My painting and textile pieces attempt to navigate the complexities and tangibility of being culturally a Filipino American as a second generation New Yorker. I combine timelines by drawing from personal research into early U.S. empire documents of Filipinos, citing ancestral stories and childhood memories, while also subverting national symbols in my own myth-making. My work often depicts personifications of both Philippine culture and Filipino American culture, illustrated as a figure in a yellow terno and a figure with a carabao head. They have a mother-daughter relationship and are usually focused on mundane tasks in intimate settings as a way to dispel historically Westernized inventions of the exotic, hypersexualized Filipina. Textile-making indicates time and structure, and their familiar tactility demands attention to question which parts of the piece are real and which are painted illusions; what aspects of biculturalism are true and what are made up. The purpose of my work is not only to offer a new understanding around the facets of biculturalism within the diaspora, but to also recognize the global legacies established by a marginalized nation.