Clouds of intellect

Last Thursday, I met an interesting Filipino-American (wait hold on. Can I say American-Filipino if I feel more American, which I don’t; I feel completely balanced, but I’m just saying. Or is that politically incorrect?). He is a Professor here at Stony Brook University and he was offering a class on literature of people of color with a gender/queer critical lens. “¡La mejor combinación!” I thought. I wanted to take this course but it conflicted with one of my teaching classes. My goal in meeting this professor was to get him to change the time slot of the course.

So I went into his office.

Knock, knock. “Excuse me, Professor _______? My name is Bernadette Tinio. I’m an English major in the English teaching program. Actually I’m not one of your students, but I heard you were going to be teaching a literature of people of color class next semester and I was wondering –”

I abruptly stopped babbling and interrupted myself by asking, “Are you, by any chance, Filipino?”

“Yes, I was just about to ask you that.” I already knew he was Filipino; I did my research beforehand.

“Yeah, I am too. I figured maybe if you saw that my last name was Tinio . . .”

And so that’s how our meeting started, which lasted for almost an hour. We discussed the course he was going to teach and if he was going to teach it again (at a more convenient time for me) in the future. Realizing my deep interest in that subject, he recommended books that he was using for his class. They are mostly about finding one’s identity, exploring one’s sexuality and how one is perceived by others based on that aspect of his or her self. Not to mention a cultural/immigration lens added to it. There’s a lot going on, which make those books interesting reads!

We got into personal stuff too – like family.

“Do you say Tito and Tita and Lolo and Lola. Kuya and Ate’s?" I asked with genuine interest. We had already established, by then, that we were both first generation immigrants, our parents having migrated here from the Philippines and our being born here in America.

His nephews call him Tito Jeff.

“Yeah. I actually have a nephew who’s only about five or six years younger than I am. It’s funny because he asks me, ‘so do I have to call you Tita Bern?’ I tell him, ‘No, just Bern, no Tita. Too weird.’”

Not wanting to be rude and selfish, I think some time during our conversation, I crossed upon his name and asked if he would prefer it with a Filipino accent or an American one, for he was indeed half white, half Filipino.

With a Filipino accent it is, then.

In keeping with the subject of names, I put my last name up for dissection and discussion. “T-I-N-I-O. Tinio. I think Filipinos would pronounce it as if it were Tiño – with the tilde over the ‘n’ like it is in my middle name, which is my mom’s maiden name, Castañeda.”

Then, to show I have at least a basic understanding of the Philippines’s origins, I quickly added, “The Spanish have a very big influence on Tagalog. I realize when I ask my parents how to spell car in Tagalog, they say it’s ‘kotse,’ whereas in Spanish, it’s ‘coche.’ When both are said with a casual, native tongue, they sound almost completely the same. Just different ways of spelling it.”

Suddenly, this popped in my head and out of my mouth: “Professor, I have a question: when did the Philippines become an American colony?”

He opened up the wikipedia page. Around the 1940s. Coming back to my last name, we figured it might have been spelled ‘Tiño” before the Americans started to influence them and change it to ‘Tinio.’ And then that name stuck, as if the Americans stitched it on our skins and we started to sport it like a tattoo.

As I left his office by the end of the random meeting, I was dazed and filled with Filipino/queer/linguistic clouds. I didn’t know what time it was and for a few minutes forgot my plans for the day, my classes. To say the least, that was a very enlightening meeting that had a deep impression on me that only further fueled my interest in the subjects discussed.

That was definitely the highlight of my day.

Oh, and no, I didn't get him to change the time slot of the course. But, I did get to know him and he wants to keep in touch. That's a good thing!