“Do you know what kind of random things they were shooting out of their pussies?!”

I found myself drinking with a group of (predominantly white) backpackers at a bar, listening to their trashy tales of partying and the infamous ping pong shows in Bangkok (for the uninitiated, it’s a popular sex show where, according to Wikipedia, “women use their pelvic muscles to either hold, eject, or blow objects from their vaginal cavity.”

Laughter. Ridicule. Squeals of shock and intrigue. And then…

“Hey Justine, where are you from again?”

I could feel the discomfort and anger rise up inside of me as I knew the implications of that question. What kind of associations were they making because of the color of my skin, the texture of my hair, the features of my face? Why did they ask me that in this very moment?

My migration story begins at the young age of four. Like many new immigrants to Canada, my family and I moved to an apartment in Scarborough when we first arrived from the Philippines. As of the latest census, more than half of Scarborough’s residents were born outside of the country with visible minorities making up 76.6% of the population.

After a few years, we moved to a bigger home in Markham, a suburb outside of Toronto that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in this city and spent the majority of my life there. 

I’ve always felt immensely fortunate to have grown up in such culturally rich communities with friends who were born elsewhere or whose parents’ or grandparents’ were born elsewhere. After-school hangouts at their homes always made for a delicious time with diverse dinners and exposed me to a beautiful medley of accents from around the globe. I credit my early upbringing with much of the work that I do now with Living Hyphen.

But somewhere along the way, I got lost in a sea of whiteness.

When I lived in the Philippines for the first four years of my life, my parents insisted that we speak English at home. They wanted me to learn the lingua franca and knew it would be essential for my success in a globalized and westernized world.

Then when we moved to Canada, my parents insisted that we only speak Tagalog at home. They would refuse to speak to me if I spoke or replied to them in English. My parents were wise and knew that I would easily lose my native tongue in the face of an almost exclusively English-speaking environment.

I grew up in Markham, a suburb just outside of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in a culturally rich community where the “visible minorities” were, in fact, the majority of my daily life.

There was a sizeable population of Filipinos in my high school, many of whom were newcomers to the country. They stuck together and often congregated on a small bridge on the second floor of our high school. And because of that, the bridge was dubbed “The F.O.B. Bridge”, meaning the “Fresh Off the Boat Bridge”.

The students in my high school looked down on those Filipino newcomers, criticizing them for only hanging out with each other and for always speaking Tagalog. “Don’t they know they’re in Canada now?” “How are they going to learn English if they only talk to each other?” I can still hear the murmurs. I can still see the eye rolls.

Back in the fall of 2017, I was hired to promote and takeover* the Instagram account of Parkbus, a transportation service brand that connects city dwellers to various national or provincial parks encouraging Canadians to spend time in the great outdoors. A friend of mine and I got a complimentary ride to a park of our choice plus a couple of hundred dollars, and in exchange, we would promote Parkbus’ service on our own personal Instagram accounts while also sharing Instagram Stories of our day on Parkbus’ brand account.

As someone who loves to go hiking but lives in downtown Toronto without access to a vehicle (at the time), Parkbus is actually a godsend (and no, they’re not paying me for this endorsement which comes years after that contract, though I’d gladly welcome that!) Parkbus provides accessible rides, connecting those who live in the city to hiking trails, campgrounds, and canoe access points, which are otherwise difficult to get to without a car or through our limited public transportation. And so I was more than happy to engage in this partnership.

When I got to Rattlesnake Park, our park of choice, we began taking photos and videos of our experience. But before sharing anything online, I thought it would be important to start off the Instagram Story with a land acknowledgment. It didn’t feel right to be sharing this experience of the beautiful nature around us without recognizing the history of the land we were on.

To be completely honest, I didn’t know much about Indigenous history in what we now know as Canada at this point in time, but I knew, in a general and vague sense, that we were on colonized land. “Reconciliation” was a concept that was being talked about more and more in my social and professional circles. I had seen maybe one or two land acknowledgments read out loud at events, and I thought that it was a powerful gesture.

Over the last decade, I have had the greatest and deepest education of my life. These were not the years I spent learning in Canada’s formal public education system or even my post-secondary academic experience. No, the greatest and deepest education of my life has been self-directed with the guidance of many incredible grassroots educators, activists, and everyday people across different intersections of identity whose lived experiences are not currently acknowledged or deemed “legitimate” or worthy by our existing colonial educational institutions.

The movements of the last decade—Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, Mauna Kea, the Climate Strike, among many, many others — have given me a vocabulary I did not have growing up, that many of us did not have growing up. The #MeToo reckoning and the Black Lives Matter movement, most especially, forced me to reassess so many instances in my life that have always stayed with me for reasons I could not, at the time, understand or vocalize.

These are times that I have been wrong or that I myself have been wronged.

I want to hold space for these precious and painful moments that have been so fundamental in shaping who I am today. I’m starting this publication to look at what I once thought and what I now know and to try to bridge the gap between these two moments in my life. I’m creating this space as a way to move beyond the discomfort of failure in our conversations around social justice and anti-oppression and instead, normalize failure in our discourse. I’m writing these stories as a way to hold tenderness and compassion for an older version of myself who did not know better, but who knows now and is still continuing to learn and unlearn.