Me, My Family and The Filipino Channel

Whenever my mom isn’t listening to me, you can bet it’s because she’s watching a teleserye (Filipino drama). I can tell whenever she isn’t listening to me because the pauses are longer and she says, “ooohhhhhh” for an unnecessarily long time. My mom speaks perfect English, but once when I asked her why she watches The Filipino Channel (TFC), she said, “to unwind and relax after the day. After speaking and listening to the English language all day, it is so nice to watch and listen to your own language.”

While making it to America is commonly considered a huge success and can lead to a better life for immigrant families, being a part of a diaspora is sometimes a lonely and incredibly painful experience. Many immigrants have a lengthy list of missed holidays, births of children, and funerals of loved ones, and many people go decades without returning to their homeland and to their families. While it may not seem like a big deal, TFC and similar networks from other countries provide a tangible connection to people no longer living in their ancestral homes.

Kim Chiu and Gerald Anderson in Sana Maulit Muli

I was in middle school when my parents became TFC subscribers and I fell in love with the Kim Chiu and Gerald Anderson love team (love teams are actors and actresses who play couples on several TV shows). My family kept TFC on in the background and it didn’t matter if I had homework or if I was in trouble, my mom would always let me watch TFC with her. When I was younger, my family used to visit the Philippines every 3-5 years, and I was always a little surprised how easily I could pick up Tagalog and remember words I never used in daily life. I now know that my nightly teleserye viewings provided almost two hours of daily exposure to Tagalog.

In “How I Learned to Stop Erasing Myself”, Durga Chew-Bose writes:

“What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how plenty of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I’ve only experienced through photos, visits, food. It’s not mine and yet, I get it.”

Members of my family and I in 2013

While I lived in the Philippines as a young child and continue to visit periodically, TFC gave me a tangible, current connection to my culture. My cousin Paustine, who is first generation Asian Canadian, said TFC makes her “less disconnected to the lifestyle and overall culture because watching Filipino shows made me understand what people go through [and] watching Filipino TV makes me more comfortable going back to the Philippines.” Like my cousin, TFC kept me current with Philippine news and culture. I began listening to music by Filipino artists like Yeng Constantino and Sarah Geronimo. The game shows and dramas that showed up on televisions in the Philippines also showed up on my television in California. TFC gave our multinational family in the US, Canada, and the Philippines something to bond over when we were leading drastically different lives. When my family and I visited the Philippines and I would hang out outside with my cousins, my grandma would send someone outside to call me in whenever our TFC shows were on so we could watch them together. As someone who only saw her grandma every five years or so, it is important to me that I spent those hours with her before she died. Paustine points out that access to TFC gave her something to talk to our cousins about year-round, instead of just during birthdays and holidays. It seems unlikely that a network could bring together families that are thousands of miles apart. But that is exactly what TFC does.

Enrique Gil and Liz Soberano in Forevermore

We know that representation matters because our stories matter. Shows in the Philippines express what matters to us as Filipinos. So many Filipino shows revolve around familial struggles with poverty and tell the story of families like mine who worked together to provide for each other. Recently, I’ve been watching “Forevermore,” a romance (like most TFC shows) that’s also about a community of farmers who are trying to keep their land from being taken by developers. Interwoven in the teleserya are mothers who leave their families to become Overseas Filipino Workers and give them better lives but are physically and sexually abused, children who put their communities and families before themselves, neighbors who become families and take on each other’s problems, and people who take pride in their land and each other. The show includes young women who just want to go to school, make a better life for their community, and create a world where their parents don’t have to work so hard. The Filipino Channel and shows like this remind me of our values: love and dedication to family and community – everything else is secondary. So when I watch TFC I feel a lot of pride in who I am, who my family is, who my ancestors were, and the country my family hails from.

When I watch TFC, I am filled with a lot of emotions - almost all positive ones. But when I recently asked my mom, she said that TFC makes her feel homesick whenever she sees families getting together for picnics and holidays, especially Christmas. Since we first got TFC in 2004, my mom has complained about how many commercials there are and how much the subscription costs, and she always says that she is going to cancel our subscription. But years from now, just like tonight at 8pm, you can find her sitting on her couch watching TFC, probably ignoring my call.

#thefilipinochannel #teleserye #filipinodramas #overseasfilipinoworkers #asiandramas