Visiting the Motherland

alone

At NAIA

Slapped in the face with the heat

sweat from the humidity

Finally understanding my handkerchief

Its purpose before wasn’t clear to me

no use in the dry California desert

In the air conditioned classrooms

but it still went to school with me

Was this the homecoming I was looking for?

Walking on the streets, stepping up on high sidewalks

High enough so cars wouldn’t drive over them

feeling like a foreigner

Karaoke bars off scout Santiago

streetlights

And abs-cbn just around the corner

Mom said, from the province to the manila was like going to the future,

I guess if you aren’t undocumented, going from the Philippines to the US must be good – like going to heaven.

Eastern visayas

Number 1

poorest region in the Philippines

bed for decades of the revolution

Ravaged by

Yolanda

home of

Nona, Ruby, Pablo

no flushing toilet

Tubs gathering rain water for bathing, drinking, washing dishes

dirt roads patched only sometimes with concrete,

politicians

promising it to be finished another day

when there was enough money

I came for all this

I came to help.

I planned to take home goods to sell.

In Jaro I observed the NGO workers in a barangay

Reducing risks in disasters

Conducted in waray waray

Translated into English and then into humanitarian

For me, the voluntourist

Thinking there was no way I understand them.

wait, i know tiis

mom sometimes went to the market and not home to eat

My uncle drove a pedi-cab and sold balut at night

And my grandpa had a banka he used to go up the river to gather rice

i know tiis

I know

what our language sounds like

Where to point on map where my family is from

How to answer someone when they ask me “so what are you?”

I look Filipino

I guess

I only ride a pedi-cab at san pedro square

Or never knew that grandpa harvested and milled rice before he cooked it

your daughter in the seat of hegemony

wait, i know tiis

i know tiis

aunts and uncles picking grapes in Delano

cousins Fishing in alaska

I thought of elementary school teachers turned jcpenny warehouse workers

doctors turned caregivers

paper parole making in the library

church collections for typhoon relief

3 families to an apartment

Trading in the electric bill for this month remittance

cots no beds

Explaining

she doesn’t know english

Avoiding ICE and buying phone cards

Was this the homecoming I was looking for?

my world crashing together

Filling in a map of rich and poor

In points and places

Of renters and landlords

In the fields

And on the apartment plantation

I see

houses torn down in the no build zone

And in the Guadalupe creek

Of

Many people not belonging anywhere

No where to call home

I see

Moving communities to create luxury buildings

with the guidance of the government and its police

And then the advantaged volunteering to be help

Semblance of war and colonization

A steady of my earlier vertigo

Without my ancestors

Or identity

Tracing

back to where we were dispossessed

Pushed

by invisible righteous markets

“saving”

me

a “better” life

but

no land

just rent

my settlement

the feeling

of being forced in many directions

lost on the land I live

because my family never stopped renting

since the day we came here

Deportation, divorce, disownment

Thrice broken, once mended

over the same sea

the story of

being filipino american