Founder, Women of Silicon Valley & Software Engineer, Google Maps
“My Lolo passed away this year, and I realized we’d never get to go to the place he’s from, Cebu, and share it together. I realized how integral sacrifice is to the Filipino experience. My Lolo and Lola sacrificed life in the Philippines, a future sharing the same childhood places as their children and grandchildren, for job opportunities in the United States. Then my dad sacrificed years of long, often 12-hour, work days to put me and my brother through college. So my success — my Stanford Computer Science degree and my Google software engineering job — are just the sum of all the sacrifices made before me, aggregated from generation to generation. And yet, I think so often about how no matter how much success I aggregate, nothing can “buy me out” of being treated like a Filipina in this world. When I visited Hong Kong, a Chinese family mistook me for their house servant and ordered me to wipe down their dirty shoes at the mall. When I moved to Italy for work, I was always assumed to be a housemaid, or sometimes a prostitute, and was propositioned for sex multiple times while walking home at night (in a pantsuit mind you). The sad truth is I’m lucky; millions of Filipinos sacrifice life with their own families at home to take care of other, wealthier families abroad, often in places where they are treated subhuman or trafficked. This informs a lot of the “sacrifice” I want to make when I’m older — that is, building a rigorous software platform to help overseas Filipinxs find secure, vetted work.”
