Under My Invisible Umbrella Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on

By Laurel Fantauzzo my skin color not to work against the appearance of

financial reliability.
I accepted the man’s service without question, as if he
had been standing at the doorway of the Olongapo office I can choose public accommodation without fearing that
building waiting only for me. As if I knew he would head people of my race cannot get in or will be mistreated in
into the downpour, open his umbrella, hold the tenuous the places I have chosen.
shelter of it over my head, and walk at my pace, getting Perhaps, in Manila, I lived a variation of McIntosh’s
wet himself. I accepted his work without a “Salamat po.” theme: Moving under the Invisible Umbrella.
I was second to worst in my class of Filipino American Last August, I spent only forty pesos at an upscale cafe in
would-be Tagalog speakers that July, and, in 2007, at age Greenbelt mall to wait out a cloudburst. I used the café’s
23, I was still too embarrassed to try. Wi-Fi for hours, while servers impatiently thrust menus
As I waited for the rest of my Fil-Am classmates, my at more-melanined customers who had dared sit for too
Tagalog teacher Susan Quimpo approached me, holding long.
her own umbrella. I wandered onto a fenced-in, exclusive university campus
“Did you notice that he held the umbrella only for you?” for the sole reason that it was a nice walk, and I wanted
she murmured. Then—as people of the Philippines are to be there. The guard smiled and tipped his hat to me.
inclined to do, when a situation seems too absurd in its He did not require me to sign his security book.
wrongness to repair—she laughed. In a live, crowded theater, I crossed a restricted area to
My classmates and I sounded the same: Fil-Ams use the much less crowded staff restroom. Four guards
managing our emotional confusion with loud inside jokes said nothing.
about our two months together in Manila. But they were As I slowly learned my motherland’s arithmetic of
brown and they were damp. I was pale and I was dry. identity—repeated in countries once brutalized by white
The man was not holding the umbrella above me. He was rulers around the world—, I realized what members of
holding the umbrella above my whiteness. He was the service sector assumed of me: English speaker + pale
holding it like a flag for everything he assumed my face + black hair = A foreigner. Or a mestiza. She looks
whiteness represented: my wealth, my station in life— like the rulers—Spanish, or American. She and her family
higher than his—and my deserving extra service. must have some authority—perhaps political authority.
This worship of whiteness is not a phenomenon unique She merits extra courtesy.
to the Philippines. But that day in Olongapo, I felt a surge As I spent more time in the Philippines in the late 2000s,
of shame. developing my understanding of the society my mother
Of course, whether I felt guilty or not, I was still dry. left in 1979, I tried to reconcile what I saw with the
reality I came from. My mother was the second-to-
Before moving to the Philippines, I had no idea how
youngest child of seven. The last home she shared with
closely my class would be identified with my face. In
her family was a small apartment that flooded regularly.
America, my face had been merely diverting, a prompt
She was a scholar at Ateneo de Manila University, always
for racial guessing-games that always made me shudder. explained to me as the Harvard of the Philippines. Her
“Mexican! Polish! Sephardic!” “You kinda look Spanish
classmates’ easy, entitled affluence depressed her. We
and Oriental at the same time. What is that?” Or my face
lived in a wealthy California suburb because my mother
had been an inspiration for the saying of strange, murky
was always conscious of the necessity to perform wealth.
compliments that made me shudder more. “I wish I had And we ate bread from the Wonderbread surplus store.
your nice, smooth, Asian skin.” “You’re so lucky your
We never, ever threw away expired meat.
nose isn’t too— well, you know.”
But the education my parents guaranteed me, in a
In Manila, my ambiguous whiteness was no longer wealthier country that once controlled the Philippines
ambiguous. It was simply whiteness.
garnered me grants and scholarships—advantages of
Thanks to my face, and the strength of the dollars I had, I travel that few middle-to-lower-class scholars in the
was top one-percenting for the first time in my life. I Philippines will ever see.
lived, overtly, the troubling inventory Peggy McIntosh My favorite karinderya serves scrambled eggs and rice
outlines in “White Privilege: Unpacking The Invisible
for twenty pesos. My presence amuses and annoys the
Knapsack:”
guards and drivers who were never granted scholarships
to study me in my birth country. As my Tagalog
improved, I began to understand their objections. Didn’t I

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have a more sosyal place to eat as a foreigner? What was continues to be a kind of cheating in the modern
I playing at, treading into their space? Philippines.
I occasionally see my relatives in Tandang Sora, a long Besides the dauyhan tax I joke about, there are other
but narrow street with many working-class subtler, more personal taxes intrinsic to my pallid
neighborhoods. My cousins often think about strategies appearance. No one in the Philippines will ever
to become Overseas Filipino Workers. It isn’t their first immediately believe I am Filipina, no matter how strongly
choice to leave. But they have no other escape from the and how affectionately I choose the country. My Tagalog
criminally small wages given them. Last summer they will take years to reach everyday, pun-level proficiency.
were developing their own small karinderya. My mother chose not to teach me and my two younger
I always consider their position against mine. It is an brothers Tagalog, for fear that our Italian American
uneasy comparison. Had my mother not been a scholar— father would feel excluded. My brothers feel no
had her own, elder sister not married an American, and connection at all to her home country. I alone return
petitioned for her to join them in California—had my regularly.
mother not found my father, a U.S. Naval officer who Sometimes, expats of Western countries who hear my
made her laugh—I too might be starting a karinderya, California accent and see my pale face assume they’ve
finding strategies to go abroad. found a friendly audience for their Philippines
Whenever I visit Tandang Sora, I always bring dessert—a frustrations. I’ll hear their complaints coming—
box of donuts, or a bag of cookies, or ice cream. My Corruption! Traffic! Terrible customer service!—and I will
cousins always feed me: sopas, afritada, fried chicken, say, stiffly, “My mother was from here.” Sometimes it
tilapia stuffed with garlic and tomatoes, which they know gives the expats pause. Sometimes it doesn’t.
to be my favorite. They joke about my Italian side when I do not know when I will deserve to say, “I am from
spaghetti is on the table. They feed me well. here.” My language difficulties and my face still prevent
Of course, none of the economic struggles that once me access to that statement. But I often hear that I am
haunted my family approach the reality of the kalesa lucky. I may not belong to a ruling family, but I look and
driver, who winces when he tells me about his wages, as sound like I do. On some days I don’t know what to do
he plies the avenues of Malate. He is allowed to take with all this, when I leave the room I rent in Quezon City.
home only twenty pesos of each 100-peso ride. The rest On some weekends I grow so tired and confused, I don’t
he owes to the owner of his kalesa. It’s perfectly legal. He leave. I stay in and watch the subtitles on the local music
does not say the rest, but I can perceive it: he can go to video channel, Myx, to try and gain a little more Tagalog.
no one for fair wages. I harbor dreams of using my white mestiza privilege to
Or my cab driver who dozes off at a stoplight—who become a VJ, until I hear how fast and natural the VJs’
apologizes when I nudge him—since it’s the twenty-third Tagalog is. I catch a commercial for a whitening soap. I
hour of his twenty-four-hour shift. How often will he get see a soap opera ad with an actress in the indigenous
the chance to sheepishly say, “Extra charge, ma’am,” for equivalent of blackface.
a cross-Quezon City ride? I watch a cell phone commercial pandering to the
Or the server who looks at me in terror when we realize longings of Overseas Filipino Workers. None of it is
she brought the wrong order. Who will stop her boss terribly surprising. All of it makes a certain kind of sense.
from automatically deducting the two hundred pesos I turn the television off.
from her own small paycheck? Who can she look to, One night, a new friend invites me to a party in Forbes
besides me, and the narrative of wealth my pale face Park. I know the neighborhood’s name as code, the way I
projects, to momentarily assist her with a generous tip? know certain last names as code: upper-est class, highest
When I find shrewd charges added to my bills, I argue as security, a servant for each family member, etc.
briefly as my Tagalogin-progress will allow. My Filipino A private gate guards the house. It reminds me of the
friends say I should argue, for the principle of it. The palatial, forbidding, buttery mansions I used to pass on
workers are likely being dramatic, performing their drives through Malibu in Southern California with an
desperation. My friends say they get cheated too as exgirlfriend who knew where celebrities lived. The young
Filipinas. man hosting the party here in Forbes Park is connected,
In the end I call the overcharges my “dayuhan tax.” My in a way I don’t immediately grasp, to a political family.
foreigner tariff. The extra cost I owe for the postcolonial Inside the house, a fog machine distorts the regal dark. A
privileges of my face. As long as the population remains DJ’s bass line shakes my skeleton. A man dressed like a
economically stranded, I suspect my American whiteness pirate urges us to drink. Small, oval-shaped rainbows

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glow intensely at a slick, temporary bar. Servers call me When I cease imagining the difference of those lives—
“Ma’am!” and gesture toward the rainbows. I realize when I choose dismissal over compassion and self-
they’re drinks. I pick one up. It illuminates my hand. My examination and criticism, to make my own path in the
rainbow shot is very, very sweet. country feel less unnatural than it is—
Outside, serious-faced cooks grill hamburgers. I grew up Perhaps that’s when it will be time for me to leave the
knowing never to spurn free food, so I stand in line for Philippines. Or perhaps that’s when I will finally be able
one. I watch more and more young Manileños arrive. to say I am from the Philippines. I don’t really know
They are, I realize, all part of the ruling classes somehow, which.
or they have befriended members of the ruling classes. How do I make space in myself for everyone on both
Many of them —though not all — are as white as I am, or sides of the gate?
more white. Protected and unprotected? I have a troubled
I see a mechanical bull. relationship with umbrellas. They are daily necessities in
“What?” a Filipina friend mocks me later, when I describe Manila, where the weather can alter by the hour with the
the bull and the bass line and the sweet rainbow and the intensity of an erratic god. But I always lose umbrellas. Or
Malibu-celebrity-style house and the free burger that I break them. It always surprises me when umbrellas
was really very delicious. “Were you just judging it the break. I never expect them to be as fragile as they are.
whole time?” Once, when the wind blew the trees horizontal in the
I flinch. But I fail to explain to her that the same thought business district of Ortigas, I paused in the lobby of an
occurred to me at the party, too. office tower, drenched. More and more passersby, each
Why, I argued to myself, should I judge this? Why should of their umbrellas brutalized and useless, joined me. The
I worry about my complicity in racial hierarchies and class guards let us all stay. Most of us were waiting to walk to
hierarchies and family entrenchments that were the MRT train. Over the next hour, we watched power
constructed long before I ever arrived in my motherland? lines whip and taxis forge defiantly forward and rain
Why not imagine, for just one night, that I am part of a slash into the streets’ now-surging floodwaters. We were
powerful family? Why not just laugh? all, for a brief moment, equally halted, equally soaked.
So I drink another rainbow. I get photographed. I Then one guard noticed me.
exchange business cards. I memorize new names. I watch “Taxi, ma’am?” he asked. “Taxi?”
the whipping hair of socialites who ride the now-bucking He smiled, offering to go out into the rain for me. I
bull. In the small hours of the night, I feel glad I am able smiled back, and told him no.
to enjoy myself.
When I finally exit the gate, I am surprised to find
another, more muted party— party in the most
utilitarian sense of the word.
These are the drivers and bodyguards, waiting for the
members of the Philippine elite inside. They smoke and
murmur to each other and check their cell phones. Their
own families are waiting for them at homes far from
Forbes Park.
I have no easy explanation for my feelings about this
moment. The workers would not welcome, and do not
deserve, my pity. But as I move mere footsteps from the
company of the sovereigns to the company of their
servants, I feel the uncertainty and shame that blur so
often in me here. In the Philippines, I can get past the
gate.
For a chance at the social mobility I perform effortlessly,
many Filipinos, waiting forever, unprotected, outside
barred mansions, will leave. They will hope for work in a
place—Europe, or my birth country—that helped create
and enforce the intractable inequity forcing their
displacement today.