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
