How bayanihan is grounding Filipino Canadians in 'ethics of care' after Lapu-Lapu Day tragedy
Filipino resilience is ‘beautiful’ but the community still needs time and space to heal
"It was meant to be a day filled with music, dancing, food, laughter."
Rev. Expedito Farinas choked up as he addressed mourners on Sunday at Vancouver's St. Mary the Virgin South Hill, an Anglican church with a largely Filipino congregation just a 15-minute walk away from where tragedy had occurred the night before.
The Lapu-Lapu Day Block Party began as a day of "great celebration honouring our heritage, our culture, our tradition," Farinas told CBC Radio's On The Coast.
Hundreds of people sang along to artists like Black Eyed Peas' Apl.de.Ap.
Filipino vendors and food trucks lined the streets to serve the tens of thousands of people who visited throughout the day.
But in moments, the scenes of joy turned to devastation as an SUV drove into the crowd Saturday evening, killing 11 and injuring dozens more.
Chaos ensued. Eyewitness videos show bodies lying limp on the pavement, held by distraught community members waiting for paramedics to arrive.
"There are so many," one man says in Tagalog amid the cries for help, before pointing the camera to the end of the street. "It goes all the way until there."
The accused attacker, 30-year-old Kai-Ji Adam Lo, was arrested and charged with eight counts of second-degree murder, with more charges likely to come.
Dubbed the "darkest day" in Vancouver's history by interim police chief Steve Rai, the Filipino community has been gathering to mourn with the nation at large. This past week, dozens of vigils, memorials and spaces to grieve have been organized, with at least 23 in the Vancouver area alone and 10 more across the country.
That support shows how the Filipino community has been unified by a spirit of bayanihan. The term comes from the Tagalog word bayan, which refers to one's town as well as the Filipino motherland and people as a whole, and reflects communal unity and the practice of providing help without expecting reward that is inherent to Filipino culture.
It signifies how the "community is grounded in ethics of care," says York University politics professor Ethel Tungohan, whose work focuses on Filipino migration and activism.
"This is testament to the community's ability to care for each other and to recognize the importance of showing up and holding space for each other."
A community 'lifeline'
Bayanihan has been a "lifeline" for the grieving Filipino community, says Leny Rose Simbre, secretary of the board for Kababayan Multicultural Centre in Toronto.
"In the past few days I've seen how the spirit has taken shape," said Simbre, who is also chair of Migrante Ontario, which co-organized an emergency vigil on Sunday night.
For many, that has meant holding each other close as victims' families reel from the senseless violence, and comforting the survivors who witnessed the evening's horrors.
Kris Pangilinan, a Filipino-Canadian journalist and founder of one of the festival vendors, Kalamansi Collective, remembers speaking with a mother just before the incident took place.
"She came to my booth immediately after the concert," Pangilinan tearfully recounted at a Toronto vigil on Tuesday. "If I only talked to her for a bit longer, she wouldn't have been hit."
That woman was 43-year-old Christi-Ann Watkins, who was struck while in line for a food truck. She sustained a range of injuries, including a punctured lung, and remains in hospital.
As of Thursday afternoon, four of the surviving victims remained in critical condition and two in serious condition, according to the Vancouver Police Department.
By Friday afternoon, donors had given more than $2.3 million across 20 GoFundMe campaigns to support victims and their families. Beyond financial support, Vancouver chef T.J. Conwi also created a food hub for families of the victims and anyone else in need of meals.
Mourners have also gone beyond leaving flowers and lighting candles, with many opting to eat and sing together. In Toronto, one vigil ended with music, including a song called Bayan Ko, meaning "my homeland," which is often considered the unofficial second Filipino national anthem.
Partaking in food and song together is an "act of care and collective resistance," said Simbre.
Prime Minister Mark Carney used the term in his expression of condolences to the Filipino Canadian community, where he highlighted its "strength and resilience."
"[Bayanihan] captures the Filipino spirit of community, of co-operation and unity to achieve a common goal," said Carney at a press conference the day after the attack. "It's this spirit upon which we must draw in this incredibly difficult time."
'When one falls, we all fall'
While she appreciates the expressions of solidarity, Tungohan worries the Filipino community won't receive the support it needs from governments because of its perceived resilience.
"Sometimes the term 'resilience' is used to appease people," she said. "Why are we jumping into resilience mode when we need time and space to grieve?"
Tungohan further states the sense of loss is amplified by the fact that the attack happened in a space that should have been a site of "refuge, subversion, resistance and joy" for a diaspora that can feel isolated from the cultural practices of their motherland.
Last Saturday's festival commemorated the anniversary of the Battle of Mactan, where in 1521 Indigenous Philippine chieftain Lapu-Lapu defeated explorer Ferdinand Magellan, setting back the advance of Spanish colonization.
"That's why the attack was so horrendous for many of us, because it wasn't just an attack on a party," she said. "It was an attack against this moment of coming together and celebrating … in spite of all of the difficulties and challenges that the Filipino community as a whole has faced."
Speaking at a vigil outside Toronto City Hall on Tuesday, spoken word artist Patrick de Belen expressed a similar sentiment.
"Filipino resilience is ultimately a beautiful thing, but not if it prevents us from feeling heartbroken or weak, vulnerable, sad, angry," he said.
In a poem titled the garden on fraser and 41st read by a community member at the same event, Vancouver-based teacher and poet Sol Diana likewise writes, "Bitter taste on my tongue when I call my own people 'resilient.' I prefer to call us by something else: kapwa; 'a shared self' ... when one falls, we all fall. Conversely, we rise together."
Community makes grief 'more bearable': mental health experts
Cordelia Mejin, a clinical counsellor and grief therapist, says the expression of "love through practical ways, not just through emotions" is shared across many Asian cultures.
"When you have people coming alongside it almost feels like people are carrying that way together with you," said Mejin, who has offered free therapy to the Filipino community and survivors of the festival. "It doesn't erase the grief, but it actually makes it more bearable."
Eliezer Moreno, a B.C.-based grief counsellor, says resilience is about honouring what happened and finding agency through it, not burying or forgetting about the grief.
"We don't want to feel helpless. We want to feel like we have power and can choose, make choices, turn what we are feeling into something, knowing that we have strength and that we are going to be stronger together in this," said Moreno, who is Filipino.
Moreno says when other counsellors asked him to add his name to a list of professionals helping those impacted, he agreed right away.
"My mind just went to, 'This is my community. I need to help,'" he said, describing it as a way to channel his own difficult feelings into helping others.
Clinical psychologist Dr. Kenneth Miller says a healthy recovery process means embracing, not ignoring, the grief.
"Resilient doesn't mean that you don't have any pain; resilient means that you recover from your pain, that you bounce back and don't go on to develop long-term problems," said Miller, a counselling professor at the University of British Columbia.
Moreover, social supports that "make people feel seen and supported and heard," Miller adds, can help prevent long-term impacts, such as acute stress disorders, which he says are typically developed by 20 to 30 per cent of survivors of a mass killing.
"The initial period, the first few weeks following this kind of event — that's when community-level interventions become so, so, so important," said Miller.
"They are actually more important for most people than any kind of mental health professional intervention or professional mental health care."
That community care and support may be especially important for Filipinos, who are bound by a strong sense of shared culture that embraces both joy and anguish as a collective.
"It's the nature of the Filipino community to love one another," said Mejin. "When you love, then there's the grief that comes when you've lost, as well."
For his part, Moreno is hopeful that the Lapu-Lapu Day Festival and the Filipino community will endure in a way that will "celebrate our own culture and our resilience and our strength."
"It will be a mark that's kind of left on that festival. But … they are going to use that mark that was left and continue to honour those that we've lost and to show the resilience that's part of the community."
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With files from Perry Lupyrypa, Radio-Canada International Tagalog's Rodge Cultura and CBC Vancouver