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Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He founded Define American, which seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform. He also wrote that New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg that we linked to here.

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
Published: June 22, 2011

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12. . .

Read the article in the New York Times.

Even more interesting than the written confession are the comments posted in the many sites that picked up this story. Snapshot of the American mindset.

One of the narrators of Mona Simpson’s latest novel My Hollywood is a Filipino nanny named Lola.

I take Williamo to the post office, seal the envelope, and send my money home. Four hundred fifty this week. A ticker tape of dollars runs now all the time in my head. Last year, I totaled more than twenty thousand – in pesos, three times what Bong Bong earns, and he is executive Hallmark. This year it will be more because my weekend job. Besides what I send, I give myself allowance of five dollars for daily spending. Twenty five go to my private savings, so when I return home there will be some they did not know. Also, I need my account here for shoes or treats for Williamo or if one of the babysitters gets married. When you are working seven days, you need some your own money.

Read the excerpt at the author’s website.

Pop culture trivia: Mona Simpson’s earlier novel Anywhere But Here was made into a movie directed by Wayne Wang, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. Mona’s parents had a child before they married and they gave him up for adoption. The child was Steve Jobs; she thanks him in the acknowledgements. Mona’s ex-husband Richard Appel is a writer and producer for The Simpsons and he named Homer’s mother after Mona.

Photo: The 99. You can download a preview at their website.

At the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi my friend stumbled on an exhibit of a Kuwaiti superhero comic book that is sweeping the Arab world. The superheroes are called The 99, and one of them is from the Philippines. Widad—The Loving.

Budj alerted us to a CSI episode in which Langston refers to a monster out of Philippine mythology.

In the first place it’s pronounced asWANG, not ASSwang. At least he didn’t attempt “manananggal”.

I learned my Philippine mythology not from my folks, other kids, or yaya (Hala ka kung hindi mo uubusin yan, kukunin ka ng aswang), but from a copy of Maximo D. Ramos’s Creatures of Lower Philippine Mythology that I found lying around the house one day. Aswang and their ilk were called ‘viscera-eating monsters’. That book disappeared, or maybe my mom returned it to their school library. I’ve been looking for a copy forever.

Rhythm and Blues pioneer Sugar Pie de Santo was born in Brooklyn in 1935 to a Filipino father and an African-American mother and christened Umpeleya Marsema Balinton. (Umpeleya from ‘ampalaya’?) As a kid ‘Peliya’ hung out with a neighbor named Jamesetta Hawkins, who became the R&B legend Etta James. Peliya took to entering singing contests in San Franciso, and she won so often that she was asked to stop joining. The full story is here.

Thanks to Ige for the alert.

From Vulture in New York magazine:

Steve Carell has shown off his musical pipes on film many times, whether crooning “Age of Aquarius” in The 40 Year Old Virgin, or harmonizing with Dane “voice of an angel” Cook in Dan in Real Life. But does he have what it takes to play an international pop idol? Warner Bros. thinks so: Vulture has learned that the studio is negotiating to buy the rights to remake the unreleased documentary Of All the Things — which traced Dennis Lambert’s transformation from musical hit-maker to suburban Florida real-estate agent to one of the most beloved pop stars in the Philippines — as a comedic starring vehicle for Carell.

In 1972, in the middle of all that offstage success, Lambert made his first and only attempt at being a recording artist: He cut a little-heard album called Bags and Things. It sank like a stone, and was quickly forgotten almost everywhere — but not in the Philippines, where it took off; even today the record’s single, “Of All the Things,” remains a staple at Filipino weddings. . . Read the article in New York.

I have three songs by Dennis Lambert in my iPod. I got them off Juan’s iTunes library.