The Filipino Nation in Daly City
1 A REPEATED TURNING ne will hear the joke told, eventually, though it hardly ever sounds like one. It’s almost always delivered casually, thrown out like an off- Ohand rhetorical question, as a matter of incontestable fact. “You know why it’s always foggy in Daly City, right? Because all the Filipinos turn on their rice cookers at the same time.” This par tic u lar teller of the joke (Wally, a news- paper photographer) and I (a student of anthropology) are sitting in scuffed plastic chairs in the living room of his cramped apartment in the Pinoy capital of the United States. We are both among the 33,000 Filipino residents of Daly City, California, where one out of three people are of Filipino descent. It is a freezing afternoon in late August, and we are looking through the damp glass of the window that faces out onto the quiet suburban street. Out- side the fog swirls, tugged by the wind into gentle twists of cotton, spilling over the roofs and parallel- parked Hondas. But inside, it is warm, as it does not take much time to heat up the small room cluttered with boxes of bulk food purchased from Costco, cassette tapes, photography books, and an open balikbayan box addressed to Wally’s parents in Quezon City. Wally, with a half- consumed bottle of beer in one hand, leans back in his chair after delivering the punch line, and waits for my reaction. I grin widely, because it is hard not to. I’ve always found it really funny.
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