Words by Samantha Radaza • September 16, 2026

Non-fiction • Interviews/Features

There is a particular kind of loneliness that blooms from being told you don’t belong to the very identity you were raised inside. Not by strangers, but by your own people. Painter, entrepreneur, and cultural advocate Michael “Mikey” Espinosa knows this feeling intimately. Born and raised in London to an Ilonggo household, he spent much of his childhood straddling two worlds and never quite landing in either. It took a Korean hanbok, of all things, to help him finally arrive at himself.

“I’m primarily an artist but also work a lot with Korean culture,” Mikey tells me, by way of introduction. It sounds simple enough, until you learn everything that phrase is quietly carrying.

Mikey’s earliest years followed a familiar diaspora rhythm: raised in the UK, visiting the Philippines annually until age eleven, holding onto his heritage the best way a child can. In primary school, Filipino faces were scarce, roughly four out of three hundred pupils, and when classmates guessed he was Chinese, he corrected them without hesitation. Being Filipino was, at that stage, uncomplicated. A fact, stated plainly and proudly.

Secondary school promised something sweeter though: other Filipinos! Finally, a built-in community, he’d thought. Instead, he found distance. The other Filipino students had already formed their own circle, mostly hailing from Pangasinan, already fluent in each other’s shorthand. When Mikey spoke, he was quizzed like an outsider auditioning for a role he thought he already had. Asked to say “how much” in “Filipino” (by which people often mean Tagalog), he offered pila. Wrong, they told him, it’s magkano. Asked for the word meaning “go somewhere,” he gave kadto. Wrong again, they said. It’s punta.

What he was offering wasn’t wrong actually. The words came from Philippine languages: Hiligaynon and Bisaya (Cebuano). But the vocabulary was from a different island group entirely, the Visayas. Instead of acknowledging , he was informed he wasn’t Filipino enough, that he came from “that rubbish place.” At an age when identity is still being assembled piece by piece, being handed that verdict by people who looked like him did lasting damage.

While conversing with Mikey, a theory starts to surface, one he arrives at gently but firmly: the discrimination he faced wasn’t really about him. It was about a flattened, one-note version of what “Filipino” was allowed to mean, a version built almost entirely around Tagalog and Manila-centric culture, with everything else treated as a footnote or an accent to correct.

“When I was growing up,” he reflects, “I kind of felt like there’s this only simplified version of what it is to be a Filipino, and when you meet other Filipinos, you start to find out that their experiences growing up within the Filipino diaspora is so diverse, but nobody talks about that diversity.”

This diagnosis lands with unusual force because it echoes across generations and geographies, not just his own. It brought to mind, while transcribing his words, a piece that has circulated through Philippine classrooms for decades: Prof. Felix Bautista’s spoken-word essay The Anatomy of a Filipino. Dili nako malimtan kay back in eighth grade, we used this piece for a speech choir competition and won. In it, young Filipino voices interrogate their own authenticity out loud, unsettled by American first names, Chinese surnames, and tastes shaped by foreign influence, wondering aloud whether that makes them culture orphans, illegitimate children of many races… Bautista’s answer, which is delivered through the piece’s closing turns, is that being Filipino was never a matter of purity. It is, instead, something that lives in the blood and history a person carries regardless of what shaped it, whether Spanish, Chinese, American, or otherwise. Mikey’s story is, in a sense, that same essay lived out fifty years later and an ocean away, except this time the accusing voices weren’t foreign classmates questioning his Coke and pizza pie. They were fellow Filipinos questioning his vocabulary.

Having been denied an easy sense of community among his Filipino peers, Mikey drifted toward another source of representation: Korean friends, K-pop, and eventually the wider orbit of Hallyu culture. Any visible Asian presence in Western media felt like oxygen at the time. That curiosity deepened into genuine craft, and he found himself immersed in the world of hanbok, the traditional Korean garment, doing influencer work and building a real sense of belonging within that community.

Hanbok itself is older and more structurally stable than most casual observers assume. Its core silhouette, the fitted jacket paired with either trousers or a skirt, was already established during Korea’s Three Kingdoms period, somewhere between 57 BCE and 668 CE, and that basic shape has stayed remarkably intact for close to two thousand years. For women the outfit centers on a wrapped, voluminous skirt worn with a short fitted top fastened by long ties, while men traditionally pair the same style of jacket with loose trousers, sometimes adding a long overcoat for formal events. None of it was ever just decoration, either. Historically, colors mapped onto Korean cosmology, whites and reds and blues each tied to an element, and the palette a person wore signaled their age, their marital status, their rank. Even embroidered motifs carried wishes, flowers for honor or nobility, dragons and phoenixes reserved strictly for royalty. And like a lot of inherited clothing traditions, hanbok nearly slipped into museum-piece status, worn daily for centuries before falling out of everyday use and being rebranded as ceremonial dress, prompting the Korean government to establish a dedicated Hanbok Day in the 1990s just to keep the habit of wearing it alive.

Crucially, Mikey never let go of the thread back home while all this was unfolding. While working in hanbok, he kept asking himself how to fold his Filipino identity into the clothing he was creating. Piña, the fabric behind the barong, was the obvious starting point, since it already carried national symbolism. But he wanted to go further than the obvious. That search led him to pre-colonial Filipino fashion, and through it, to creators like Nahia Lloren and Sharrie Villaver, whose work opened his eyes to something his upbringing had never taught him: that Filipino clothing, like Filipino identity itself, is regional and plural, not singular.

That discovery culminated in a project close to home. With hanbok designer Songhwa, whose garments have dressed idols like IU and Suzy, and with UNESCO-recognized weavers from Panay who specialize in piña, Mikey helped create a piña hanbok, a literal stitching together of Korean silhouette and Filipino textile. He then went a step further, commissioning a hanbok made from hablon, the handwoven fabric native to Iloilo and Cebu, made possible through weavers credited from Arevalo.

Hablon carries its own quietly dramatic history, one worth sitting with for a moment. The word comes straight from Hiligaynon, from “habol,” simply meaning to weave, and the practice long predates Spanish arrival. By some local accounts, weavers in Miagao were already producing multicolored patadyong skirts before the Spanish ever set foot there. The cloth is traditionally built from piña, abaca, and cotton fibers, worked on a foot-powered handloom in a slow, deliberate process of dyeing, warping, and weaving threads into stripes, plaids, and checks. By the nineteenth century, Iloilo’s output had grown so significant that the province earned the nickname Textile Capital of the Philippines, with Miagao, Oton, and Arevalo becoming its main weaving centers.

Like hanbok, though, hablon nearly disappeared. Its peak years ran from the 1950s through the 1970s before cheaper machine-woven textiles gutted demand through the 1980s, pushing weavers toward other trades and leaving the craft to wither for a generation. Only in the last two decades, through local government backing and designers deliberately choosing it again for gowns and formal wear, has it clawed its way back into relevance. That revival is exactly the moment Mikey and the Arevalo weavers stepped into. His hanbok wasn’t cut from some untouched museum relic. It was made from a fabric that living weavers had only recently pulled back from the edge of vanishing altogether, which makes the piece less a costume experiment and more a quiet act of double preservation, one endangered craft rescuing another.

Not only is it an art piece. It was, in fabric form, an answer to every classmate who once told him he wasn’t Filipino enough.

“It wasn’t that I wasn’t Filipino enough,” he says now, “but my Filipino identity was shaped by my Ilonggo and Bisaya roots, which were different from the experience of other Filipinos I had met.”

This is where the conversation turned personal for me. I grew up bouncing between towns in Agusan del Sur and Cebu, the product of parents whose fights sent us packing every couple of years, kindergarten in Talacogon, grades one and two in General Santos City, back to Talacogon for grades three and four, then years five through ten in Sibonga, Cebu, before senior high in Prosperidad and finally settling into Cebu City for university. Not taking into account my residency in Batangas today. Somewhere in that shuffle, Cebu became the place I associated with home, even though I was born in Butuan City, carrying Cebuano, Chinese, Manobo, Blaan, Surigaonon, and a trace of Spanish blood, all of it inherited from grandparents who were themselves migrants rather than original Talacognon Lumads.

Butuan is not a minor footnote in Philippine history, either, and it’s worth pausing on why. Long before Spanish contact, it operated as a genuine trading power, wealthy enough in gold and confident enough diplomatically to send its own envoys abroad. Chinese court records place a Butuan delegation arriving to establish formal relations as early as the start of the eleventh century, and shortly after, a Butuan chieftain petitioned the Chinese imperial court directly for the right to trade without going through a middleman kingdom first. That’s definitely not the behavior of a minor outpost; it is of a state that knew its own worth on the regional stage. Butuan’s trading web reportedly stretched to China, Champa, Brunei, Srivijaya, Majapahit, India, Persia, and even parts of what is now Thailand, moving gold, pearls, and hardwood outward in exchange for silk, ceramics, and metal tools. The physical proof still sits in the Agusan riverbed: the balangay boats, a set of ancient plank-built vessels uncovered by accident in the late 1970s by locals panning for gold, constructed without a single nail, using pegged and lashed hardwood planks strong enough to carry a kingdom’s commerce across open water. So when people from Butuan speak of a rich pre-colonial heritage, it’s a documented history of a cosmopolitan port that traded as an equal with empires most people only associate with far more famous coastlines elsewhere in Asia, not just hometown sentimentality. Very rich history, right? But I can’t seem to gather outsiders to relate to it. It’s my birth place, but for others, it’s not in their maps.

Watching Mikey’s video was the first time I’d seen someone articulate, from the other side of the world, a wound I’d carried quietly for years. It’s an exhausting task of explaining where you’re from to people who have never heard of the place, and the sting of having your Bisaya identity treated as a punchline rather than a heritage. I told him about introducing myself in fifth grade at a new school, giving up on naming my actual hometown because nobody recognized it, and eventually just claiming Davao City, seven hours away by land travel, purely because it was the nearest name people might know.

Mikey didn’t flinch at the parallel. If anything, he leaned into it. “There’s so many things that were shown to me like, oh, this is the Filipino culture,” he shares, “but it was Tagalog, things that I wasn’t familiar with. So we can’t connect in any kind of way.”

We spoke, too, about how that regional hierarchy hasn’t fully disappeared even within the Philippines. Bisaya identity is still occasionally weaponized as an insult in Manila, still reduced to accent jokes or assumptions about domestic work, despite the fact that Visayan speakers are just as capable, just as educated, and just as Filipino as anyone born in Luzon. Mikey admitted he hadn’t grasped the scale of this until an eight-month stay in the Philippines, when friends from Kalibo who studied at Ateneo de Manila described the prejudice they’d absorbed simply for being from the province. Once he knew what to look for, he began noticing the same stories surfacing everywhere, on his For You page, in comment sections, in the placid solidarity of strangers recognizing themselves in each other’s grievances.

Later on, I asked Mikey whether reclaiming his Bisaya and Ilonggo roots actually healed the old wound, or whether it just gave him better language for the hurt. His answer carried real significance. He described the early ache of finally meeting other Filipinos, expecting instant kinship, and instead finding distance, a feeling he likened to being ostracized by the very community he assumed would claim him first.

The turning point, he says, was understanding the why behind that rejection. Once he learned that Philippine cultural identity is genuinely regional and diverse, the old insults lost their sting. Being told he “wasn’t Filipino enough” stopped feeling like an indictment and started feeling like evidence of someone else’s narrow education. “It just makes me feel sorry for them that they don’t understand the diversity of our country,” he told me. It hardened him a little, he admits, but it also gave him a voice. Rather than absorbing the hurt silently, he now speaks up, publicly and often, about the plurality baked into being Filipino.

As expected, that openness hasn’t come without cost. Alongside the outpouring of support his hanbok content received, especially from fellow Bisaya viewers, he’s also faced a wave of hate comments, ironically, mostly from other Filipinos. His read on why this keeps happening lands somewhere between weary and hopeful: colonization left the national identity fractured, and in the scramble to reclaim it, some people try to define Filipino-ness narrowly instead of embracing how varied it actually is. He argues that what’s needed is less defensiveness and more listening, a willingness to sit with each other’s differences rather than getting instantly offended.

We talked, too, about the double standard baked into the school system: Tagalog, taught nationwide as a mandatory subject Filipino, versus the near-total absence of Bisaya, Manobo, or other regional languages in Luzon classrooms, even as electives. The expectation to assimilate flows only one direction, which makes the demand for open-mindedness feel distinctly unfair when it’s never reciprocated.

There’s also a layer to Mikey’s experience that intersects with appearance and colorism. Because he doesn’t fit the features some people expect of a Filipino, he’s often approached differently, even in Iloilo, even by fellow Filipinos on the street. He’s treated as foreign until he opens his mouth and proves otherwise. He’s candid about wanting a more inclusive definition of Filipino-ness, one that doesn’t exclude the mixed-heritage or lighter-skinned Filipinos any more than it should exclude the Bisaya, the Ilonggo, the Manobo, or anyone whose features and accents fall outside the Manila-centric template.

Now, I asked Mikey for his favorite Bisaya or Hiligaynon word, and he doesn’t hesitate to say langga. Love. Sweetheart. It was what his parents called him growing up, and hearing it still floods him with something close to homesickness, minus the sadness. He describes it almost synesthetically, claiming he can hear the ocean when the word is spoken. He also lights up describing a peculiar, very diaspora ritual: spotting a fellow Filipino in a London shop, striking up conversation on a hunch, and feeling an entirely different warmth the moment he learns they’re from Panay or Iloilo, when the cadence of their voice softens into that gentle, sweet Ilonggo lilt even mid-argument. Yes, that intonation!

When I inquired what, in his view, makes him Bisaya, his answer wasn’t about language fluency or geography at all. It was generosity. The instinct to welcome strangers as family, which he inherited straight from his household, the way his relatives fold total strangers into warmth the moment they’re introduced. He tries to carry that same openness with him wherever he goes.

His message to other young diaspora Bisaya, who are still hunting for solid ground under their identity, is disarmingly simple: you are not as alone as it feels. When he first posted his hanbok reel and watched Bisaya viewers respond with recognition rather than ridicule, the loneliness he’d carried since childhood finally cracked open. Confidence, he suggests, isn’t something you’re handed. It’s something you build by learning your own roots well enough that nobody else’s narrow definition can shake it loose.

What Mikey is describing, and what I recognized instantly in my own patchwork of hometowns and half-explained origins, isn’t really about hanbok or piña or hablon at all. Those are just the materials. The real subject is the quiet demand every diasporic and regional Filipino eventually faces: prove your belonging, on someone else’s terms, using someone else’s language, someone else’s features, someone else’s map.

Bautista wrote his answer to that demand decades ago, insisting that being Filipino was never about bloodline purity or vocabulary tests, but about a heart that quickens for the country regardless of what shaped it. Mikey has arrived at nearly the same conclusion through a completely different route, and through two textiles with strikingly parallel histories at that: a nearly lost Korean silhouette and a nearly lost Visayan weave, both rescued in the same recent decades by people who simply refused to let them disappear, now sewn together as both artwork and argument.

Filipino identity, both stories insist, was never meant to be singular. It was always meant to be woven, from threads nobody expected to survive.

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