The Things We Carry: Immigrant Stories from the 1.5 Generation
Witnessing Australian Parliament’s last sitting session of 2017 from the public galleries was a memorable experience, especially given the historic passage of the Marriage Equality Bill that evening. As a visitor and outsider, I also was fascinated to compare Australian parliamentary and American congressional debates — both in style and in substance. What stood out from the session was the heated rhetoric regarding senators who were recently ousted from parliament after revelations that they were dual citizens. The “citizenship crisis” came at the heels of the Turnbull government’s failed attempts to mandate a written and oral English language competency test and increase the permanent residency waiting period requirement to apply for Australian citizenship, which many saw as an attack on immigrants.
Striking up conversations with some locals in Melbourne and Sydney, I heard arguments for immigration restrictions not too dissimilar from those in the US — that many working and middle class Australians are feeling pinched by a slow-growth economy; that immigrants are job and resource “takers”; that droves of them are encouraged by policies which have made it too easy for them to enter the country; and that “We [Australians] need to take care of our own first.” Often, they asked where I was originally from, what I did for a living, and if my entire family had immigrated to the US. And upon confirming that I was an immigrant, more than one person remarked that I ought to feel fortunate that I’ve adapted to and succeeded in life in America.
What gets lost in discussions among people who don’t remember their own family’s histories of immigration or aren’t acquainted with others who’ve recently arrived is that immigration policies in most developed countries already are restrictive. It usually takes years to get approval to immigrate (even as an asylum seeker) in addition to the permanent residency waiting period requirement to apply for citizenship (where one isn’t allowed to travel outside the country, for instance to go back and visit family in their homeland). So, the decision to move from perhaps the only place you’ve ever known, away from loved ones and support structures — not to mention the years of planning, sacrificing, and saving — to start from scratch elsewhere with no guarantee of success is not an easy one to make. Rarely is immigrating instantaneously a golden ticket. It’s more like high-stakes gambling, where you hope that the greatest risk you’ve ever taken will be worth it in the end.
I made this trip to Australia to reconnect with friends from childhood who also immigrated from the Philippines. In the course of catching up, I was struck by the many similarities as well as the many differences in our immigrant stories. I am grateful that they and a few others I reached out to generously agreed to be interviewed for this post. It is my hope that by sharing our personal accounts, readers will have a better sense about the things we carry to this day about our immigrant pasts, as well as gain a more nuanced, empathetic perspective in the immigration debates currently happening in many developed countries around the world.
OUR FAMILIES ARE BROKEN
I was 13 when my parents, sister and I moved permanently to New York in 1992. My parents ran an Italian-American restaurant in our hometown of Baguio in the Philippines, which languished in the economic recession following the fall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986 and the subsequent departure of many of their American clientele who had been stationed at Camp John Hay Air Force Base. To pay their mortgage and the bills, Mom was recruited to work as a nurse at the height of the AIDS crisis in New York. I was nine years old when she left, and it was primarily Dad who had to navigate through my sister’s and my pre-teen years (since my mother would only get to visit us once a year during Christmas). When we reunited as a family through the Nursing Relief Act, the four of us lived in a rental studio apartment for over a year until we found a rent-subsidized 2-bedroom, where my sister and I shared a room for the first time since we were toddlers. In retrospect, it was probably just as difficult for Mom as it was for me to accelerate our relationship. I remember the moment I caught her reading my diaries to get to know me better — it felt like a tremendous violation, but perhaps I didn’t know how to talk to my mother either. Dad didn’t have a working visa initially, and despite multiple postgraduate degrees from the Philippines, he had to go back to school to earn a social work degree from an American institution in order to secure a steady job. Yet, I don’t recall my parents discussing what must have been a great source of grief and stress. Each time I tried to bring up how difficult I was finding our transition to New York, my dad would shut me down by accusing me of hurting my mom’s feelings and demanded that I instead be grateful about finally being together as one family.
C first moved to California at the age of 18 in 1997, then permanently in 1999. As the youngest of six siblings and the only one under the age of 21, C was able to immigrate with her parents as a dependent and recognized that she was lucky to do so. Similar to my family’s experience of living in close quarters without much privacy, she and her parents first lived with an uncle in Southern California before moving in with her brother in a crowded multi-family rental home. C had to get used to not having a room of her own or the freedom to go anywhere, and to learn to do her own dishes and laundry (since even middle class families like ours in the Philippines had hired help and didn’t do the basic chores ourselves). Her parents didn’t intend to stay for too long, since they had a successful family business in Baguio and were quite settled. C felt homesick and easily bored — being away from her boyfriend and friends from college — and also that “America felt too big, that I felt so small.” She returned to the Philippines, but felt lost: “I almost felt like I shouldn’t have come back because … it wasn’t like it used to be and I felt quite out of place. I wish I had a different outlook in life back then and focused more on getting myself settled in making my home America … Even when I returned to the US permanently, I wasn’t quite sure of what I REALLY wanted for ME.”
F moved to Australia permanently at the age of 20 in 2001, after a “trial year” in 1995. Like my family, F had one parent present and the other absent at different points, and she was raised in part by her grandparents. She moved a lot in Philippines, so the move to Australia felt like part of the “routine” and almost right away, she “went on with the ‘new normal.’” Because of her “unusual family setup” and also because she was the eldest child, she was brought up to be independent. However, she did find it difficult (as I did) to adjust to the idea of “being a [complete] family in Australia.” They didn’t discuss immigrant experience much. At one point early on, she earned more than her parents and paid for groceries and the rent: “[I] didn’t understand it then, but it must’ve been humbling/embarrassing, especially since my parents were professionals/upper middle class in Philippines.”
R moved to Australia in 1994 at the age of 15. Like F, she was raised primarily by her paternal grandparents, since her parents had moved to the Middle East, where her father had secured a job as a civil engineer. Since R always felt like a “transient/traveler between countries, the move to Australia was not a shock, rather an adventure, as I did not always live happy years in Baguio due to separation from immediate family … Most of my father’s siblings were already living in Sydney, so there was a sense of comfort, safety, and familiarity.” Similar to my own father’s experience, R’s dad couldn’t find an engineering job that suited his qualifications and settled for one in an unrelated field. R imagines that this was “a humbling moment for immigrants who had previously enjoyed a life of comfort, travel, stature, and recognition … To this day, my sister and I are acutely aware of our parents’ sacrifices in bringing their family together, and providing good education to help better their children’s future. They had sacrificed their careers and a life of relative ease and comfort.”
FINDING HOME: ADAPTATION AND/OR/VS. RESILIENCE
I have vivid sense memories from childhood and remember details of my past in the Philippines, but struggle to recall or make new memories since the move to New York in 1992. Often, I feel guilty when I don’t recall something that my friends find important enough to remember. For a couple of years, I considered my childhood friends from the Philippines to be closer than my new friends and kept in touch with them mostly by post, since email didn’t exist and international phone calls were expensive. I’ve managed to find a way to move on with my life since then. But up to now, I feel that there’s an unbridgeable distance between myself and those closest to me. My friends and my partner will never get to know the person who lived a pretty full life before moving to the US — my past is still with me, but it’s something I can’t even begin to share with the people who know me simply as a New Yorker. The older I get, the more I’ve come to see my inability to fully “attach” to anyone or anything as perhaps ok. It allows me to just be authentic, open and loving toward anyone who comes into my life.
The Baguio I knew no longer exists, but despite 25 years of living in New York, I still don’t feel that it’s “home.” Like C, I feel that part of me was caught in time and in between places. Whenever I travel, something will inevitably remind me of the Baguio of my childhood — from the conifer forests of the Pacific Northwest in the US, to the dewy fern gullies of County Cork in Ireland, to colonial architecture in Namibia. It’s as if I’m collecting pieces of “home” that are scattered elsewhere in the world; or perhaps it’s that I hold “home” inside myself. I wish I still had access to the places of my childhood — especially the house I grew up in. I love old family homes — such as the house my grandparents built, which my cousins and their kids four generations later still reside in, or my Aunt J’s, which contains three generations of memories — for the histories, traditions, and sense of place they hold for future generations. I value not just my personal history, but also strive, in writing and in life, to preserve knowledge about my colonial history and certain cultural mores, such as embracing elders and extended family in my life (even as my own parents seem to wish to erase the entirety of their past and move on with a fresh slate).
C too values “teaching my kids about the Philippines and preserving traditional Filipino values; that as immigrants we DO make a difference in our communities.” She feels most herself within the Filipino and Asian communities, where she “blends in.” She is wary of others outside the community who aren’t exposed to or choose to remain ignorant about those from other cultural or ethnic backgrounds. It is when she is comfortable enough to talk about Filipino culture and traditions and “feel like a proud Pinoy” that she’s able to feel a connection with the dominant culture.
For both R and F, who moved around a lot growing up and learned “to be independent, to figure things out for [themselves], and make things work,” there was an immediate, sobering acceptance of forging ahead and building a new life in Australia. For R, “The move between countries, constant travel, and the loss and making of new friends, have led to experiences which I consider as ‘part of the Learning Curve.’ Moving to Australia was a clean slate, and a chance to rebuild a beautiful life with honest love for self, family, friends, wider community, nature, and the universe.” F finds Australia generally inclusive and has been able to find a sense of belonging through various interest groups, from the transfer to Australia of prior Filipino affiliations with Red Cross Youth, Rotaract Club and Mensa International, to the forging new local gym and library memberships. For F, “Home is not a country, but a state where I feel valued and heard but can trust to be kept to account for my behavior.” She hopes as well that she’s making a “home” in Australia for her children and husband. The idea of “return” also seems more possible and within reach for F. Whereas, being a 20-hour flight away in New York, I feel severed from the Philippines in time and distance with scarce hopes for fully catching up, and therefore desperately nostalgic for what no longer exists.
FINDING OURSELVES AND OUR DREAMS
Although my maternal grandparents and all but one of my mother’s siblings were in New York, we were estranged from them. As an adult, I chose to reconnect with Mom’s side of the family, which helped me (who felt “in between” places and “transient”) to feel rooted for once. Until I got to know my maternal grandmother, Auntie J, and cousins, I felt like the odd one out in my immediate family as the writer, the non-conforming rebel, the questioner, the experimenter. Whether or not my parents were aware of it, I felt pressured to study and pursue a “pragmatic”/“traditional” career and relegate my creative impulses toward “side” hobbies or projects. Majoring in media criticism and falling into nonprofit fundraising from a more traditional career in book publishing was perhaps the first step in freeing myself from the notion that I needed to stay on the beaten path in order to feel “successful,” and it’s what enabled me to take this “leap year” without worrying about what family, friends and prospective employers might think.
I’ve always identified with my immigrant identity, although my understanding of that identity has evolved from one of shame and suffering to one of pride and strength. It is what makes me, if not unique, then different in the way that I strongly believe in giving back and fighting for the people in my life — especially those who struggle in different kinds of ways. By drawing out my family’s immigration stories, I’m able to feel more grounded in my self-knowledge, which in turn helps me define what I want in this present moment and for the future. My only regret about the immigrant experience is that my family didn’t openly communicate about how it affected each of us. I wonder if we could have found pathways toward healing and moving forward much sooner had we shared our struggles and supported each other along the way.
C and R felt they had the freedom to pursue their career of choice, as a graphic designer and materials engineer respectively. While C and I are conscious of our immigrant/hyphenated identities in navigating life and relationships in the US, both R and F neither feel an obligation to represent Filipino and/or immigrant communities (although F is “proud of high achieving Filipinos”), nor do they find that being an immigrant has been an impediment to succeeding in Australia, which “embraces who we are regardless of where we came from.” For R, it is more about representing her parents and family “to pursue goodness, to live life in empathy and kindness … to let people whom I value know that I love them before we all turn to dust, and to continue being a good person until the end of my days.”
C, R, F and I feel that, for as challenging as our varied immigrant experiences were, our parents ultimately made the right decision to immigrate. Perhaps we would’ve handled things differently than they did or could’ve been more generous in trying to understand them, but the one lesson that we all learned from our parents was how to be resilient in the face of hardships and losses. Meeting again as adults, C, R, F and I have been delightfully surprised that our “most authentic selves became friends [in childhood], and that part of us is still inside each one.” But we also are different for having immigrated. C is confident that she is “a better person because I left my ‘comfort zone.’ I became more hardworking as an individual, became more independent, more confident to make my own decisions.” For F, Australia has provided her with opportunities to travel with her family — she’s been able to take her kids to the Philippines to explore their heritage and looks forward to taking a trip with them one day to England and Estonia to learn more about the other half of their bloodline. For me, it was easier to fit in with American democratic/liberal values and social ideals, especially with regard to gender roles and expectations. I felt damaged in so many ways by a misogynist Filipino culture that at once objectified but also repressed women. In the US, I felt free to be me.
Which is perhaps why I find personally troubling recent policies in the US that seek to reverse the gains of the women’s and civil rights movements; that suppress for all but the elite pathways to “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”; and that erode democracy and the rule of law. Immigrants often don’t take these freedoms for granted because they know what it’s like to live without or to fight for them. Immigrant families such as ours made the difficult decision to leave home and loved ones on the simple promise of the American Dream. As our accounts have shown, C, R, F and I recognize how fortunate we are to have made the immigrant journey. More than most, we immigrants feel we must prove ourselves worthy contributors to our communities and adopted countries — securing employment even if it means taking jobs we’re overqualified for; spending time and resources getting an additional degree(s), despite having already earned advanced degrees from our home countries that aren’t recognized by our adopted countries; getting over culture shock and incidents of racism and discrimination; and moving forward despite multiple traumas and challenges. Yes, we are fortunate for all that the US and Australia has made possible in our lives. But especially at a time when both countries are engaged in debates about restricting pathways to immigration, we ought to recognize that contributions flow the other way as well. Immigrants are who keep the Dream alive for all seekers. It is our commitment to working hard, being resilient, and sharing knowledge, skills and the best of ourselves that helps build a “more perfect union” wherever we are in the world.
