Magdaragat, p.20
Magdaragat, page 20
The only thing we could agree on was fried chicken. Yup, Filipinos love fried chicken. It might be one of the most Filipino things about me. It came to the point where the only way my family could get me to come to the gathering was by ordering a big bucket of love. That love continues today and it’s even inspired me to get a fried chicken tattoo on my leg.
So why am I telling you this? Well, issues regarding food made me the odd one out of the family. They started to ask me questions like, “What kind of Filipino are you? Food is so important in our culture and you don’t want to eat?”
Now remember how I went to an all-boys Catholic private school? Most of my friends were Filipino; most of the kids from grade school transitioned there. My other classmates? Well, they were from all over, but a majority were white, and a majority played hockey, And remember how I told you that we played basketball? Well, I have news for you. I completely suck at it, but I still played because I wanted to be a part of something.
If you weren’t a jock playing either basketball, hockey, football, or volleyball, chances are you weren’t considered cool. I didn’t do any of those things, but I discovered something no one else was doing. Punk rock.
Keep in mind, my Tito Bong was a banger. He schooled me in so many hair metal ways. His favourite pastime was blasting heavy metal and vacuuming the house. He would crank up Maiden, the Scorpions, AC/DC, and Metallica so loud that it would rumble the house.
Sometimes our neighbour would knock on our door and ask if we could turn down the music. My uncle, sporting his jean vest and mullet, would tell him no and continue to clean the house.
I remember when he had to babysit both my brother and me. I was about nine at the time. Metallica was playing at the old Winnipeg Stadium. It’s where the Silver City is now at Polo Park. We weren’t going in. It was summer and my Tito Bong decided to park his car across the street in the parking lot. He bought my brother Mark and me two Slurpees. We proceeded to sit on two lawn chairs while he stood up and rocked out in the parking lot.
You have no idea what kind of influence that had on me. Here was a guy who was rocking out without a care in the world and not taking it from anyone. That’s amazing. Blew my nine-year-old mind. I thought he was the coolest.
So, remember how it took me an hour to get home? I had to transfer onto another bus downtown. In the dead of winter, I had to get warm, because Winnipeg is so freaking cold. There was a record store downtown called Music City. I would go in there to warm up. But downstairs there was this creepy alternative place called the Cellar. This place used to frighten me. In fact, I was always scared of the loud music and characters coming out of there. But I was intrigued. To me, it felt like the porn area of a video store. One day, I looked in. One of the guys in the store noticed me. “Young man, is there something I can interest you in?” he asked. I looked at him and said, “Ugh.” Keep in mind that this guy had a vest covered in spikes. He gestured to invite me in. I started looking around. The music that was playing on the PA was punk. I’ve never heard this kind of music before. I was pretty blown away because it didn’t make sense to me. Nor could I understand how anyone would even like this music. But it was exciting!
In the background was a videotape of music vids playing on VHS. It was Rancid, one of the most pivotal punk bands of the 90s. They fused punk and ska. I thought, “This is amazing!”
The weird dude that I thought was creepy based on his appearance was super cool. He wasn’t the intimidating person I thought him to be. His name was Andy. He’s now a schoolteacher. But at the time, he played in the Horribles, one of Winnipeg’s most legendary bands.
I wanted to put on headphones to check out some music. There were a whole bunch of records in the player and I went to the first one. Just as I was putting the headphone on, Andy stopped me. He said, “Young man, you don’t want to listen to that. You want to listen to this.” And the best part is, the band was local. They were political punk rockers called Propagandhi. The song I listened to was called “… And We Thought Nation States Were a Bad Idea.” It’s become an anthem in my young teen life. It was the beginning of an awakening for me.
Since I had no money, Andy hooked me up with cassette tape dubs and sampler CDs.
One day, he gave me a flyer to an all-ages show. It was like five bucks and I thought this was super rad. The only problem was, who would go and check this out with me? And that’s when I decided to play the songs for my Filipino friends at school. Their automatic reaction was, “What is this? Is this like some angry white music? Don’t you like hip hop?”
Of course I loved hip hop, but this was something different and new. This had an energy to it I’d never experienced before, and this newfound love for punk now made people question how Filipino I was for not keeping to the status quo.
You also have to remember that the Internet wasn’t a thing back in 1996. You couldn’t just go Google a topic or a musical band. You had to seek stuff out by physically doing it.
So here I was with stuff I cared about and no one to share it with. It was sad. I pretty much spent a good year feeling like a loner. And that’s when things started to go wrong. Eventually, I would leave private school. Things just weren’t working out. I chose to leave.
Now I’m not knocking the private school. That experience taught me a lot of things. But going to public school completely changed my life.
For starters, I met people from all different walks of life. And there were girls, so many girls! The awkwardness I felt talking to girls went away the moment Nicole asked me if I wanted to have lunch with her and her friends. That was rad.
And remember my best childhood friend that lived across the street? Yup, I was now going to school with Derek. The best part was, he was into punk just like me. I was beginning to meet new people who were into the same things I was, and school became fun. And I was acquiring an identity.
There was no class system here. It wasn’t a place where the jocks ruled. You had everyone — jocks, geeks, freaks, theatre kids, punks, kids from all walks of life. There was racism, but it wasn’t as bad as before. And the teachers in public school were super cool to me.
When I went to private school, a couple of teachers picked on me for being different. One teacher always made sure to pronounce my last name wrong. So many people in class would laugh and mimic it. To this day it pisses me off when someone purposefully gets my name wrong. I have PTSD from it.
Another teacher made sure to make fun of the stuff I was into. Here I was, a kid in high school listening to the best music on Earth. And he made fun of me for not understanding why I’d write an entire essay on Minor Threat and being “straight edge.” If you don’t know what straight edge means, it means to abstain from drugs and alcohol. It was rebelling against the cultural norm. It was punk as fuck. It was cool to be different. Although I didn’t identify as straight edge, taking a stance on being different in society meant a lot to me.
That started this me-against-the-world attitude that took me a long time to shake. If no one understood me, screw it, I would just rebel. So I had a really hard time talking to teachers. Academically, I was pretty sound. Attitude-wise, I was a lot of trouble.
It wasn’t until one public school teacher called me on my shit. They didn’t treat me like a child, but like an adult. That started a dialogue. They were willing to listen to me. This taught me that you can trust people and give them a chance.
It made high school a lot better. I felt accepted for who I was. People come from all walks of life, in all sorts of shapes and sizes. That’s when I decided to seek out more people like me. That’s when music became a big part of my life.
For me, wearing a band T-shirt was a gigantic cultural badge saying, “This is what I’m about.” That was what was cool about the punk scene — it was usually made up of outcasts. People from very diverse backgrounds who weren’t accepted into “normal society.” It didn’t matter if you were straight, gay, Muslim, Christian, black, brown, or white. You just had to be a good person and like the music and the message.
Punk got me into vegetarianism, putting me inherently at odds with Filipino culture, which is pretty meat-heavy. Remember the local band Propagandhi that I was slightly obsessed with? Well, let me tell you something about that band. That band taught me a lot about politics and vegetarianism.
It was my eighteenth birthday, and I had just graduated from high school. To celebrate, my lola bought a KFC feast with all the fixins’. She looked at me and said “k’ain na,” making a gesture with her hand to put food in my mouth.
I turned to her and said, “Lola, I’m a vegetarian now. I don’t eat meat.”
She looked at me confused. “There’s fried chicken there. Go eat some before it gets cold.”
“No, Lola, I’m a vegetarian, no more meat for me.”
My mom looked at her and said a couple of words in Tagalog.
“If you don’t like my food, you don’t eat,” my lola said. I could almost see the steam rising from her head.
Lola was already angry with me because I didn’t eat a lot of Filipino food and this just angered her even more. For the next ten years, she tried to entice me with fried chicken, but I held my ground.
So how does Propagandhi play into this? Imagine being a seventeen-year-old watching animals being slaughtered on a constant video loop before entering the concert venue. Yes, that was a thing at punk shows growing up. That alone traumatized me enough to not touch meat for a decade.
But imagine being part of a culture that doesn’t accept your lifestyle choices. My lola nearly threw me out of the family. My parents thought it would be something I’d grow out of quickly, but they were wrong.
I was officially the outcast of the family.
I ended up moving to Ontario. I studied journalism. I also got way more into drinking and drugs, which drained my already limited income.
I loved alcohol. I loved it so much that I pretty much drank daily. That led to many bad decisions.
Alcohol is something that turns me into a “sailor on shore leave.” Trust me, it’s not pretty.
Today, I stay away from it.
My mom was hyper religious growing up. She rarely drank. However, around Christmastime, she would drink some awful sparkling champagne called Baby Duck. She’d get extra funny as the night progressed, belting out Christmas carols or dancing around with some yuletide flair.
Now let’s fast forward to my mid-twenties. After several years away at college, I wanted to bond with my mom. Before I left home at nineteen, my mom was strict and a stickler for rules.
Keep in mind these rules were self-inflicted “decency” ones. That meant no drinking.
Well, that was about to change. When I went away to college, I became a heavy drinker, amongst other things. When I returned home, I introduced my mom to red wine.
My mom can keep it under control, something I can’t do. My drinking led to other bad things, like drugs, which I’d rather not get into.
At my lowest point, I was buying a loaf of bread and going to the college cafeteria to make condiment sandwiches. Sandwiches made of relish, ketchup, and mustard, packed between two slices of white bread. Appetizing, huh? It got to a point where I lost nearly thirty pounds due to bad nutrition. My college professor expressed concern, my friends said I was turning grey, and a nurse friend was convinced that I had scurvy. It wasn’t a pretty picture.
Luckily, Christina, a close friend I knew from Winnipeg, started inviting me over for dinner with her family whenever she could. She always made sure I took something home with me.
Kids can have a lot of pride. The home situation isn’t great or maybe the family is too poor to afford food. And no one likes charity. I certainly didn’t. But the fact that my professor would bring me extra sandwiches, and that Christina would invite me over for dinner on a semi-regular basis, saved my life.
I know that many of you carry extra granola bars and go out of your pocket to help people in need. Keep doing that — little gestures can affect the way someone thinks about life.
For the next five years, I honed my craft as a storyteller. I travelled the world with bands, documenting their lives and shenanigans for terrible pay.
Until a bombshell hit me. My Uncle John got cancer.
My Uncle John was Ukrainian. My auntie Linda, or Dada, as I call her, married a Ukrainian man. Filipinos have a thing where we adopt people in our lives into our family. Since my grandpa died when I was eleven, Uncle John kinda became like my grandpa because he was the same age my grandpa would have been.
Dada and John had no children. He made sure to teach me some of the Ukrainian traditions he thought would be important, like what’s done around Christmas and Easter. It came to a point where Karpaty’s, a Ukrainian deli in the north end, knew me and always had an order ready for my Uncle John.
My aunt died of cancer when I was nineteen. Since my parents didn’t have a lot of money, she wanted to make sure I could go to college, because she said I had a gift for storytelling. This is why I decided to study journalism.
Uncle John was very close to my dad and mom. When he got sick, my dad took early retirement to help care for him, even though John was too stubborn to ask for help. That’s just how my family rolls.
When I found out about Uncle John, I packed up my life in Toronto and headed home.
The next couple of months became anchorless. I moved in with some buds, and I started working a job in a telemarketing firm.
One day my friend brought home this gigantic American Film Institute desk reference book. It was about eight hundred pages long. I just devoured it, reading it in between stints of caring for my uncle and working. It became a Bible for me.
One day, in 2005, I mustered up the courage to email a producer at the National Film Board of Canada. He responded, and we met. I told him I had a documentary idea.
The idea was to follow my wrestling-obsessed friend to meet wrestling icon Vince McMahon. He already had a history of getting pictures with wrestlers and this would be the “pièce de résistance,” so to speak.
He proceeded to tell me that I didn’t know what I was doing. At the end of the meeting, I said, “I don’t care if you believe I can do it or not, I’m still doing it.” Remember, I’ve got this me-against-the-world attitude. The punk world, which was my community, was so used to being DIY that I just expected people to say no if I ever asked for help.
As I walked out the door, he said, “Listen, this world is hard. You need to learn certain things about it. But if you show up on Monday, maybe there’s something you can learn.” And that became Monday, and Tuesday, and soon every day for about eight months.
Finally, a diversity initiative emerged to train ten filmmakers across Canada to make their first documentary feature through the National Film Board of Canada. It was highly competitive. I ended up being one of the ten chosen out of eight hundred applicants.
My parents thought that I was wasting time. They didn’t understand why I was devoting all my time to filmmaking. They wanted me to do something practical like become a nurse or go back to school.
Then, two days before I was set to leave for Montréal for a week to start workshopping my film, my dad called me and said I had to go see Uncle John right away, because he didn’t have much time left.
My Uncle John shooed me away from being by his side all the time. “You’re a young man, Jim,” he said. “You gotta live your life.”
I spent the evening with him in palliative care. He was not completely lucid because of all the pain meds he was on, but he gave me one of the most encouraging speeches ever.
My family may not have understood what I was doing, but he did. He told me that in life, people are always going to be against you. They will always bring you down. They will say that you’re living a fantasy and bring up all sorts of reasons why you can’t do it. They are going to say you will fail because of race, age, or social class. But here’s the thing. You’re a fighter. You always have been. So when you start your career making films and telling stories, you’re going to be great. He said he was proud of me.
Uncle John died the next morning.
My dad asked me what I wanted to do. Should they have the funeral now, or should they wait for me to get back?
I didn’t want my Uncle John to come back from the grave and haunt me. So I went to Montréal and started my career as a documentary filmmaker.
During that time, I met Métis filmmaker Ervin Chartrand, who remains a close friend. We both wanted to tell stories about people who didn’t have a voice, especially kids.
That’s where this project came along.
It was called “Live/Life from 95.”
It was a co-production between the Winnipeg Arts Council and CBC Manitoba. Here’s the art council’s description of the project:
The WITH ART program matches artists with community groups to collaborate on art projects that explore ideas and issues and give voice to community. The filmmakers worked with the youth of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization of Manitoba to create a hip hop video and a documentary of the process.
IRCOM, located at 95 Ellen Street in downtown Winnipeg, is a transitional housing complex and delivers social and recreation programs to newly arrived refugees and immigrants to Canada. Over 250 new immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Liberia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Russia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan live at IRCOM and access their programs — over half of whom are under the age of 18. Navigating their new environment is challenging and some youth become vulnerable to gang-related activities. The goal was to offer opportunities for more productive activities and creative growth.
The artists, Jim Agapito and Ervin Chartrand, worked with the youth over an extended period and together developed a project that reflected an artistic style and content that was relevant to the youth. The filmmakers brought in Wab Kinew and Dammecia Hall who mentored the youth in hip hop writing and dance as well as other professional artists and craftspeople to create a high quality rap video and documentary of the process. The youth were able to decide what they wanted to communicate and in what fashion, making it a unique and personal, as well as a universal, expression of life in a new land.
