I don’t really cook Filipino food, or eat it much either, unless I’m back at my parent’s house or a family party. I’m not entirely sure why. I like it! I just don’t make it. And I feel bad about it sometimes when I think about it too hard.

I started cooking when I was nine and the Filipino food thing probably has at least a little bit to do with how I learned, which is mostly on my own. My parents showed me the basics: my dad showed me how to cook SPAM on the stove and my mom let me cut vegetables for pancit and gave me her recipe cards for cookies. From time to time, they’d drop me little pieces of wisdom: why my dad felt soy sauce was important for fried rice, how my mom insisted on scraping all the dough. But before long I was looking things up on my own, learning from TV, from the internet, from books, from eating.

They had a similarly passive-but-encouraging attitude about my career in art. This is the area of my life where I often feel the least “Asian;” my parents never did the thing of guilting me into becoming an engineer, or a doctor, or a lawyer. Instead, they enrolled me in art classes in high school and took me to The City each spring. My dad bought me my first graphics tablet. My mom hung up my drawings. Neither of them said anything when I dropped my Computer Science major after one quarter. I still don’t really know why they did all this.

I was watching an interview with a Filipino chef once who cooked Filipino food in a less traditional style, and she was asked—as so many Asian cooks are—about the idea of authenticity in her food. The thing she said has always stuck with me: “the food I make is Filipino food because I am Filipino”; our identities are inseparable from the food we make.

But I think I also take it in a different direction: the food I make is Filipino because my parents are Filipino, and because of how they raised me, they’re in every thing I do and everything I create. Thanks, Mom and Dad.