Pinay Sa Alaska

I knew that my daughter-in-law was becoming famous on TikTok, with her channel about being a Filipina in Alaska, just homey everyday videos.  But now she has had several go viral to the tune of 13M viewings, and has 250K followers, mostly in the Philippines. She just got interviewed on their largest TV channel.

I am not on TikTok, so I don't know what I can get up on my site. There must be a way, but my embeddings don't seem to be working. Someone will explain it eventually.

I think this one is asking does the ocean really freeze in Alaska, so Jocie goes out on the Bering Strait to show them. You can see why that would be of interest to them.  

Note how she switches back and forth between Tagalog and English, sometimes for a single word, sometimes for a few sentences together. The name for that is code-switching. We hear it most commonly with Spanglish and Chinglish, for obvious reasons. Those words are going out of favor for a couple of reasons, but the one that is important to me is that it is not a very accurate description. All languages in contact influence each other, and immigrants and ex-pats naturally find that local words for places and objects are the best choice when one's own language does not have the word, or only an uncommonly used one. Americans living in a place can think they are speaking English to each other, but a newcomer will immediately detect the presence of local words. "Well of course. That's its name."

This one is about bringing the two younger daughters to ice sculpting. Also something they probably don't have a lot of in Manila. In the description of why they didn't stay I think I picked out the word "tantrums" amidst all the Tagalog.  Then you do get to see some of the very few Romanian-Filipino children in the world. My son John-Adrian, called JA by his brothers and John by everyone else, shows up at about the 2:00 mark, after Jocie demonstrates putting on her multiple layers of clothing and masks to go snowmobiling out to the crab pots. You probably don't see a lot of digging through the ice to pick up your crab pots where you are in most of America either. In his day job he is an accountant at the hospital.

Then she takes you shopping for groceries with those alarming frontier prices, and is her adorable self eating the crab they just caught.