I was 22 when I first visited the Philippines. The country where my father was born, and where all of my ancestors had lived before my grandparents moved to the New World, the Land of Opportunity— the United States.
The first reckoning was before I had even left the airport terminal. “FILIPINOS,” one aisle was marked with in bold capital letters. “NON-FILIPINOS,” said the other. I stood between the two as the other passengers filed past me, confidently choosing the line they belonged in. Of course this was about what kind of passport I held, but in my sleep-deprived state it seemed like a question that rocked my very essence. My American passport suddenly felt foreign to me, despite it being my constant companion for the last several years. It named my origin, but could I claim it? After a halted breath, I chose the “Non-Filipino” line, and with each step forward, I felt the weight of that choice.
I had imagined the trip differently. In my mind, arriving in the Philippines would feel like visiting an auntie’s home, warm, familiar, welcoming, like finding a missing piece that I knew I had lost. My Lola’s nursery rhymes, the stories my Grandpapa would tell us over a few beers, the faded photographs of distant relatives that all shared my same nose, painted an idea in my head that “home” might exist somewhere across the Pacific.
The reality was, of course, much more complicated.
As soon as I opened my mouth I revealed my true origin. Most people were cordial but it was obvious that I was as much of a tourist as the Germans you saw towering above the locals. I was a visitor from a foreign land, not a lost child returning home. Shopkeepers exchanged glances and charged me 4 times the listed amount. Children peddling trinkets flocked to me. At the market, a vendor spoke to me in rapid Tagalog, until my Lola stepped in to explain that I “don’t speak”. And they laughed, warmly, but even so I recoiled.
I heard the language of my grandparents surrounding me, on every street, from the basketball courts, over the radio, in the crowded jeepney, and I ached to be able to respond. I was a mute. I was told that my grandparents would force my parents to respond in English at home, even when spoken to in Tagalog. They were worried about the bullying that was known to afflict any kid that looked vaguely Japanese or Vietnamese in those times. Now, surrounded by a language that should have been mine, I felt the loss physically as a tightness in my throat. A knot in my stomach, an isolation no amount of smiling could bridge.
I saw the airstrip my Lola used to work at as a young woman. She had only been a teenager, she’d told me, when she began selling trinkets and jam to the visiting dignitaries. Driving over the cracked tarmac, I tried to picture her: young, vibrant, unaware that she would someday leave this place. Did she stand where I was standing? What did she dream about as she watched the planes take off?
I visited the military academy that my great-uncle died at as a young man. The building was white plaster, and a little dated, but still carried the unmistakable poise of a military institution. He was a young man when he died, younger than I am now. I realized I had never asked why he’d joined, or what my family had lost when they lost him. The weight of my ignorance was unbearable.
I visited the site where a mango tree once stood, where a young girl, my Lola, stood under its branches catching the succulent yellow fruits tossed down by her brothers. The tree was long gone, replaced by concrete and corrugated aluminum. I was looking for proof that the stories were real, that my family had actual lives here, rooted and full, before it all changed.
And I felt lost.
The homecoming I had expected was shattered and replaced with the realization that I knew nothing about where my family came from, about the lives they had lead before moving to a country that forced them to avoid speaking their native tongue. I had arrived at the coordinates, but I wasn’t home.
But that isn’t the whole story just yet.
There was still warmth and recognition in this place I had never been to. In Baguio, the scent of pines mingled with the diesel and the smell of fresh pandesal wafting from the bakery. I bought some, still warm from the oven, and tore into it on the street with my mom. It was exactly as I had tasted at my Lola’s house back in Virginia, fluffy and only slightly sweet.
At the karaoke bar, I was cheered on by warm people who didn’t care that I couldn’t sing along with the Tagalog tunes on the projected screen.
The flavours I encountered filled me with an indescribable emotion that was some mixture of joy, nostalgia, and relief. The tang of tamarind in Sinigang, so alike to what my mom makes at home. Lumpia that some distant cousin pressed into my hands, insisting that I take some. “For later,” she smiled.
These moments didn’t resolve my confusion, but they softened it at least. They suggested that maybe “belonging” was something I could build over time, from an accumulation of time, kindness, small gestures, and shared laughs.
What does it mean to have a home to return to? This trip further complicated an already confused understanding of what “home” means from a kid that had to move to a new state every few years. I had already suspected that “identity” wasn’t a place I could travel to, but if it was, the Philippines was my best chance. But I’m not Filipino in the way my grandparents are, and I’m not American the way that my friends are. I exist in the hyphen between Filipino-American.
There’s a term for people who grow up between cultures: “third culture kids”, who have to build an identity out of pieces from the world their parents and grandparents came from, with pieces from the country that they’re raised in, creating something entirely their own.
Standing between the two airport lines was less of a failure to choose an identity and more of an accurate description of where I actually live.
I came looking for home and found a starting point instead. The Philippines isn’t a place I’ve returned to; it’s a place I’m meeting for the first time. My relationship with the Philippines can’t and won’t be the same as my grandparents’ relationship. But it can be mine, built over time, deliberately and with care. And unlike my grandparents who left with finality, I have the privilege of beginning again, of choosing to learn, to visit, to ask the questions I never knew to ask. The girl under the mango tree became the woman who raised my mother, who raised me. The mango tree is gone, but I’m here, and I know where it stood. I’m proof that something took root despite everything. And that, I’m learning, is enough to begin.