Mike Mendoza - Roots to the Phillipines

Mike Mendoza is a personal trainer at a prestigious athletic club in Sacramento. A friendly, beautiful-smiling young man in his late twenties, Mendoza is quick to tell me that he was embarassed to be a child of immigrants when he grew up in Concord, California. Why? Because he was the only one among his childhood friends with parents who were not born in the United States.

Mendoza and his siblings would race to the phone whenever it rang so that his parents would not get there first. He knew that if his parents had answered the phone, they would be the butt of joking from his friends. They would mock the accents and say they couldn't understand what his parents were saying.

Like several of the people I have interviewed, Mendoza says that as an adult, he is very proud of his parents and his heritage. But, he winces when he recalls how he did everything he could to fit in with his white classmates, including trying to spend as much time away from home playing with his friends at their houses instead of bringing them to his home.

Adulthood brings its wisdom and understanding and, I believe, helps us connect better to our families and to others who come into our lives during the years that we grow older.