Finding My Voice as a Filipino Through the Kundiman and Karaoke

It’s hard to negotiate how much of me is Filipino or American, but I realize this is only a question asked of me by people who seek clarity in their own definition of “American” identity.

I never did karaoke growing up. I can’t sing, and it seemed like I was the only Filipina I knew who couldn’t. Not that someone has to know how to sing to do karaoke. But the expectation, at the very least, of being genuine about singing (in front of others!) was what terrified me.

Whenever one person finished their song, the mic would be handed over. This is how it goes, like a ritual. For Filipinos, karaoke is a domestic event. Everyone sits on the couch, underneath the fluorescent lighting, while the scent of beer breath perfumes the living room, mingling with the smell of lechon from the kitchen.

When my turn comes, the fluorescents become a spotlight and I begin to sweat. Everyone else would be ready with their songs—a tito with Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” a tita with a Barry Manilow deep cut—but I don’t have a stand-by, no memorized song number to plug into the remote. I imagine I’m the only one in the family who was born without a karaoke song number to their name. I pass, as always.

Although Americans have adapted to singing karaoke, often at bars and with plenty of alcohol, karaoke felt like a distinctly Filipino tradition to me. But in my childhood attempts to be “American,” I felt removed from the activity. Though my parents immigrated from the Philippines, I was born and raised in Brooklyn. The culture of New York is the only one I’ve known and the one to which I’m constantly adapting, that feeling of being uncomfortable all the time.

When I step across the threshold into my home, there is a culture and set of values that often conflicts with the one outside the door. This is a familiar feeling for many children of immigrants. The one outside the door, in school and social circles, encouraged me to be more American, to learn their ways and music and traditions. It urged me to leave behind the culture I grew up with inside my home. It is a feeling that I’m still trying to unlearn.

It is one most recognizable for Filipino-Americans for whom there is a struggle to understand our Filipino identity while reckoning with our American identity. From a young age, I learned that Americanness was the preference of people around me. The American accent was more preferable and pleasing to people’s ears. I had to adapt to simple American customs, like the inevitable transition from bringing rice to ham sandwiches at lunchtime, to make their noses feel comfortable. It involved my parents conducting intense security clearances before I could attend a sleepover at a friend’s house. These were things that I felt I could not control, like the time I was scolded the day of a ballet recital for wearing the “wrong,” or darker colored, tights that were the color of my skin. There is often this impossible choice and false premise created by the white American system.

Then, once in a while, someone sings a song in Tagalog and I relish the words, the voice, of my people. Tagalog songs, to me, have always sounded more pleasing than English songs. It’s hard for me to listen to songs in English and separate them from the original voices that made them famous. Nice try, Tita, I think as she belts out “My Heart Will Go On,” but you’re hitting the wrong key. Filipino songs, on the other hand, bring out genuine feelings in the singer, an earnestness only Tagalog could communicate. Friends remind me of their favorites on karaoke like “Bakit Ngayon Ka Lang” and “Sana Maulit Muli,” which, respectively, loosely translate to “why did you appear only now” and “hopefully it happens again.”

Longing is an essential part of Filipino culture. We endured centuries of colonization under the empire of Catholicism, so we have made an art of wanting something we know we can’t have. Literally. It’s what drives a Filipino love ballad—what’s called a ‘kundiman.’ Under the colonial rule of the Spanish Empire from the 16th to 19th centuries, Filipinos were made to absorb many parts of their colonizers’ culture, used it to preserve our own, even as we were told to stomp it out.

The kundiman is a song of patriotism, disguised as a serenade to woo someone. It’s about love, yes. It’s about love for the homeland, for kapwa and country. Kundiman, translated literally, means ‘if it weren’t so.’ These ballads were one way Filipinos protected their identity and allegiance to their compatriots by incorporating Spanish influence into their lives.

In 1899, the Philippines was purchased from Spain by the United States. After nearly fifty years as an American property, the Philippines gained independence in 1946. Throughout, these songs prevailed, these struggles for independence and humanity. Take the song “Jocelynang Baliwag,” for example: While it may have been written for a woman and under the guise of courtship, she takes the place of the country under Spanish oppression. During the revolution, the aforementioned woman, or country, was a source of joy and inspiration to keep fighting. It is a surviving artifact of colonial Philippines, doubling as a lullaby and a protest.

The kundiman is a surviving artifact of colonial Philippines, doubling as a lullaby and a protest. 

It’s a subtle aspect of the Filipino imagination that can be found in more contemporary examples too. “Dahil Sa Iyo” was a love song written in 1938 by Mike Velarde, Jr. for the film Bituing Marikit. It was a hit in the Philippines and became even more popular in 1964 when Velarde wrote a version with English-Tagalog lyrics. The hybridized “Dahil Sa Iyo” made it to American shores, to the ears of its far-flug Filipino communities. It’s a perfectly good, likeable love song—slow and easy, perfect for karaoke. But at its core, you’ll find the enduring spirit of the patriotic kundiman.

Look at the song’s chorus: “Dahil sa iyo, nais kong mabuhay / Dahil sa iyo, hanggang mamatay / Dapat mong tantuin, wala ng ibang giliw / Puso ko’y tanungin, ikaw at ikaw rin.” In English, “Because of you, I yearn to be alive / Because of you, ‘till death (you) must realize / In my heart I know there is only you / And ask my heart, you’ll know that this is true.”

It’s no wonder it became a standard among the Filipino diaspora. It’s hard to ignore the undertones, the implied love of a motherland. The English lyrics may have made it more accessible, but I find the song is not as potent in translation—kind of like hearing your pledge of allegiance in a foreign language. But when sung in Tagalog, a language only we can understand, “Dahil Sa Iyo” feels like a promise, a pact of loyalty to the Philippines. We know what this song means to us. And as much as anyone else wants it or is eager to capitalize off it, this one is for us.

Filipinos are no strangers to hiding feelings. We love emotion. We are a romantic people, almost to a fault. Filipino soap operas contain a perfected algorithmic storyline that will make my mom cry at any episode. We also gravitate to music. Because of colonization by the United States, American popular culture dominates in the Philippines. The wistful songs of Karen Carpenter mean just as much to my mom as do ballads by Filipino musicians.

It was through my parents that I am learning to fall in love with melancholy music, particularly love ballads. We don’t have those songs at home anymore, songs like “Hanggang Sa Dulo Ng Walang Hanggan” or “Ngayon at Kailanman,” sung by Pilita Corales or Rico Puno; my parents left those records when they left the Philippines.

Those songs were memorized by my mom, who, a young girl, would listen to them on the radio with her oldest sister, Ate Lita, as they cried along to the lyrics. When Ate Lita moved away and got married, my mom’s greatest memories of her would be invoked by this music. But I, instead, would come to know these songs myself through my parents, as they hummed the tunes or when they sang under their breath while working. Though not physically, they still carried these songs with them.

At first, the music of my people asked too much of me. It asked me to digest its words and understand its meanings, all while learning to navigate the American environment that prized whiteness above all else. Even in New York City, surrounded by a diverse blend of proud cultures, an investigation into mine felt fraught and vulnerable. My Filipinoness wanted to thrive, to understand itself. My Americanness wanted to suppress it. Perhaps that’s why I took to the kundiman so well; at our cores, we were about this search for and a preservation of self.

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If I were to compare Filipino love songs to an adjacent genre in American culture, it would be to Christmas songs. The baritone of “Blue Christmas” and the melancholy of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” is almost as tragic and comforting as the kundiman. There is a tinge of sadness, yet the poetry of the lyrics always earn a smile, like yearning for someone amid separation or circumstance.

There is a recording of Nat King Cole crooning “Dahil Sa Iyo” and nailing almost every word’s pronunciation. He sang it at a concert in Manila’s Araneta Coliseum in 1961 and the Filipino audience gasped after every line. They kept expecting him to continue in English, but instead were surprised when he sang the song in its Filipino entirety. By the end, it’s hard to unhear him in Tagalog. This listening process was a slow and gentle journey towards understanding, much like the kundiman.

My fascination with the kundiman and my desire to better understand my identity may have been symptoms of simply growing up, especially in the current, increasingly nationalist, state of America. I knew that if I wanted to investigate and further develop my sense of self, it would require a whole new education. I had to go beyond the theory I was taught in the academic ivory tower of university. It required learning to question what I was taught, the process of unlearning, perhaps the hardest lesson of them all. I began to learn what it means to decolonize, to explore the culture that was a blind spot for most of my life—my own.

I immersed myself back into the music and artistic complexity of Filipino culture, from rereading Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart with a critical eye, to picking up new works like Elaine Castillo’s America is Not The Heart. During a trip to a small bookstore in Philadelphia called A House of Our Own, I found a corner of a bookshelf dedicated to the Philippines. The amount of money in my purse restricted me, but I picked up Rebolusyon by Benjamin Pimentel which sparked a series of conversations with my dad on his experience with the People Power movement in the Philippines that overthrew the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.

I went to the opening of an art exhibit this summer at C’mon Everybody, an arts space and events venue in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights, when it had works by Filipino-American artists on display. There, I met people who felt the same way I did, searching for connection to others like us. There were mostly artists who used their paintbrushes and cameras to explore their experience as Filipino-Americans. We traded stories of the Filipino communities we lived in or the lack thereof. That these creative folks worked in fields like the arts, spaces I never thought we could take up, it was stunning to me. But there we were, together.

By talking to each other and validating each other’s experiences, this sense of excitement took hold. It wasn’t just about meeting new friends, but about meeting people who truly understood each other’s upbringing, listening to the same songs, like a shared memory. To find them, I had to venture out on my own, to find and celebrate people who looked and felt the way I did. There was a shared feeling and mutual understanding of what it means to live in this space of being hyphenated Americans—being both Filipino and American—that we were just now learning exists and want to claim as our own.

It is often difficult to negotiate how much of myself is Filipino or American, but I realize that this is only a question asked of me by people who seek clarity in their own definition of “American” identity. 

Within our group texts are the layers of conversation that thrive on a base of support and survival. Right there in my pocket, I have access to friends, those miles away and people I have never met in real life, who I depend on because I know they are also coping with what it means to be a Filipino-American. It was no surprise that, when asked about their favorite Filipino songs, my new friends all referred back to the music of the ’90s. It was the music we grew up with, thanks to our parents, the music of our childhood.

It is often difficult to negotiate how much of myself is Filipino or American, but I realize that this is only a question asked of me by people who seek clarity in their own definition of “American” identity. The blend of culture and identity is already who I am and not divided into one or the other. The identity of being Filipino-American takes on so many forms. Listening to those Filipino songs, thinking of the kundiman, reminds me of a part of me that may seem hidden, but is still at the heart of who I am.

Listening to the music or singing the songs now makes me realize that we have been here this whole time. Finding people who create art, tell stories, and sing songs that speak to our shared culture and complexities allowed me to do the same. The music and the books and the art are reminders that being Filipino-American is complex and beautiful.

There is this constant longing to understand and claim an identity. In a country like America, where concepts are constantly divided into binaries, the need for concrete knowledge, especially about who I am, creates flux and confusion. But these songs of independence and perseverance have now become my own. When these two sides of myself collide, it is a shift in my own sense of being, creating yet another dimension to myself that is completely new to me, a dimension all my own. Even when others may not see it, all of me is still there.