It was long after school ended and most people had gone home. Only the volleyball players were left running drills in the gym and a few of us sitting around campus waiting for our rides to come. I dozed on a stone bench by the pickup curb listening to whatever came out of the gym door. the squeaks of sneaker. The smacks of serves, saves, spikes and returns. And, of course, the thuds of defeat. 

Then, as if manifesting herself from an amalgamation of these sounds, she startled me from my sleep.

“Are you free tomorrow afternoon?”

At first, I ignored her, thinking her words were meant for someone else. Even though I recognized her voice, we had hardly spoken to each other.

We were in the same grade in high school and had gone to the same schools since elementary. Had we spoken more often, I would have considered her a childhood friend, but we were barely even childhood acquaintances.

When she repeated herself, I opened one eye and saw her standing above me, clutching her copy of the Norton Anthology for Contemporary American Literature from our English class to her chest. It was huge and dog-eared with multi-colored tabs from all the annotations we had to do. I cared less about English those days, so, unlike hers, my book was clean. I felt it bulge through my back pack as I rested my head on it. 

“If you’re busy this weekend, no biggy.”

I was confused by her initial question, but the abrupt confidence in her voice from her follow up left me feeling annoyed, as if she were saying, if not you then some else could do.

“No, I’ll go,” I said sitting up now, already assuming we were going somewhere together.

I was at the age where if someone asked if you were free, it only meant a date. Even when she was a stranger, there was still much for me to be attracted to. She was smart, hardworking, and, despite being unremarkable and easy to forget, she was pretty. Perhaps it was the easy-to-forget-aspect of her that made previous advances go unnoticed, I thought. She had no friends that I saw, but she wasn’t hated. Everyone just assumed she liked being alone. A pang of guilt and a cold sweat of conceitedness ran down my back. I swiveled my feet to the ground and laid my palms on the stone to lean back coolly. 

Her face was unmoved by my response. If she was flirting, I thought, she was either nervous or unimpressed. 

“Great. Tomorrow at twelve, Din Tai Fung. Don’t worry about money. My father is paying. We’ll just eat and go. Quick and easy. Thanks.” Her voice was flat, as if she were reading out-loud the synopsis of a movie. She turned to go, but stopped and turned back around as if remembering that we were strangers and not already lovers. She asked for my number and we exchanged information on our phones. “I know this is out of the blue and random.”

“No, I love Din Tai Fung,” I said, then, unable to fight the question from coming out of my mouth, stood up, “but I just have to ask, why me?”

We were close enough now for me to notice she was a couple inches taller. She looked down at me with relief rather than surprise.

“I’m half-Filipino and you’re full Filipino, correct?”

I looked up at her, a little embarrassed. “Yeah, I guess that explains my height.”

She laughed. It was the first time I saw her smile. She looked like a different person. If there had been any other person around, they would have noticed it too. “No, no. It’s not that. I thought my father’d feel more comfortable if there was another Filipino there.”

“Oh,” I said, a little disappointed it wasn’t because of anything else, “Well, I’ll be as Filipino as I can be tomorrow.”

In her smile back to me, I noticed the slight roundness to her nose and the dark radiance of her hair that screamed Filipino I never noticed before. As she turned to walk away, I suddenly felt like there was blood between us, that this wasn’t so much a date as it was family obligation.  

When my dad picked me up and I told him a girl had asked me to lunch the next day and that her father was paying for it, he slapped my shoulder with so much pride I couldn’t have the heart to tell him that I didn’t think it was a date. 

“That’s my boy! What is she like?”

“She’s smart and pretty,” I said, looking out the window at the traffic on the 405 freeway, trying to avoid eye contact, “and she’s taller than me but not by much.”

“That’s ok, anak. It’s 2023, short or tall, skinny or fat, boy or girl. It doesn’t matter, na?” My father slapped my shoulder again without taking his eyes off the road. He spoke with sudden gusto and understanding I had never heard until then. “As long as you like each other, balong.” 

“Yeah,” I said, without the heart to tell him I wasn’t sure if like or dislike was even a factor in this. “Dad, are we full Filipinos?”

My dad suddenly slowed down and looked at me, cars honking and speeding around. “What does it look like?” He asked, as if hurt by the question.

Of course my father was, he had lived there all his life until I was born. As for me, I hardly knew anything about our culture. 

The whole car ride, I asked my father questions about Filipinos. Everything from popular sayings to well known geography. 

“Are you testing me, Anak?” My father said as we finally pulled into our driveway.

“No, I just want to make a good impression.” I said without going into further detail.

When my dad parked, he took off his seatbelt and gave me a hug. It was the first hug he had given me since I was a little boy. I was taken aback when I felt the tears from his cheek run down my shoulder. “Just be yourself, balong. They like you already. You. That’s enough.” While he hugged me, he rang my chest with his finger to emphasize the word “you” so hard it made me cringe. 

“My mother is dying. Did you know that?” 

I read her text to myself in the darkness of my room that night. She had sent it right when I had settled in for bed, as if she was settling in too. I turned on my side to text her back, as if she were lying right next to me.

“Yeah. Mrs. Danahoe told the class when you were absent last week,” I texted into the bright screen. However, Mrs. Danahoe had said her mother was sick in the hospital and did not say anything about dying.

A box with elipses sprang up to let me know she was typing a response. While I waited, I wondered if she were watching my elipses too. “She has stage-four brain cancer and has about a month left. She can’t talk normally anymore but while she still could she told me about my father. He wasn’t around my whole life, but he told her that if anything happened to her where she couldn’t take care of me anymore that she should contact him right way and he would do what he could for me.”

“I’m sorry about your mom. Why the secrecy? Your dad a secret agent?” I texted in poor taste. I wished I could have deleted it but was relieved to see her reply with an lol followed by her explanation.

“I wish. Unfortunately, he’s just some famous comedian.”

“Wow. Who?”

When she texted the name, I was shocked to read that it was the name of a famous Filipino-American Comedian. For some reason, only non-Filipino Comedians came to my mind. I did not expect her father to be one of the few, if not the most popular of, Filipino-American comedians there was right now. 

“Doesn’t he have other kids? He talks about them in his comedy all the time.”

“To be honest, I’m not familiar with him or his comedy. I’ve never had an interest until my mother told me he was my father.”

“And did you look him up on youtube or anything. You want any links?”

“No, that’s all right. Tomorrow should suffice.” I read the word “suffice” and tried to think of her tone. Was she angry? Happy? Sad? There was no telling in text. 

“And this is your first time meeting him?”

“Yes. You?”

“Never. And he never once came to see you?”

“Never.” She texted back, as if she copy-and-pasted my response.

I knew I should’ve felt angry about his absence in her and her mother’s lives, but I couldn’t help but feel giddy about meeting this Filipino comedian in person. He was a Filipino-American icon after all. His daughter, on the other hand, wasn’t really much to anyone. Sure, the situation with her and her mother was abhorrent, but this revelation was bound to have more of an impact on the Filipino-American community at large. Her father was a household name, not just for Filipinos but for all Americans. Because of him, people were more accustom now with our culture. He even made one of the first Filipino-American films in Hollywood. Thinking about the effect it would have on everyone kept me up all night. If this wasn’t a date, it was for sure some sort defining cultural moment.

When we arrived, a waiter took us to a private room at the back of the restaurant. Her father was already there, sitting at the head of a long table nursing some tea and his phone. To my surprise, he was alone. No bodyguards. No lawyers. Nobody. I thought, at least he would have one of his sons with him. He was always seen in public with his children. Instagram posts showed them together in every shot, even together in the selfies he took with fans.

The server left us and her father got up and said her name except coming from him it sounded like he was saying it wrong somehow. He held his arms out when we approached, but, instead of embracing him, she held out her hand for a handshake. She was much taller than him which, from the look in his eye, surprised him.

His face fell a little but he managed to keep his smile up. “It’s nice to finally meet you despite the circumstances,” he said and shook her hand for a long time before acknowledging me. She said my name and I was almost surprised that she knew it.

“Nice to meet you. Will you both sit down, please?” We shook hands briefly and went to sit. Before I could choose my seat, somehow she had maneuvered me between them.

I stared down at the menu, afraid to look her father in the face. 

“Pick whatever you like,” her father said, the smell of tea on his breath, “I also have them making a special order of something not on the menu, so make sure to save room for it.”

“Oh, what is it?” I asked, managing the courage to look up at him. 

Her father turned smug with the face he made whenever told a joke impersonating his Lola yelling at him. “A friend of mine from San Francisco just sent me down some new Siopao from his food truck and I thought I’d have the restaurant steam them up for us.”

I imagined him setting up a joke where he recounts a wild tale about his Lola putting dinuguan in his siopao for his school lunch and sharing it with his friends innocently calling it chocolate meat. but when a joke didn’t come, I asked him what was in them.

“Your usual pork and chicken adobo, and some weird ones like carne asada beefsteak and mushroom sisig,” he replied with pride, then looked over at his daughter. “What kind of siopao is your favorite?”

“I never had it before,” looking intently at the menu, “but I’m unfamiliar with what they have at this restaurant too, so I guess I’ll just try what you brought then.”

“Your mother never introduce Filipino food to you?” Her father said with a sudden seriousness to his face. 

She pushed her menu to the side away from us and shook her head. “I’m afraid I’ve never had it before.”

“Had I known, I would have chosen Max’s restaurant down the street!”

I nodded in agreement, familiar with Max’s and their famous Filipino fried chicken, however, she just stared drearily in front of her, unfamiliar and unimpressed.

“Next time then,” her father rebounded, “I think you’ll like the siopao then.”

When the waiter came, we got waters all around and not to be rude in just having the food that he brought, her father also put in three orders of pork xiao long bao.

She nudged my shoulder after the order and asked me what those were, and, before I could say, her father explained that they were steamed dumplings with pork and soup inside. 

I had expected someone of his fame to be more arrogant and forthright but meeting his daughter for the first time had diminished his confidence. He was reaching for anything now to connect with her.

Still, everything he said was met with an apathetic gaze. There was nothing special about this man. He wasn’t a celebrity, a comedian, or a man. He was just her father. 

“What’s your favorite kind of music?” He asked.

“Anything,” she said.

“What do you want to do after high school?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“How have you been?”

“Fine.”

In between questions and answers, my stomach growled in the silence. I sipped my water until it was gone and the server came to refill it. 

Then, finally, the food arrived all together. We opened the tops of the steamers to reveal the plump white siopao buns and the ample xia long bao soup dumplings.

Her father and I readied for our chopsticks while she asked the server for a fork.

While we waited for the server to return, we put our chopsticks down and her father stood up and pointed out the siopao, all with different colored-paper attached underneath them. “At least you can eat these with your hands,” he said and grabbed one with a purple paper underneath. “The purple ones are pork adobo, yellow is chicken, red is the beefsteak, and brown is the mushroom sisig. Try it,” he said and waited for his daughter to pick one. 

She looked over the buns and picked a pork one like her father. I picked the beefsteak.

Her father sat down looking pleased and bit into his bun making exaggerated sounds of pleasure, ones that I had often heard him make in a bit he does while pretending to get a massage from his children stepping on his back when they were small. 

I bit into my siopao and was surprised to find the spices from the carne asada accompanied with a chimichurri filling that complimented the sweet fluffy taste of the rice bun. It was an experience I never had before. It was Filipino and not Filipino at the same time. It was certainly not Mexican, especially the chimichurri.

I took another bite and looked over at my companion and found her already halfway through but her expression had not changed. When she finished it, she reached for another. 

“How was your first Siopao?”

Upon hearing the question, her hand recoiled, as if she suddenly remembered she shouldn’t be enjoying herself. 

“It was good.”

It was then with her words I remembered a conversation we had long ago, in first grade. How did I forget? I was waiting for my ride with the after school guardians and she was sitting next to me while I ate my leftovers of longanisa and rice. I was so embarrassed that the smell was strong, I scarfed it down away from the guardian and her while we waited. Before it was all gone, she came over and asked me what I was eating.

“It’s Filipino food.” I told her.

Her stomach growled and I knew she wanted some, but I was so embarrassed I quickly scarfed down the rest.

“You wouldn’t like it. It’s nasty.” I said, secretly relishing every bite.

“Eat as much as you like,” her father said, “try them all.”

And as she grabbed another the server came with her fork. 

Throughout the whole lunch, not once did they talk about her mother. Conversation was sparse, except for questions and answers about the food. What was in this and how do you eat that? If there was something the two of them had in common, it was how easily they knew how to turn on and off who they were. When they ate, they stopped being anyone else that I could recognize.

When the meal was over, we all shook hands and took a selfie together on my phone. She had her arms around us while her father and I were in the front. They didn’t have to tell me not to mention what their relationship was when I posted it. As far as anyone knew, we were on a date and ran into a famous comedian. 

Years later, when the famous comedian passed away, I found her on Facebook, but her account was set on private and I was too embarrassed to message her after so much time had passed. In her profile picture, she had the Filipino flag behind her. She was someone else again, this time someone I couldn’t recognize anymore.

– E. P. Tuazon