I grew up the youngest of four in a Filipino family, the only child to be born in the United States. Among relatives I was often referred to as “the little American citizen.” My formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area gave me a sense of being “just like everyone else,” perhaps at the cost of my cultural heritage.

Then, along the way, I experienced a kind of cultural identity crisis. Two professionals I worked with and respected encouraged me to be proud to be a woman of color, to be proud to be a Filipina. But I just couldn’t grasp what they meant: How do you learn to be proud of your cultural identity when most of your life has been so removed from the motherland?

Before I can explain how I came to answer to this question, I must first describe the evolution of my American identity.

I was eighteen years old and a first year college student when I was raped by an acquaintance. Like many rape victims, I harbored secrecy and anguish about the assault until sharing my story began to help me label the issue and better address its after-effects. Eventually, I decided to pursue a disciplinary case within the university. I didn’t anticipate, however, that it would take nearly an entire academic year and every ounce of my emotional resilience to face an administration so unwilling and so unprepared to handle the situation.

An unexpected outcome of the case was that I became increasingly public with this “private” experience through my involvement with a rape prevention program on campus. I shared my story widely with others both on campus and in the community – including junior highs and high schools, intercollegiate conferences, other universities, and as part of a nationally syndicated television show.

I also developed my own sense of personal freedom and found my own justice by bringing this otherwise silenced issue to light. I learned that the power of my voice could generate more dialogue and understanding. Most of all, I felt an overwhelming sense of obligation to help other young women and men avoid similar circumstances in the future. Ultimately, I found that speaking publicly about my rape galvanized my identity as an American, as a woman, and as a feminist.

To a certain extent, I began to speak out about my rape to defy my cultural background and the assumptions that Asian women are submissive and quiet. Shockingly, I never really thought about other Asian women, or Filipinas in particular, who might have their own history of sexual violence and survival to tell. Not until I heard the personal story of an elderly Filipina did I begin to make vital connections between my work, my identity, and my cultural roots.

As an unexpected early graduation gift, a nonprofit organization called Gabriela brought a former “comfort woman” to speak on campus. She was a small woman, less than five feet tall, but by no means frail in spirit. Age-wise, she might have been in her seventies or eighties. At first glance, she reminded me of my paternal grandmother. Listening to her tell her story in the Philippine language of Tagalog created an instant connection between us, and made me feel respect for whatever she had to say. It was as though I’d finally reached a place that reconciled my different worlds of experience.

With the aid of an English interpreter, I learned for the first time about the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II, and how many women were taken away to sexually service, or “comfort” the Japanese soldiers. Rape was not a one-time occurrence for her, but an ongoing form of torture she somehow managed to survive. In the mid-1990’s, increasing numbers of former comfort women like her began sharing their stories publicly to raise awareness and to seek restitution from the Japanese government.

For me, this lecture was a watershed moment when I realized on a deeply personal and cultural level that I was not alone in the work I was committed to doing. There were women much older than me, women living oceans away, who were also turning the tide by breaking the silence and dismantling cultural stereotypes. Here, my story, my voice is one of many in a necessary effort to make the private more public, to talk about the inhumanity and the injustice of sexual violence.

Additional resources:

Comfort Women Speak : Testimony by Sex Slaves of the Japanese Military (Includes New United Nations Human Rights Report)
by Sangmie Choi Schellstede (Editor), Soon Mi Yu (Photographer)

The Comfort Women: Japan's Brutal Regime of Enforced Prostitution in the Second World War
By George Hicks

Asian Women’s Resource Exchange

Emari Dimagiba Lavine is the result of 16 years of Catholic education. Raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, she is the youngest of four children in a Filipino family. With experience in radio broadcasting, rape prevention education and adolescent reproductive health advocacy, she has devoted her life to increasing interpersonal communication and social understanding about sexuality. She has been writing in a journal since age eight, and appreciates learning about new music. She lives with her husband and two cats in the Twin Cities.

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