“Do you smoke?” she asked me, a blunt dangling from her fingertips. It was three in the morning in a very small bedroom on the south side of London, and I was still drunk off vodka cokes and the company of my friends. It had been an idle invitation thrown out as the evening was wrapping up, an offer to attend the celebration of a dead man’s life, and in my eagerness a party seemed like the best idea in the world. I arrived to discover the only people I knew were the friend who had invited me and a cousin of his I had met once or twice, and I was soon abandoned so that they could be good party hosts. Overwhelmed and still hazy from the previous drinks of the evening, it was probably fate that led me to that room.

“No,” I answered, “but thank you for asking.” There was the faintest smile curling at the edges of the stranger’s lips as she lit its edges and took a deep drag, passing it along to the man beside her. It made its way across the perimeter of the room, from person to person, and I watched mesmerised at the little pass-around of friendship and plumes of smoke. The scent of weed was a familiar one by then, lingering at the entryway to Euston Station and trailing behind the odd passerby down in Shoreditch, and without intending to I took a seat by her side on the carpeted floor and began to listen. They were reminiscing about their friend who had passed on, spinning yarns about the good times they had had together, but I didn’t mind that they were resurrecting a dead man before me. Somehow, it felt safer and warmer to be in that room than being outside its single door among a crowd of people with sun-bleached hair, paper white skin, or both. 

“Where are you from?” asked another stranger during a lull in the conversation, one at the farthest end of the circle from me. He was dressed in layer upon layer in preparation for the winter chill outside, an easy smile on his face that invited me to let down my guard.

“The Philippines,” I replied, mentally flinching in preparation. Most of the time people didn’t know much about my country, or had heard and seen it only in the context of its sandy beaches and smiling locals. It was too late in the evening for me to contend with the usual phrases and celebration of how exotically foreign my country was, and how excited they were to visit and scuba. 

Instead, what I got were nods and murmurs as the strange man took another drag on the blunt, exhaling hazy wisps of smoke straight above him. “So they got you too, huh?” 

“Got me?” 

“You know.” He looked around conspiratorially, as if making sure that his words weren’t overheard by anyone unfit to hear them. Considering the crowd that lingered just outside the door, maybe he was onto something. “White people.”

My laughter was a nervous titter, unsure if he was trying to crack a joke. But his eyes were deathly serious, looking straight through my demeanor at the truth that I and my countrymen knew. We had been occupied for hundreds of years by Spaniards, led to our shores by a Portuguese man arrogant enough to name our isles after a Spanish king and foolish enough to be slain on our beaches. For his failed circumnavigation of the globe he was immortalized in straits and stars, and for his discovery he became a cautionary tale to every Filipino child against trusting strangers.

“Yeah. It was the Spaniards first, and then the Japanese, and then the Americans, and now we’re independent.” It wasn’t the sort of thing I talked about in polite or impolite company, at least not in England. Europeans seemed to have a touchy relationship with their colonial past, either treating it as an atrocity to be swept under the rug or a punchline to the kind of joke I could never really get. Where I had met Spaniards and Americans, the occupation of the Philippines was the product of a bygone era wholly unrelated to them, never mind the way they smirked and rolled their eyes at my backwater ways  and bristling indignation.

“So you are, and good for you.” He nodded and the rest of our little congregation nodded along with him. Part of me ached to blunt the edges of my mind that were returning with sobriety, to dull the edges of awareness with weed and fade into the happy place everyone else seemed to be in. The other half remembered that I had promised my mom I’d do my best to be good. “But you know,” the stranger continued, emphasising his next words with a pointed glare in my direction, “Fuck them. Fuck these colonisers, you know? They took everything from all of us here, black, brown, and yellow, and they’re waiting right outside that door for us.” There was a chorus of agreement, of yes and uh huh and a single hell yeah. Even I felt emboldened to nod along, my heart strengthened by the solidarity of being amongst people of colour and the alcohol content of the beer I had snagged at the party’s entrance.

There had been no thuggish bark to it, none of the sharp and aggravated tones I’d been conditioned to accept would come out of the mouth of a black man. Instead here was a prophet of the modern era, getting high with six friends and a stranger, speaking the truths of the world. I wish I had etched his words after that into my heart, remembered the other things that were said after the haze of narcotics exited my bloodstream. They were good words, that much I can recall, words about quiet injustices and heartbreaks of race that I didn’t wholly understand except through the lens of my own experiences. Being called a chink by a driver in the dark as I walked home from university. A getting to know you where I was asked if I lived in a mud hut. My ex-boyfriend’s research proposal, correlating the wealth of areas in Hong Kong with the number of Filipina maids employed in each district. Nothing as severe as the lives they had lived, but enough to feel the distinct separation between us inside that room and those outside of it. All I can remember properly were the chants, not wholly angry or shouted, but spoken together as mantras of solidarity. Fuck white people. Fuck the system. Fuck colonialism. Everyone who had wronged us, everyone who had marginalized us, everyone in the outside world who had seen someone with darkened skin or slanted eyes and sought to treat us as second-rate human beings– they could go get fucked. 

It came to a head when someone peeked through the doorway, popping their head in and asking if anybody wanted more drinks, snacks, or anything of that sort. As one we cried out “Fuck off, coloniser!” before breaking out into peals of laughter, as the head’s owner beat a hasty retreat. A minute or so passed before I realised that the person who had peeked in was the person who had actually invited me to the party, so I made my excuses and headed off to make sure he wasn’t offended. As it turned out, he hadn’t minded, and found the whole thing hilarious. I was inclined to believe that the absurdity of the situation must have been what was amusing, but a very small part of me wondered if it was funny because none of us was a credible threat to him.

With the benefit of hindsight and time, I’ve had to ask myself why I felt the need to go after my friend, to leave behind that place of refuge. I wanted to believe that it was because I was being sensitive to the feelings of someone I cared about, but it was such a small thing to him that I don’t think I needed to leave. Maybe I wasn’t mentally ready yet, was still trying to be a good minority and stick close to the disproportionate number of white people I ended up befriending during my studies. There are so many things I am still learning, about the invisible lines between myself and the people I call my friends. Things that they do try very hard to understand, but which cannot always be so easily explained without that quiet solidarity of “they got you too”. Perhaps one day, very suddenly and without intending to, I’ll stumble through the door into that room again, of marijuana-induced revelations and lived-through experience. Together we’ll smoke, drink, and chant mantras of the modern day that will get us through the rest of our lives. Fuck colonialism. Fuck the system. And fuck white people.

Kyle Tam is a writer, dreamer, and full-time complainer from the Philippines. Her work has been published in Rejection Lit, Re-Side, and Planet Scumm, and is forthcoming in other publications. She hasn't had weed before or since this event, not for lack of opportunity but as a choice.