‘Searching for Kapwa’ Film Screening and Discussion
Oakland Asian Cultural Center
388 9th St., Suite 290, Oakland
June 22, 2024
At the Oakland Asian Cultural Center’s screening for Searching for Kapwa, a chronicle of one Oakland resident’s search for self from his parents’ Filipino homeland, I spotted a barrel man on a table selling Filipino wares, and chuckled to myself in recognition.
There’s a cheeky Filipino toy called a “barrel man” that you’ll find in plenty of Filipino novelty shops or in the homes of Filipino families. It features a crudely carved wooden figure whose body is covered by a barrel. Press a lever, the barrel lifts up, and out pops his phallus. It’s one of those if you know, you know kind of tchotchkes that help identify fellow Filipinos.
As a first-generation Filipino American, I went through my own period of searching for identity, much like what’s depicted in Searching for Kapwa. I recognize the same pattern in the life stories of fellow first-generation Americans that I’ve known. Occasional visits as a child to my parents’ country of origin, a feeling of disconnection with my roots, a childhood spent favoring my American identity, then slowly wanting to rediscover and connect with where I really came from. But where is that, exactly? My friends, whose parents immigrated from countries like Mexico or China or South Korea, have similar stories.
Kapwa is the pre-colonial Filipino word that connotes a shared identity, history, and belonging. Larry D. Lariosa, an Oakland psychotherapist who grew up as a first-generation Filipino American in San Diego, faced a personal reckoning with America during the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, twinned with the rise in Asian hate crimes. Having often shunned his Filipino roots in childhood, he grew to see the fractures of the American Dream and wanted to explore his Filipino identity.
The documentary, which he made with his longtime partner, Terrence Marcotte, weaves together interviews with his parents and friends, sociologists, and other Filipinos and Filipino Americans. He travels to different parts of the U.S. in search of the history of Filipino Americans, and makes his way to the Philippines. He uncovers the history of racism and oppression of Filipinos in America, who were in the U.S. as early as the 1500s but are rarely mentioned because, as he said, “it’s not part of the American narrative.”
The film and the discussion afterwards were both wide-ranging and enlightening, providing for all kinds of cultural touchpoints. The coverage of the colonial mentality and the embrace in the Philippines of Western culture rang true. I remember being startled as a teenager to find an array of whitening creams sold in every grocery store in the Philippines, but identified with a childhood habit that Lariosa’s friend recalled in the film about wearing a clothespin on the nose to try to make it narrower and more Western. During the post-screening discussion, an audience member thanked Lariosa and Marcotte for covering the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements.
The movie was a satisfying journey that rang true to my own. When talking about his motivation for making the movie, Lariosa said, “As an activist and brown person in America, I often feel like an imposter.” He wanted to make the film in part to stake his claim as an American and a Filipino, and show the constantly shifting narratives we discover about ourselves over time. It was fitting that the documentary began with a quote from the famous Filipino nationalist and writer José Rizal: “He who does not know where he comes from will never get to his destination.”
