I’m heading home for the holidays and every time I return to the state I spent my formative years, I feel tense. I have flashbacks of the daisy orange that cloaked the town during football season, the accent that made me cringe when pronouncing my Filipino last name, and the looks on parents’ faces when friends brought me around. It doesn’t help that on the drive down to the South, I’m confronted with the occasional Confederate flag, a symbol I first learned of when I was 13 and to this day still fills me with the sense that I’m entering a place where I am not welcomed.

In recent years, I decided I was tired of feeling resentful and embarrassed for my upbringing in Tennessee. As a child I, along with my sisters and cousins, bemoaned our family immigrating to Tennessee. We imagined that an upbringing in heavily Filipino populated California or New York would be better. We wanted to feel less isolated, for the bullying to stop, and to feel connected to a people that our parents taught us to never forget. It was seeing the August 2018 Time Magazine with Stacey Abrams on the cover titled, The South Issue, that started this change of attitude. In reading the title of Jesmyn Ward’s article, Loving a Place that Doesn’t Love You, I was emotional for two reasons. It immediately spoke to my experiences and revealed that someone understood the complicated feelings of home, but also, I was shown my blindspots. This sentence alone would have me widen my eyes, aghast by my childish complaints of being the only Filipinos in Tennessee. (By the way, a 2010 US census reported that there are 178,874 Filipinos in my hometown of Knoxville.) Isolation, discrimination, and bulling were the problems of our first generation American family, but Ward put those problems into perspective.

It is difficult for [people] to understand why a successful black woman would choose to return to the South and, worse yet, to Mississippi, which looms large in the public’s imagination for its racist depredations, and rightfully so.

The rest of the paragraph would remind me that my family does not have the generations and generations of cruel American racist experiences. In fact, many in my family would probably not be able to recognize it because assimilation was our saving grace. Ward’s article ends with all the beautiful, joyful, and good of her hometown. It’s like a very honest love letter, revealing what it takes to learn from the past and build a solid relationship. I take her words with me as I make my way back home, “. . .this place that I love more than I loathe.”

Yes, I love Knoxville, Tennessee. There is a pain when I say that, but I’m learning to pay attention to that pain. I first felt the pain when I was living in Utah. I fled my southern hometown for the mountain west. How very Mormon of me! I was a barista and a drive-through order came through all the employees’ headsets. I smiled to myself, the familiarity of an accent I fought to never have myself hit me with homesickness. The customer made their order and ended it with, “Thank you ma’am.” My heart panged again with homesickness. What followed next were my co-workers saying, through the headset for all the workers to hear, that the Southern accent was stupid. This stereotype is why I reasoned it would be weird for a Filipina to speak this way. I felt the pain in the jokes they made, but I pushed it away when I saw my hypocrisy.

A week prior to my travels, I felt that pain again. Instead of pushing it aside, I watched a Dolly Parton documentary, Here I Am, on Netflix. Growing up an hour outside of Dolly’s hometown of Sevierville, I was oversaturated by all things Dolly Parton. I never saw myself in country music and in the life it represented. With Dolly being the icon of that music, I kept my distance and judged for not feeling welcome. Yet, my family were recipients of Dolly’s Imagination Library. I credit my love for drawing to the children’s book I had as a child and I have volunteered in reading programs for children. I would say Dolly did make an impact and I could’ve used her songs in my teenage years. In hindsight, there was a relatability there.

So these are the little things I’m doing to remind myself that Tennessee isn’t just my difficult upbringing and it’s troubled history. Tennessee is my love for fried okra. Tennessee is the Sunsphere and a beloved downtown I spent numerous days at as a teenager. It’s Payton Manning drunkenly spilling beer on me (true story). Tennessee is the first time I had fried green tomatoes. Tennessee is being called honey and sweetheart by the worker who took my order. Tennessee is hiking Mount Leconte and looking out over the Smoky Mountains. Tennessee is fishing for crawdads in a nearby creek. It’s having my first broil at my best friend’s house and his mom letting me call her mom. It’s my elementary teacher who found a way for me to go to Washington DC when my family couldn’t afford it. It’s my pair of red cowboy boots gifted by a best friend simply because she thought of me. It’s being told by my sister (who btw, confronted the KKK) that people are fighting for change. 

Recently, my Idahoan sister-in-law told me she hears my southern accent come through on occasion. I’m happy that my determined fight to flee and reject didn’t quite stick. There’s room for change and progress there in Tennessee and here within me.

Are you heading home for the holidays? Does home bring up complicated feelings for you?

This outfit is made up of a Gigi Pip hat, Everlane pants and western boots, a coat from Rent the Runway, and a Dolly Parton tank bought at a local shop. I feel like a very chic Dollywood or Dolly’s Stampede attendee. By the way, did you know Dolly changed the name of her dinner show theater from Dixie Stampede to Dolly’s Stampede? The simplest changes.