The privilege of coming home
There is a scene in Hannah Espia’s “Transit” that I constantly think about. The film follows an overseas Filipino worker (OFW) in Israel trying to hide his son from immigration police against a policy that refuses residency for the children of migrant workers. Once caught, his worst fears are realized as his child is deported to the Philippines, a country he has never known. Packing together for his departure, his son asks, “How do I fit the whole of Israel in one bag?”
“Transit” struck a chord because it was one of the first times I saw my own experience represented in the media. Most migration stories focus on people leaving their country of origin, reckoning with the adjustment, or following their children as they are trapped between their family’s culture and the society in which they are raised. Fewer stories cover what it means to return, either to a home that has moved on in your absence or to a place others call home but does not feel like yours.
When I was 13, I moved to the Philippines from Singapore. I had more than one bag, but even the huge balikbayan boxes we shipped did not feel nearly enough to pack up an entire life. How do you choose what to keep of your childhood—or of yourself?
I never expected to leave Singapore. I moved there as a baby and had been raised there, barring a brief period where my family followed my father to Thailand for his job. I had grown up surrounded by narratives of assimilation wherein, one day, if I was good enough, I would be granted residency, then eventually citizenship. Leaving meant giving up the narrative I had unconsciously woven about being an immigrant making it good in a diverse, multicultural city.
The losses were both real and intangible. It was in the clothes I outgrew, the books I had not read in years, and the toys I put to the side, planning to save them as memories of my youth. But it was also in my imagination of the self: When you center your dreams around the schools you will go to with friends, the hope of staying in a country you have changed yourself for to fit in, you will inevitably grieve the person you thought you would be—the future you knew and understood.
I was a returnee who barely understood the language of my birth and spoke it even less. It took years to learn, then longer to belong.
In conversations about our plans for the future, my peers often float around the idea of moving to another country, chasing a life unweighted by the problems of the third world, like poverty and corruption. Around the globe, the Filipino diaspora has set down roots, finding new nations every day to call home. Some are OFWs with plans to return to the homeland eventually; others are immigrants seeking to permanently resettle in greener pastures.
There are moral arguments about why it is important to stay in a place that both raised you and needs your help. Activists march in the streets, calling for better governance, because they believe in that obligation. If not me, then who? There are also pragmatic reasons why people leave: because of the cost of living, because of better opportunities, or because they will never be able to put a roof over their family’s heads if they do not. The reality of the Philippines, and of migration, is that people move more often than not because of factors outside their control. Where you end up, what is or becomes your home, is coincidental at best.
I lived in Singapore by coincidence, and left it in very much the same way. In my younger years, I took this unexpected exit to mean that home just did not exist. I found it hard to have the same conviction I had at 7, singing songs of a country that was never mine to claim: This is home, truly, where I know I must be, I crooned softly. Over time, my tune has changed.
When you move as much as I have, you begin to realize what home means and what it consists of. Home is where you can put down your bag. It is unpacking that bag and the boxes you shipped and the dreams you had since shuttered away, placing books on shelves and prints on walls. More than knowing where home is, it is knowing that your life can no longer be confined to a suitcase, instead sprawling across rooms, across friendships, and across the people and places you have made your own.
I arrived in the Philippines almost 10 years ago. But the process of homecoming has been far slower. I came home when I realized that I could stay—the greatest privilege of a life spent on the move.
In a country built by migrants—by the sacrifices of Filipinos often leaving and rarely returning—I hope we all have that privilege one day.
—————-
Miranda M. Autor, 22, is studying political science at the University of the Philippines Diliman. She has lived in three countries, traveled to many more, and finds traces of home in each one.
