In Tagalog, my last name means respect. Growing up a Galang in America, we were constantly reminded that we should learn our name and let it guide us through our lives. Respect.
My father, Miguel T. Galang, is a physician and so early in my life, I learned. Watching how he interacted with his geriatric patients, I understood the value of a person’s life, that person’s history and the struggles he or she had survived. In my mother, Gloria Lopez-Tan Galang, I learned what it was to be a woman who created her own opportunities. She’s never made a fuss over it, never called herself a feminist, but that’s what she is, making choices and running households, never giving up hope in hopeless situations. Respect yourself is what she’s taught me. And I learned about respect for a people, my people, from both my mother and father as they modeled their lives to me. We moved around a lot when I was young, but it didn’t seem to matter if we were in Peoria, Saskatchewan, or Milwaukee my parents were always organizing our communities, sharing our perspectives as Filipinos abroad and later on as American citizens. They were always speaking out for change and trying to enter dominant mainstream America but never acquiescing who we were. It was always about respect.
I’m the oldest of six children, the first American born Filipina on the Galang side. And my father is the eldest child of twelve children born in Macabebe, Pampanga Philippines. That means that I am the ate – or eldest sister of all the twenty-some cousins. Many of those cousins have children of their own. I’m somewhere in the middle to low end on my Lopez-Tan side. My mother’s the youngest girl of seven children. I can’t even begin to count how many Lopez-Tan cousins I have. Suffice it to say that when I was in the Philippines during the summer of 1999, every Sunday we’d gather at one of the elders’ houses and there were always fifty settings for cena de Domingo.
I am rooted in my family. A Galang/Lopez-Tan. I have come to understand that in this life all that matters is love. And love is where my family is. If you ask a Galang to describe a Galang he or she will tell you about the time the uncles and aunts gathered around the kitchen table in Kingston, New York shortly after the death of my Lola Nicolasa to grieve and work out all the details that come with losing one’s mother. Someone will paint you a picture of the octagon table no wider than four feet where seven sets of fists flew high to the air and then down on that table – bam, bam, bam. Someone will pull their hands to their ears, “Ang ingay naman!” and talk about how loud the Galangs are – man, woman, child. We are a loud family. We are a politic debating word defining hold nothing back cuz I love you family. Someone might say passionate. My grandfather, Lolo Miguel Senior, was the town dentist, a local politician, and a lawyer who studied for the bar simultaneously with his grown children Hector and Dolores. Their house was always a house of debate, of study, of the people. Many of us have turned out to be a variation of Lolo Miguel – principled, strong, a leader of sorts. (My lolo gave birth to my activist roots.) Mostly we’re just loud. Mostly we’re loving.
And the Lopez-Tans are loud too – but that’s because there are so many of us. My Chinese Filipino side is loud in the way children chase each other through crowds of grown ups, and elders announce the stories of the family over glasses of whiskey and wine. Generous and loving they are apt to feed you until it begins to show. We are so many we must haul long tables out onto the driveways and rent chairs to seat everyone. I think of spending long afternoons sitting with my aunts, my cousins, storytelling this and that. I think about wandering the dirt roads from Manila to the province of Macalelon, Quezon to find our ancestral home, to visit the portraits of my lolo and lola – Filemon Green Lopez-Tan Siok Ching and Clara Anca -- in a house void of furniture and rugs. In my memory, I push the heavy doors open and climb a long staircase only to find walls of dark mahogany, and vast spaces of wooden floor, and the portraits of the Lopez-Tans hung like pieces in an old museum. Lolo Filemon was a businessman from China who fell in love with Lola Clara when she was only 16. In 1999, I wandered that house with Auntie Goring, my mother’s oldest living sister and my ates and kuyas, and I listened to the stories of the family. When I consider my life as a Lopez-Tan, I think of how I am a part of a long history, of how we are prone to gather in droves to remember who we are. And for once in my life I feel the pressures of being the ate – the role model – the first – taken off my shoulders and I am one of the little cousins. It is a miracle to be surrounded by such love.
And that is what I try to take with me wherever I am. I try to gather up all that love and bring it with me so I might live in peace. My source of love comes from God, from my family and when I am far from home, from my darling kitties. I have to admit in times of crisis, of not understanding the world and its actions, of the way people can be, or the way death steals off with people we love, I am want to run home to my immediate family. Not so much to talk about it as to hold the children, or to sit in my parents’ room drinking morning coffee with them, or to take my mother to lunch.
On the weekend after September 11, I drove home for my nephew Mikey’s baptism. I spent the weekend alternating babies in my arms – my eight-month-old godchild Mia (a scrumptious girl) then Mikey, then Mia. I rocked them to sleep. I whispered “You Are My Sunshine” and “I’ve been Working on the Railroad” in their little ears. I wept a lot. They helped me gather strength to travel back to the middle of America where I sat in my house watching the world pull itself back together.
On the website you’ll see that I am a teacher, a writer, a professional, but what’s most important to me is that I am a Galang/Lopez-Tan and this colors all I do, all the choices I make as a teacher and an artist. I am a member of a family that has taught me about love and respect and the struggles that contain them. This is how I choose to live. Like my father says, “Respect for family, respect for your Maker and respect for life.” |
