This is the story of my grandparent's immigration from the Philippines to the United States. Writing it has helped me unravel pieces of my identity as I begin to understand how I fit in to my larger family tree.
Lolo,
You hurt me the other day. When we were on the phone. You were at Starbucks. The phone got passed from Lola to Mom to Julie to Mopa to you. We were at the end, when you’d usually throw in a “Keep working hard at school.” Instead, before the “I love you”, you said you were happy I’d been travelling, “but just don’t go to the Philippines.” It’s not safe, you said. I shouldn’t bother, you said. Lolo, I can’t. I can’t not go. I do not understand the half of me that is full for you. I need to, Lolo. I need to go. But we can compromise. Tell me what it’s like. If I can’t see for myself, you show me. Pamilya, please show me.
Mahal kita,
Joc
I close my eyes and picture Luzon. One of the three islands of the Philippines. An island. Hmm. Islands have warm sand. Blue sky. Blue sky that melts to blue water. Maybe there is a coconut tree with a strong trunk and palms that shade brown bodies. Brown skin that glistens with prickles of sweat and smells like the sun. Maybe you, Lolo, climb it with your brothers to borrow its juice on your tongues. A boat might be in the distance where your father winds up his rod to win your dinner. A prize that you’ll take back home to your proud, proud nanay. She might grin over the red stove and prepare it over fluffy, white rice and green, leafy greens. Warmth wafts through the whole home, seeping into the floorboards and painting cozy walls cozier. Your kuyas shovel rice in, racing for seconds. Your nanay reminds them of manners. Your tatay brags that next time the fish will be even bigger. He was just tired today. You are happy. The Philippines is happy.
After one phone call with you, I press the red icon and this picture shatters. Like someone shook the coconut tree and one of the real-heavy bowling ball looking ones crashed on the glass frame and quickly threw mean shards around my bare feet. Reality fills its cracks.
You never really got to go to the beach. Luzon is an island, yes, but you are inland. You lived in Angeles City- the mega urbanized, entertainment capital of Luzon. Two hours from the coast, which means two hours of bus fare just to see the water. “If it cost money, we didn’t do it.” You didn’t have a favorite Filipino food until you moved to California when you were 25, into a house with a kitchen where Lola could cook the foods you never got to build a nostalgia for. You grew to love menudo- cubed pork stewed with soy sauce, lemon or calamansi, garlic, onion, red pepper, potatoes, celery, tomato sauce, bay leaves, and (like everything else) served over rice. She told me cooking made her feel like she was back at home. I’ve always thought that watching her cook is like watching someone dance. No cookbooks, no recipes, just ingredients. One time, when prepping for one of those huge family parties where faces flood in telling me they are my Tita, Lola’s kitchen really looked like Seafood City. The biggest Filipino supermarket chain in the U.S.- they are always proud and bustling, just like my Lola’s kitchen. They work to cultivate a sense of belonging among Pilipinx-Americans, strategically positioning their stores in areas of high Pilipinx residential concentration and market themselves with slogans like, “Your Filipino Town”, which I know because I have a Seafood City poster hanging in my dorm room. Seafood City is a hub, just like Lola’s kitchen. Every surface had cut veggies or boiling stews or fish heads or sous chefs rolling lumpia. I imagined that my Lola’s house was a mini-Philippines that held all of the country’s bounty. Her entire home was and is a Philippine garden. She even bought calamansi seeds for $50 at the outdoor, weekend Spring Valley Swap Meet 17 years ago, to plant a tree that stands strong today. She invited friends over when it was time to harvest and they took photos of what reminded them of home, too. They zoomed in on the juicy, yellow-orange fruits, to share on Facebook that they had a taste of the Philippines in San Diego. They reveled in the nostalgia, but you, Lolo, were glimpsing tastes and sensations for the first time in your new home. In Luzon, you only really ate small dried sardines and rice and tomatoes because tomatoes were cheap. You didn’t have a favorite because you barely had. Usually, families grew bell peppers or squash or okra or cayenne in their yards, like Lola learned to do, but your family didn’t have the money to start gardening. You didn’t have a big coconut tree to climb with your brothers. You did have four noble fruit trees that carried guava, caimito, atis, and tamarind, but even these were meek in comparison to the bounty of your neighbors. There was no free high school, so you and your three siblings could only go two at a time. It didn’t matter that you were all of high school age. You had to take turns. That’s why you and Lola were seniors at the same time, even though you are three years older.
Your love story started around Christmas. Lola was 15 and you were 18. She had a crush on someone named Dennis (don’t worry I yelled at her, “Lolo’s name is not Dennis!”, but she just laughed it off). All the girls called him “Dennis with the tantalizing eyes”. I wonder if that flows off the tongue better in Tagalog. Anyways, her friends told her Dennis would be at this Christmas party, so, even though she was so shy and had never spoken to him at school, she committed to being there. She was made of butterflies when Dennis actually approached her. He was quite elusive, though. He said, “Lina, soon, someone is going to bring out a guitar and ask you something.” Lola thought he was talking about himself. She didn’t know that Dennis was your best friend, your wingman. Right on cue, you saunter in through the doors, guitar in hand, singing “Let me caaaaaall you sweetheart.” I should have known you were a hopeless romantic- born on Valentine’s day and named Valentino. You really live up to your name. After the song, you asked her to a dance and she fell into your loving arms. You won her heart. Every Saturday to follow, you graced her home with flowers, your Lola’s desserts, and fresh fruits from your four trees. On one of these Saturdays, Lola’s grandpa caught you two in a kiss. To her horror, he ran his mouth around to everyone about it. The next morning, Lola woke up with excruciating, throbbing, swollen lips. She thought she was in a nightmare. But no, she was in her cousin’s trap. While she was asleep, her cousin rubbed cayenne peppers over her lips as a warning against intimacy—that crazy cousin thought Lola was going to get pregnant. Lola screamed, “Ay nako!! It was only on the cheek!” I was practically cackling when you passed the phone over to her. When I let school get the best of me, I talk to her as little as once a month, but no matter the length of our conversation or how long it has been since our last one, our shared laughter has this special way of making me feel so whole. I look a lot more like you, Lolo, because of our darker skin, but I have Lola’s laugh. Loud, un-embarrassed, free laughs that make our eyes crinkle and our stomachs hurt. She reminds me that life can be simple if you laugh. I bet she has that effect on you, too.
You were picture-perfect sweethearts. She was 21 and you were 24 when you passed exams and physical feats necessary for the Navy. Your ticket out. A ridiculous 24 hours ensue. You asked her to marry you on the day your ship is set to depart. She said yes and jumped and laughed, then ran to the person she must see next. Through her first communion, her elementary school graduation, her high school graduation, and college graduation, the same woman, Daling, made all of her dresses. Lola visited Daling to reminisce on all of these seminal moments, then popped the question, “Will you continue this tradition and make my wedding dress?” “Of course, anak. When is it?” With a mix of nervous and laughing eyes, my Lola admitted, “…..This evening.” “Ay nako. Sige, let’s start then.” The rushed wedding was precious, of course, but now I understand why Lola is meticulously planning her grand 50th wedding anniversary this August. In the grace of your retired lives, you and Lola are going to do it right this time. I am so honored that I’ll be there to see it.
I asked what the hardest part was about leaving the Philippines. You said, “Nothing.” You could make money for your family, make a life for yourself, and that’s all that mattered. You made $78 a month and sent back $35 every time. While the American sailors ripped open letters with smiles and cash, you stuffed bills to be sent out. You shined the Americans’ shoes for $1, so that they could pass their morning inspections. They didn’t care to learn and you wouldn’t dare pass up on an opportunity, no matter how much earlier it meant waking up. I’ll hang on to this image as I grind through my final days of college and embark on my first career moves. You knew how to work and worked.
Lola had to wait for your ship to dock in Hawaii, where you’d stay for one year. She flew there all alone and stayed in your friends’ already over-crowded home for three months. You said Nothing was hard about leaving, but Everything about it scared her. She was leaving her friends and her family, without any idea of what was coming next. The Lola I know is hilariously crazy. Remember when my sister, Maddy, flipped her eyelids up to scare our little cousin, Daniel, and Lola laughed so hard she peed her pants? Or when she brought me with her to Zumba and danced like a 90’s pop star? Or when she ran all around Chuck E. Cheese’s with us and couldn’t figure out how to get the skee balls to roll up into even the low-scoring holes? That laugh- ‘til-you-pee Lola was stifled way, way down. In all my life, I have never seen the scared-and-stifled Lola before, so it is hard for me to imagine her this way. But she said she felt so sick in that borrowed home. Maybe from loneliness? Maybe from the new food? Maybe from the constant smell of vinegar that the mother of the home kept cooking with? Maybe from the five men in the house who never flushed and told her not to, unless it was number two. Later, she found out it was from pregnancy. She didn’t know my mama was in her tummy when she left home. Lola said that if she knew, she would never have left. Because, at least in the Philippines, she knew someone would be there to take care of her.
If she knew and she told you, Lolo, what do you think you would have done? Maybe you would have gone to your favorite park to think. That park tucked away in the mountains, just thirty minutes from your inner-city home back in Angeles City. That park where the cool, fresh air breezes a break from the humid, humid rest of it all. That park where the statue of the Virgin Mary used to be the only cement encroachment…. Now you think the park is probably gone because so many of your spacious areas of solace have been ripped apart to hold condominiums or apartments or computer shops. But if it was then, and not now, maybe that’s where you’d go to weigh your future. I know it wasn’t the idyllic beach scene, but it held its own beauty. Maybe you’d sit under the trees, letting your tears make ripples in the clear river that ran through it. Crying in confusion over whether to stay or to go. Or maybe you’d cry there, into that same river, smiling at the thought of your reflection in the water shaping the features of a beautiful baby girl. No way you could know that your baby girl would become your most loyal travel companion, as the Navy shipped you from Hawaii to Taiwan back to Hawaii to California to Japan back to California. No way you could know that she’d become an Ate to three more of your beautiful babies. Or that one day she’d meet a man in LA who loved teaching as much as she did. Or that they’d have four of their own little girls. Or that their oldest daughter, Jocelyn would become your favorite. (Joke lang, Joke lang.) Gazing into the river of comfort, you could watch the present unfold around you, dancing like the trees, but you could not see the future. You couldn’t have known how much you’d grow in the years to come.
I’m glad my mama kept her little presence a secret. She’s always been looking out for others, huh. I’m relieved that you got to leave an island of pain for you. An island I romanticized for what it might be, but now, an island I am learning to love for how it made me….
There is something about the white paint swirled in to my brown skin that makes me feel less than. That made me ignore sign-ups for the Pilipinx American Student Association, but that makes me proud to stroll in through the front door to their annual cultural events. My face beams throughout the duration of the show, as I see a part of myself represented on stage. But I leave guilty, deflated, confused. Why wasn’t I on stage? Why don’t I celebrate my culture every day? It is not half. A person cannot be half. I leave guilty because I didn’t put in those hours of Tinikling rehearsal that brought all of those other dedicated Filipinos up on stage. Shit. I didn’t even know the half of my grandparents’ lives on the island before I was prompted to unearth these stories for an essay in class. I am battling myself and sometimes feel like I am losing. This pit in my stomach punches at me when I least expect it. When I see my little sister immersed in her Filipino club at school. When I am at the airport and here the employees speaking Tagalog, but have no native words to show that I am one of them. When I realize that it’s been a while since we last spoke.
When Lola walked the phone up to you- sorry to interrupt the Warriors game- I pressed mine to the side of my face. I clung to your words with a tighter, whiter grip than usual because I’m old enough to realize all of the questions I should have already started asking. How am I 21 years old and just now learning that my own Lolo grew up on sardines and seldom saw the ocean? At what age do you start to realize your grandparents have their own lives that are even wilder than your own? That they used to be kids? That they might have climbed trees until dusk and been chastised by their moms for coming home smelling like the sun? That they weren’t born a Lola or Lolo? Their stories tell me who they were and, therefore, who they are. My mom used to drop my sisters and I off at school in the morning, and stretch her neck out of the window to yell, “Ask good questions!” I carried this advice into the classroom, but why didn’t I think to turn this inquisitive switch to my most sacred teachers? Well, the switch is on now. I will keep asking and keep listening. I will teach my daughters to do the same.
When I pick up the phone and listen, I do not feel like a fraud. I do not feel half. I am a part of you and no one would dare question your degree of Filipino. You fought and you fight and I will wear that pride. I will wear that pride with humility because you fought battles so that I didn’t have to. Prideful humility- there’s a nice oxymoron. The point is, I’m still learning. I’m discovering the raw truth of my family tree and it may be 21 years late, but not 21 years too late. I do not have to be able to recite your old stories in order to feel closer to you- though that does bring me so much joy. What’s more important is that I can begin to see how my life fits into a long timeline of resilience. How my sisters and I plug into the picture and how, if any of us ever have children, they will carry your legacy too. Family is everything. Knowing its heartbeat is knowing your own.
I think I understand why you wouldn’t want me to go to the Philippines. You came all this way for me, so it’s foolish to you if I go back. That doesn’t hurt me anymore. I see that it is complicated. Immigration is complicated. Family histories are complicated. But they are also a phone call away. For me, at least. For now, at least. Thank you for being my lifeline. Life is a big precious lesson and you are my teachers. I am your humble student. Your prideful, humble student. Pinoy ako. Salamat, pamilya. Mahal kita.