When I was young, I never truly considered myself Filipino. Sure, I lived in the Philippines and I carried a green passport, but I never identified with the nation of my birth. My parents’ friends always complimented me for my mestizo looks when I was still a kid. I didn’t have the trademark kayumangggi complexion my Filipino teachers used to talk about. I went to a Chinese school and even a Chinese church, and Chinese dominated my community.

How could I call myself a Filipino when I spoke Fukien at home? How could I tell my friends I liked a Filipino girl when everyone paired up with a Chinese girl in the school across the street? Because of social structures I didn’t choose, I never really had the chance to call myself a Filipino, nor was I given a reason to do so.

Surprisingly, all that changed in school. I never thought school would address this issue. I thought school was for learning fancy words for communication. To me, knowledge never meant self-reflection. But I was mistaken. In the end, schools, both at home and abroad, solved the issue of my identity.

It started in the third year of my Chinese high school experience in the Philippines. I was lucky enough to meet my Jose Rizal in the classroom. He was a young graduate of Ateneo de Manila University who planned to spend his whole life teaching. It was his second year as a teacher, but he was already brimming with wisdom and experience. He provided social commentaries on the recent sitcoms involving our elected officials. He showed why “Noli Me Tangere” needed to be taught in school. Everyone in society embodied the characters in the novel, including my favorite religious model, Hermana Rufa. He also believed education could change lives, and he proved that with me.

I took the lingering problems of our country, like corruption and poverty, with a grain of salt. These didn’t have to exist in my world. So, I grew up ignoring them and other social illnesses. After all, politics simply isn’t a concern for the Chinese in the Philippines. We only need to focus on business. You can be mean and call us gold diggers but then, as my economics teacher explained, Adam Smith’s invisible hand will solve all our problems.

Sadly, Smith’s hypothesis has failed time and time again in the Philippines. My favorite teacher disagreed with it, and so did the writers of contemporary Filipino literature and opinion-makers like Conrado de Quiros. For as one character in “High School Musical” puts it, “We’re all in this together.” Just practicing business, medicine, law and other professions without succumbing to corrupt practices will never solve our problems.

But this mentality plagues the Chinese and Filipino communities alike. Our failure to do something about them causes problems to fester. By not standing up for equality or justice, we allow the problem to persist. By continuing with life as usual, we allow the problems to grow. By not telling everyone else about them, we ensure that the problems will endure. And now our problems have grown too big for any “reform” candidate in 2010 (if there is one) to control or solve.

Considering all this, my 16-year-old brain had a “Eureka!” moment like no other. So this is what it means to be Filipino, I told myself. Filipinos do not only love everything that is good or bad about this country. More importantly, Filipinos fight to change their country. Filipinos open their eyes to the problems they cause and look for ways to change them.

It was at that point in my life that I decided that I wanted to be a Filipino. And that was back in high school, when my idealism was at its peak.

Then I had to go to college. I got accepted to my top two choices of Philippine universities. In April 2008, however, I received an e-mail informing me of my acceptance into the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

I had always wanted to study abroad, but this time I couldn’t reconcile it with my being Filipino. In the end, I decided to put being Filipino on hold so that I could have what I hoped to be the experience of a lifetime.

I arrived in Philadelphia without any preconceptions. I would explore other options once more since no one knew who I was. Maybe I was just pressured in high school into accepting this definition of a Filipino, I thought.

Like most other college students, I looked for a group of people to associate with. Since I grew up in a Chinese family, it was only natural that I would first try to get along with Chinese students from the mainland. It didn’t work. They spoke fluent Mandarin with each other, and I felt like a stranger among them. I guess I’m not really just Chinese after all.

I tried befriending Chinese-American students. In the process, I met countless friends who shared my interest in music and the desire to perfect our Mandarin. However, they didn’t know what Gawad Kalinga was nor did they find kare-kare, sinigang and adobo delicious.

To my relief, Penn has a strong Filipino-American group and I joined them. They definitely like the food of their parents, but they don’t know where Pasig was nor do they concern themselves with the latest gimmick of our President.

Each of these groups appeals to me but I have never felt like we share the same values. There is always something missing. Being Filipino is missing. They don’t understand the extent of our problems. Even if the Fil-Ams share my food and culture, they only talk about Barack Obama and the US recession. They don’t know anything about the eternal Philippine economic and social depression. When I tell them about vote-buying during elections, they just laugh or say it is “cool.” They can’t be roused to anger, but I am angry.

After being away for almost a year, I realize that I am a Filipino. Given the opportunity to start what could be a very profitable career in investment banking (in a post-recession United States, of course), I will turn it down. I can’t imagine living a happy and contented life outside the Philippines. For me, nothing will compare with going back one day and working to help solve our problems.

With this, I have added another dimension to being Filipino: going back to our only home. Sadly, countless Filipinos continue to leave our country for good. I suppose we can’t all be Filipino enough when money problems arise.

(Evan S. Chen, 18, is an economics freshman at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.)