AMERIKANA — CHERRY LOU SY
/Steve tells Nancy Wheeler his Winnebago summer dreams: screaming kids, a map and an open road, American as apple pie. Then later he reveals that it’s always her with him by her side in that Winnebago. My ears catch that word, Winnebago, a gold nugget stuck in the sieve. Sounds so Uncle Sam. Stranger Things season four reminds me that in the Philippines, we loved everything American and said idioms like ‘you’re the apple of my eye’ when the only time we’ve seen apples was when the Americans came in fatigues with MREs and their rations of SPAM and Hershey’s chocolate bars looking for go-go dancers in makeshift bars near American bases. Even when the American soldiers and their generals left, the places festered and now John Does from everywhere ask for virgin ten-year-old boys and girls to deflower. And sometimes we’d read news that put us all through a looking glass of circus mirrors: like how in 2014 Jennifer Laude gets murdered by a U.S. marine in Olongapo City.
Ask us where we’d like to go and we’d say Disneyland even though most of us won’t leave our small sleepy towns to go to Manila. We dream to leave everything behind. Go to where the Statue of Liberty lives. Eat McDonald’s every day. We heard the streets were paved with freedom fries and Fort Knox gold.
Steve and his Winnebago dream bring me home to that time when I looked longingly at America. Now that I’m an Amerikana, courtesy of my formerly OFW mom, the pixie dust left by reading Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, and Archie’s comics as well as the smoke and mirrors of celluloid films like Rambo and Terminator and stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Travolta, and Tom Cruise, I know better. There is no gold on the other side of the rainbow. Only the white neighbor asking us why we don’t have a flag outside on the 4th of July.
Cherry Lou Sy is a writer originally from the Philippines. She graduated from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study with a BA and received an MA in English Lit and MFA in Playwriting in Brooklyn College.
