Heard during folk dance rehearsal the last couple of weeks:
“I want to be a filmmaker but my parents said no.”
“I wanted to be a dancer but my mom put the kibosh on that.”
I myself wanted to be a dancer when I was a little girl. I knew of a guy who wanted to pursue painting. In both cases, our parents squashed those ideas. Thinking about that now, it’s a wonder that the Philippines produces any artistic people. We do, and in droves too. Filipinos are known as the “Entertainers of Asia.” The original Miss Saigon is Filipino, and she was also the singing voice of Jasmine in Disney’s Aladdin. You won’t find a bar in Hong Kong or Bangkok or Tokyo that doesn’t have a Filipino house band or singer who can perform every type of music. So against all odds, lots of Filipinos somehow manage to pursue their artistic dreams despite crushing parental opposition. But, and yeah, I’m gonna say it, maybe those early parental pressures are the reason why our artistic people aren’t THAT creative. Yeah we’re good singers and dancers, but we don’t have our own sound or artistic medium or dance form past the 1800s. We never grew artistically, and maybe it’s because of our mothers’ collective voices inside our heads saying, “If you’re gonna be a singer, you should at least copy what’s already successful.”
Could that be why our art forms never evolved into something fresh or modern or original? Why we never developed anything contemporary to call our own? Our biggest international celebrity right now, Arnel Pineda, is basically a cover singer.
Which is a roundabout way of me making this point: now that I’m a parent, I can totally see why artistic dreams get squashed. That life is hard and unforgiving. Of course we don’t want that for our kids. But on the flipside, I still remember the pain when my mother declared that I was done with ballet classes. And I don’t want that for my kids either.
