off my fresh-out-of-college tenacity and drive, I searched for a place to put my theatre degree to good use. I wanted to make a dent in the entertainment world and show my parents that theatre wasn’t synonymous with failure. The place I found would become my artistic home and be my gateway to discovering my Asian American identity. That place was the Los Angeles-based Asian American theatre collective Artists at Play.
Through my work with them, I was enlightened about the world of Asian America through the words and stories of writers like David Henry Hwang, Julia Cho, and Qui Nguyen. By reading their plays and being transported into their theatrical worlds, I began to see that I’ve been unconsciously suppressing parts of my identity—my Asian American identity—to fit into a world that I thought was made for me.
But it was a double-edged sword. My exposure to Asian American theatre opened the curtain to all the issues that faced the Asian American community—like, you know…racism, stereotypes, prejudice, the model minority myth, colorism... But that’s the magic of theatre. More than a show of pure entertainment, theatre is a powerful tool that can reveal truths about yourself that you never even knew. In that way, theatre, indeed, is a mirror.
“I’m really into being Asian right now,” I once told a cousin at a family reunion. And it was true; I felt the need to catch up, and so theatre became my Asian American training ground and then became my form of activism against the issues we faced. With Artists at Play, I supported their efforts, as a producer, to tell the underrepresented stories of the AAPI community. We developed new works with staged play readings and workshops, funded and produced world premiere productions to introduce new AAPI plays into the American Theatre canon—and continue to do so today.
Yet despite all of this, my Filipino identity was still something to be discovered. The way I grew up feeling more “not White” than Filipino was how I felt then, too—but more Asian than Filipino. Asian American is nothing more than a sociological and political term. It was coined by activists Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee in 1968, and was made to combat being called Oriental. Before being Asian American, we didn’t have a pan-ethnic Asian identity in America. Just like the islands of the Philippines before colonization, Asians in America were separate islands, uniquely their own. But inspired by the Black Civil Rights Movement of the ’60s, the Asian civil rights movement gained their own momentum. The newly created identity of Asian Americans was used to galvanize us to unite and fight for shared liberation. I am very proud to be Asian American. But as it’s my habit, I got lost in that identity while suppressing who I was within the moniker. What helped me finally find the Pinoy in me was, again, theatre. Enter—my playwright era!
Continued in Part 2 (tomorrow!)
About the Author:
Nicholas Pilapil is a Filipino American playwright. His plays include The Bottoming Process (world premiere IAMA Theatre Company, Victory Gardens' Ignition Festival of New Plays) and if all that You take from this is courage, then I've no regrets (winner of the Samuel French Off Off Broadway Festival). His plays have also been developed with Geffen Playhouse, Artists at Play, Playwrights Foundation, American Stage, Ensemble Studio Theatre/LA, and The Workshop Theater, among others. His work is published by Samuel French, Smith & Kraus, and his collection of monologues, Other Monologues, is a winner of The Astringent Award and published by Astringent Press. Read more from Nicholas on his Substack My Ugly Mouth. nicholaspilapil.com
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