(by Carlos/Giancarla Ross)
My story begins with an old, faded photo tucked away in an album, not the kind you have on social media or in a file folder on a computer, but the old, physical kind, back when Kodak was ubiquitous and not a distant memory.
It’s a sharp-looking German shepherd on a grass lawn, maybe some palm trees in the background, but everything presumably originally lush green, though the photo itself has long since faded to inadvertent sepia. I don’t actually ever remember seeing this dog in the flesh, but I do remember the single word, in all capital letters, handwritten on a corner of the photo.
“Oligarch”.
Who the hell names their dog Oligarch?
If I’d been an adult seeing that the first time, that would’ve been my question, but we’ve had that photo in our albums as long as I can remember, and this is basically concurrent with seeing the paternal visage of Ferdinand Marcos as “my president”. No, not Bong-Bong, his dad. The dictator.
I have fainter memories of my older cousins watching giant robots on teevee. A road trip through dust-choked roads lined with food stands and banana trees and garish jeepneys and tuk-tuks, up to the cool air of pine-covered mountains — not the Sierra Nevada or the Rockies or even the Guadalupes, but a place called Baguio, where you would have to drive up a long canyon past a giant concrete bust of President Marcos (long since demolished) and then a gigantic lion’s head, because I guess Baguio is known for lions? (It isn’t. The only lion I ever saw in the Philippines was in some picture book version of the Bible showing Daniel with the least scary-looking lions ever. It might have been Precious Moments. That memory is a bit hazier.)
I remember seeing equally faded photos, some of them legit black-and-white, of “running the rapids” at Pagsanjan — “they filmed Apocalypse Now there”, I was helpfully told many years later, even though I was still at that point too young to have seen or appreciated that film.
But yes. Oligarch.
A word that, for the first decade or so of my life, just meant, “that big dog in the one photo album”. A word otherwise bereft of meaning and filed away, as the father figure in the background of my young psyche changed from my barely remembered actual father, to, uh, I guess, proxy-dad Ferdinand Marcos, to the every-bit-as-nebulous “father figure” I’d get when I was four, a different president named Reagan, as we traded our nice home with the garden in Pilar Village for the choking smog at nightly gunfire of mid 80s LA — our own “Morning in America”, if you will.
I got into dinosaurs like every little boy, and then I wanted to be an astronaut like Mrs. McAuliffe, until she blew up on our teevee, and then a fighter pilot like Tom Cruise, before my eyesight got terrible. I played with the Voltron lions and watched Robotech, and then my mom got a job at the concrete company and she joined the company bowling league, and I thought the computer guy was really funny so I told mom to go talk to him, a conversation that has so far lasted thirty-seven years. (She took his surname a few years later, and so did I.)
I was a smart, curious kid, then. They called me gifted, and I breezed through everything because school was easy. The hardest part of going to school in Atwater Village in the mid-80s was knowing when to duck behind the concrete planters to avoid the return fire at the drive-bys. The second hardest part was not getting caught playing with the ditto sheets. Sorry, Gabriel.
Soon enough, my folks decided LA wasn’t a good place to raise a “gifted kid” and got a transfer to Arizona. Packed into my stepdad’s 1984 Nissan Sentra? That photo album. With Oligarch the Dog.
Even when I saw that word in my study lists for spelling bees — and I was a good spelling bee kid, even made state, I still never made the connection. It was just a word to memorize, I was in junior high, I still just didn’t have the context to know what that meant, how could I? Just. Oh, that’s a real word. Of course it is. Okay.
Just another tool with which to eventually win some academic competitions. Unfortunately, oligarch never showed up for me as a spelling bee kid. Euphemism and roan did, serving as proof that it’s never the words spelling bee kids get right that we remember, but the ones that keep us from winning that set of the Encyclopedia Britannica that would’ve been cool to have. And I was better at the Geography Bee anyhow. That was the first time I won money from Alex Trebek, and it wouldn’t be the last.
I was not a particularly progressive kid, because other than a particular, deeply unfortunate episode that forever kept the standard Filipino Catholicism from taking root, I was otherwise far too deep in my books, video games, and otherwise pleasing my family to be really truly aware of the importance of my place in the world. I was special. I was smart. I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it, so I just followed whatever goalpost was laid before me, and I had no way to understand my parents also had no idea what to do with my intelligence and curiosity and hyperactivity and complete lack of focus because in the late 80s and 90s, smart Asian kids didn’t have AD(H)D and terms like neurodivergence were simply not on the radar.
Besides, by this point, I was “as white as my dad” so why should I care about things like privilege and race and socioeconomics? Other people’s lives were affected by other people’s choices right?
There was no single epiphany, but I’m sure seeing that old photo album with good old Oligarch jogged a thing or two, as I started out on my real educational journey, going to Arizona State with absolutely no idea of the ensuing twelve years of meandering blunders that would leave me destitute and damn lucky to escape with a bachelor’s degree that I’ve only really ever used as a placeholder in a resume. What I did know was …
… wait a second. Why did we have a dog named Oligarch?
Why did we have pictures of Ferdinand Marcos in the house, and who the heck was my birth father, really?
Yeah. So. Oligarch was his dog. That academic-looking dude with the gray hair, in one or two pictures, all but forgotten in the ensuing years being the happy stepchild to funny computer guy.
Why didn’t he come to America with us? Why did he never once call? Why did it take until my third year of college for me to find out that he’d died the year prior?
Oligarch wasn’t just a German Shepherd!
Oligarch was my father.
No, not like that! Gee, phrasing!
More to the point: I was unknowingly the child of an oligarch.
When I was younger, I remember being told I was a “love child”, and I just thought, oh, Mom really loves me, but that, while absolutely still true to this day (love you Mom!) is not what that phrase means in Filipino culture. You see, when a guy loves a girl … but he’s already married to someone else … love child is a euphemistic way of saying I was a bastard. Illegitimate. Out of wedlock.
The scandal wasn’t even that my father had a mistress – because he was a high-ranking executive at San Miguel Beer Corporation (don’t be fooled, it’s not just beer, it’s basketball leagues, it’s shopping malls, it’s banking, it’s basically the most powerful corporation in the Philippines, even more so now than back then!). Powerful men with mistresses in a developing country? That’s almost a cliche.
The scandal was that my mom came from a nicer family than his wife.
Seriously.
My mother’s line, it turns out, gave rise to a Philippine revolutionary general, several provincial governors, models and movie stars.
My father’s line, two Philippine revolutionary generals, the opera singer who first recorded what is now the national anthem, provincial governors, a supreme court judge, and a certain Imelda Romualdez Marcos … apparently a first cousin once removed of my father.
Yeah. That Imelda. The wannabe Evita with thousands of shoes and her own nominally disapproving wink-wink-nudge-nudge biographical musical, rocking Ferragamos in the presidential palace while millions toiled in filthy slums that would flood out seven times a year from typhoon surge.
And my mom knew. I just never asked.
For all the questions I would pose about the world — what is that bird called, why does that mountain have a funky name, how do you make such good chicken adobo, it took me until the cusp of adulthood before I really even started thinking about where I came from, why I never wanted for anything, what my place in this world really was, or how I got there (and, I don’t just mean by Northwest Orient 747-200 back in 83).
I had never asked my mom why our photo album had a picture of a German Shepherd named Oligarch.
I just accepted it, just like I accepted heteronormativity and fiscal conservatism and the basic tenets of Christianity and the fact that we were “better off immigrants” because we made better choices than the other brown and black people.
Of course, none of that was ever true.
Even being a love child of an oligarch put me in a far, far better place than the millions of my own countrymen living in poverty so dire, Sally Struthers was asking me to spend “a cup of coffee a day” to save my own (more distant and less fortunate) cousins. I had the luxury of having a plane ticket to come to America, I didn’t have to brave the open seas on an overcrowded boat, or dodge la migra, because we were sponsored, we already had our anchors in place. People who truly struggle are not put in positions to invest money in defense industries, to potentially send their child to the Ivy League, to move to Hawaii when that adult child insists on paying most of their own way to college because of a misguided zeal for American individualism and libertarianism. (No, I don’t blame my folks — their choices and life are theirs, and they are resigned to the fact that we are now utterly and deeply incongruent in politics and religion, but we do still deeply care for each other all the same.)
I was indoctrinated into the American dream because I was taught I was meant to Be Somebody, not just because I was smart, not just because I was talented, but because, I think somewhere in my psyche, I was supposed to live up to being The Child of An Oligarch, and the world belongs to oligarchs. And why shouldn’t someone who was born to be special succeed – no, excel – in the meritocracy that is America?
Except no.
I was following my free will no more than that German Shepherd ever could. I was just floating along in that delusional fantasy world until bit by bit, it corroded itself in the face of hard reality.
Heck, my father burnt himself out trying to keep up with the expectations of his rivals and allies, and died young of lung cancer, leaving behind his three other children, his wife … and the other “wife” and child who got away. He should have just been an economics professor, spending his life serenading his love to the one he loved, but he was just … a dog named Oligarch.
I don’t have to live like that.
Sure, I’ve had more false starts than I can count. Maybe this, too, might be a false start, or maybe I’ll keep at this storytelling gig, to go along with the social services career I’ve built with the help of dear friends and mentors and, yes, family.
But if I am to be accorded some amount of privilege in this world, then it’s my responsibility to use that to lift people up, not just me, and certainly not just to perform fancy human tricks for the benefit of the hereditarily and unfairly powerful.
Ask the questions. Examine. Learn. Refuse to be complicit.
After all: I’m no one’s pet.
I am no Oligarch.
Stories That Are All True 