Pancit

2024-09-19

This may be cheating. This following excrept is from an assignment I wrote but I wanted to share it here, too.

When I was younger, I didn’t know what it meant to be Filipino. From elementary to junior high school, I was one of three Filipinos in my grade. Everyone else was White. I constantly compared my very Filipino family to my friends and their very Canadian families. In my rebellious preteen eyes, the only interesting thing Filipinos had was food.

What comes to mind is pancit, a simple noodle dish. It was a dish I didn’t love immediately. The turning point was during a trip to the Philippines. It was my grandfather’s death anniversary, and, to my surprise, there was a big celebration. I was used to pancit at Filipino gatherings. It’s a staple to any Filipino party. What I didn’t expect was pancit at what seemed like a somber event.

I distinctly remember my aunts on the cement kitchen floor, squatting around a giant wok. Woks are big to begin with, but this wok was unlike any other I had seen before. It was about half the size of a dining table. They ladled out spoonsful of pancit from the wok onto paper plates. My dad instructed me to take the paper plates and distribute them to people waiting outside. We ended up doing this for an hour and a half, and, somehow, the wok never seemed to run out of noodles.

My father later told me that most of those people outside were not relatives. Some were people that no one had ever met before. He joked that, “people smelled the food and came over.” I was stunned.

That's part of my assignment. The rest of it is just the boring history of pancit.

What this excerpt reminds me of is community. I don't think I have a solid community that I can turn to these days. Individual people, maybe, but not a community. I find it quite hard to break into them, often feeling like an outsider. My strategy is usually to observe the dynamics and how people talk to each other, so I have an idea of how to participate. This works for text-based online communities. In person, it can be read as weird and creepy. As you can probably tell, I'm not the fearless extrovert type.

I think another part of it is that I can be very distant. Showing my vulnerabilities can be hard for me. I often wonder if I am overstepping. Or fearing not being accepted. I think having community requires openness and willing to be vulnerable, both of which I have trouble with.

I wish I could say that I'm working on it, but I'm really not. It's not high on my priority list these days but maybe it should be.