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1 A REPEATED TURNING  O ne will hear the joke told, eventually, though it hardly ever sounds like one. It’s almost always delivered casually, thrown out like an offhand rhetorical question, as a matter of incontestable fact. “You know why it’s always foggy in Daly City, right? Because all the Filipinos turn on their rice cookers at the same time.” This particular teller of the joke (Wally, a newspaper photographer) and I (a student of anthropology) are sitting in scuffed plastic chairs in the living room of his cramped apartment in the Pinoy capital of the United States. We are both among the 33,000 Filipino residents of Daly City, California, where one out of three people are of Filipino descent. It is a freezing afternoon in late August, and we are looking through the damp glass of the window that faces out onto the quiet suburban street. Outside the fog swirls, tugged by the wind into gentle twists of cotton, spilling over the roofs and parallel-parked Hondas. But inside, it is warm, as it does not take much time to heat up the small room cluttered with boxes of bulk food purchased from Costco, cassette tapes, photography books, and an open balikbayan box addressed to Wally’s parents in Quezon City. Wally, with a half-consumed bottle of beer in one hand, leans back in his chair after delivering the punch line, and waits for my reaction. I grin widely, because it is hard not to. I’ve always found it really funny. Wally is not the first person to tell me the joke. Almost every single one of my interviewees inevitably asks me the question about fog and Daly City. There is very little variation in the way the joke is told, whether in 2 CHAPTER 1 English or Tagalog, whether there is a pause between the question mark and the answer. There is nothing here for linguists to savor or puzzle over. In this instance, for the anthropologist, perhaps what counts most is the teller, not the tale; it is in the teller that the kind of cultural difference worth studying lies. The tale is something we all already share. And yet, despite its silliness, despite its meteorological absurdity, the joke begins to acquire a sense of both political and semi-religious gravity: it invites us to envision the peculiarly affecting image of thousands of Filipinos depressing the rice cooker switch simultaneously, about half an hour before dinner is served, in a daily culinary ritual that comes almost as naturally as breathing. And the steam collectively rises up and out, the fog becomes a unanimous, quiet declaration of ethnic presence. In this city, you may not always see the Pinoys. They may be hard at work at their jobs, they may be huddled in privacy behind their drawn curtains, they may be inside the warmth of their kitchens. But they are there. The fog proves it. By anthropological standards, Daly City may not seem particularly exciting—not the street violence of Naples, or the humid rainforests of the Amazon, or the urban grit of Spanish Harlem, or the harrowing war zones of Angola—but sometimes what seems deeply ordinary to the reader can yield the most ethnographically fascinating data. The relative placidity on the surface of Daly City is matched by the pleasant orderliness of rows, by the way the candy-colored homes wriggle along the brown spines of the Colma hills. But unlike cinematic suburbia—where the trimmed hedges are mere facades for repressed anger and American adultery (and perhaps a murder or two)—Daly City has an alternate, more fixed identity : it is known, both in the Philippines and in America, as “the Pinoy capital of the United States.” Filipinos live and work among Filipino restaurants , television shows, video stores, newspapers, and concerns that allow them to imagine a life in many ways indistinguishable from life “back home.” As the largest and fastest-growing ethnic minority in a city where the majority of the residents are Asian and over half are foreign-born, Filipinos constitute almost 32 percent of the population. In this suburb of San Francisco , with a total population of 103,621, about 32,720 Filipinos make their home. These population statistics reflect demographic patterns in the country as a whole: since 1965, after the removal of national origin quotas, Filipinos have made up the highest number of Asian immigrants admitted annually into the United States. By 1990, 1.4...

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