Tuloy po kayo, welcome, I was hoping half expecting a warm welcome in August of 1972 when I landed at JFK.

Above Manila’s 104 degree Fahrenheit tarmac voices wafted, chased by hunger pangs diseases of injustice 400+-years pummeling under colonial fists in the open air rising.

Vice President George Bush toasted President Ferdinand Marcos for his “adherence to democratic principles and the democratic process” while high school students university protesters were gunned down running towards the mountains.

“Run off. You have to hurry. So we don’t have to worry.” Dad had me lean on his shoulder. “Your Mom will get you what you need when you get to New York.” Handed me a small suitcase tucked with dreams of farmers and women in saya scurrying to market each day before the sun blazed across the sky. I could hear a high school’s sweet heart crying breaking in the shadows. Some dried mangoes wrapped in secret pockets.

Paalam! Good-bye my birth country! I had to turn away throwing kisses teary-eyed.

Half a heart departing, the TWA engine whirring towards half of Earth away: Two years, tops! I promised to myself. In two years I shall return!

I sprinted towards the red white and blue on skinny legs skimpy in mini-skirt and suitcase overstuffed with confusion, pain looking back at a school mate’s death by political protest by pillbox his 15-year-old brain matter lay sprawled his young life mattered! Our future mattered! unidentifiable on a bloody Manila street.

Tuloy po kayo. Welcome to your new home, to America, where hospitality on gold-paved roads awaits. But what awaited across a port of entry immigration line, cubicle after cubicle behind Honolulu glass were questions, short and glaring: “Where do you come from?” I searched for Mom’s image waiting behind the New York City greeting gate, her big hug her warmth squeezed in my memories, wrenched we were both from our ancestral farms, our maternal bond lopped by a three thousand dollar one-way plane ticket indebted.

I come from adventurous watery spirits
Who traveled far and wide
Hopping island to island
Across ocean waters salty
Hawk eyes on sea legs
Joyous laughter navigating
No destination in mind—

“Are you a communist?” “Do you have communist affiliations?

At 16 years old my knuckles my gut I tightened across sea to shining sea longing, clinging to hope in a freshly laminated card flashing green.

At 17 newly minted working papers one hundred thirty five dollars a week on a high school diploma I jumped up and down as news flashed across 1970s dark drapes inside a temporary small walk-up in Jersey City—The Philippines descends into martial law Nixon resigns a car honks I was banking tears of yearning I was earning.

At 24 lost and shivering I clutched my pocketbook closed the flap of my trench coat and ran away from jubilant handshakes in business suits descending the steps of New York City Hall—I had reached the bottom steps alone, breathless and empty and puzzled.

“We’re American citizens! Isn’t it great?” A smiling stocky man in a dark brown suit waved an American flag in miniature and grinned alongside me. “Where are you from?”
“Queens—I mean, the Philippines.
“Where is that? In Africa?”
“It’s in Asia. You know, where China and Japan are.”
“Oh! Everybody wants to become an American. I think I will go see the Statue of Liberty. I love it in America. In the Soviet Union, life is so hard. Everything you want you can buy it here. In the Soviet Union, the stores are empty. How long have you been in America?”
“Me? Seven years. That’s right. Seven years last month—”
“Five years. After five years I become citizen. Why you not become citizen right away?”
“I, I was working —
“I don’t know why you wait.”
“Why? I mean—Don’t you want to go back to Russia some day?”
“Oh no. No! I do not want to go back.”
[I had to stare, quietly.]
“If I visit I cannot come back. I do not want to go back.”
“I have family and friends I love back home.”
“I have no family. Me—I want to be free!”
~o~

Stunning. The judge in formal black robe had appeared inside the big hall beyond the heavy columns. “Welcome.” He addressed the crowd. “Welcome one and all, on behalf of the citizens of the United States of America.” [Yankee Doodle Dandy began in accompaniment. Tuloy po kayo.] I raise my right hand. “I want to stress the importance of each and everyone’s commitment to this country’s democratic ideals.” [A flourish.] “Everyone please form a line.” A procession cut across my vision. A priest holding up a cross is followed by pall bearers who carry a coffin and march to Lenten music. My teenage self in black toga and cap followed, head bowed, clutching my rosary. A Marikina farmer with rolled up trousers and white chino behind me; and so was half of the Judge’s congregation. The other half made an about-face to follow the Judge, who settled behind a table counter. Citizenship candidates faced the robed man, handing over documents.“Immunization records?” “Passports?” “Completed application?” “Green card, please—Anxious whispers intensified to protests through the crowd. “Surrender your green cards please!” What if they have to go through the process again? “Have you had any communist affiliations?” “Why do you want to come to America?” “How does a bill become a law?”The Judge’s gavel pounded. “Everyone has been accepted! No one will be turned down for citizenship today!” Right hand raised, his voice boomed. A call, a demand, for response. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.” [A row of blue sheets is raised to the rafters. Like sheep the crowd followed suit.] “… and to the Republic for which it stands.” “One Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”[A row of white sheets is raised just above blues.] A congregation in unison, a mass prayer. “I hereby declare!” “I hereby declare!”“On oath!” “On oath!”“That I absolutely and entirely renounce!” [Stiffening I stifled.] “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity!” [I mouthed words.]“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen!” “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” [I muted.]In loud cheer the crowd burst. [A row of red sheets raised above whites and blues.] My knees shook. Celebrants exchanged vigorous handshakes. I heard a door slam— ~o~Tuloy po kayo. Tuloy po kayo. At age 65 shy of half a country half a heart I have to witness masked men and women march up stone steps, through the pillars of the Capitol, shaking fists, loudly renouncing declaring allegiance and fidelity not to this House—While my immigrant suitcase stayed put; brimming with two children one recovered from leukemia one thriving with ADHD one grandchild biracial on a donated Filipina egg a Wall Street career one marriage one divorce community advocacy a complete hysterectomy a graduate degree obesity diabetes a 2-bedroom downtown apartment with an unobstructed view beyond city birch of the Freedom Tower.Why do you want to stay in America? Have you had any antidemocratic affiliations? Anti united states for which we stand?Are you able to read, to write to qualify for a Green card interrogation—Keep moving then. Tuloy tuloy na kayo. Be on your way, please. Exit this citizenship line. Tuloy tuloy na po. If you abjure all allegiance and fidelity to our House.After a 50-year American apprenticeship, dare I insist? That citizenship be fully understood, embraced, earned, over and over and over again. Each immigrant suitcase be re-opened re-examined re-filled on our ever-moving two-century-old conveyor belt. Re-naturalized! Tuloy po kayo. Please stay. Otherwise, tuloy tuloy na po kayo.

When I was 11, on a day when the rains had just let up, I rushed out the back door to Blumentritt in search of a red delicious apple for my mother. Mom could not keep anything down, vomiting relentlessly as if her insides could not stomach the foreign creature within. “Giving birth to another life is excruciating!,” she’d expel, a teacherly emphasis on that word, excruciating.

All my ministrations did not seem to matter: soothing caresses of her emaciated hands, arms; sips of water, measured ever so carefully as I gently lifted her head; and cool compresses on her dripping forehead and cheeks. She was wretched, wretching, moaning to no one in particular. Her frame had shriveled to skin and bone, her beauty-pageant face twisted in pain. I thought to myself how she must have been pampered as an only child; first to be served at the table, dressed and tresses combed by a maid. Over hill and valley, through the raging river at times, Mom was escorted to and from school, excursions she endured during bad weather with the aid of a beautiful red parasol gifted her by my Lola. In Lola’s mind, and mine, red carried Mom through hard times.

“I'll come back'" I had whispered to her, before leaving through the back door. Abed upstairs was Dad; in his usual drunken stupor I expected him to awaken with violent tantrums when the sun began to set. Inang was away to care for another grandchild. I had turned to the stony likeness of the Virgin Mary whose once-blue cape draped ashen like Mom’s face. I knelt and laid my questioning heart at her immaculate feet. Why would Mom with child be suffering so? Hail Mary full of grace. I touched her plastered countenance and closed my eyes tightly, if only to drown out her wailing—and the dread of having to lift Mom’s fragile body again and replace another sheet she’s bloodied over a banig mat.

Once outside our wooden house I stood on slightly raised ground but I felt water on my knees as I exited the back gate and passed the old cinema. The heavy rain had quieted, but left in its wake tributaries that connected our house to San Juan’s marketplace. One unsteady wooden plank overlaid into another, over the floodwaters that flowed further out into the main street of N. Domingo, where young men hand-paddled boards to take townspeople from house to house, house to church, house to hospital.

Over the market entrance gutters, past squatting mothers and daughters tending baskets of calamansi citrus and devil-hot sili; beyond the makeshift bamboo stands heaped with fresh harvests of sineguelas and guayabano, eggplant and cabbages, my slippery rubber slippers navigated the watery labyrinth of tiled stalls, dripping chopped goat and pig and gutted river fish at the market’s deep interior. There, on an elevated platform, stood the well-lit international store, its wooden shelves stocked with apples and grapes, corned beef and spam, and by-the-ganta white rice hand-cleaned of errant brown husks. I tucked in my belly upon ascending, very much in need of a taste of hope.

Shhhhh, I repeatedly whispered, thinking of my mother's dark fight.

Back in the small dark kitchen I unpeeled the apple’s delicate wrap and press it to my nose to inhale its richness. Knife on plate I carefully dissected the precious fruit; scooped out the seeds; and proceeded with my fractions—one quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth—estimating my mother’s mouthfuls. I decided to leave the skin. Mom loves red.

Mom pushed and screamed, pushed and screamed, for hours long after a sudden gush of water soaked the banig sheets. I recall her telling me how she had pushed and screamed, pushed and screamed until I had cut through her, and she dropped the bloody mass of me into a pail. Shaking uncontrollably, her eyes closed, I held my mother until the midwife arrived to clip the umbilical cord. No one, not even Mom has told me who cuddled me upon arrival. But at 11 years old I felt alone to catch the emptiness of my mother’s still-born child.

At 12 years old, my daughter Julia drowned in daily crying fits.

Shhhhh, I whispered, intermittently throughout her each day, my focus on her dark fight within. She was sad to miss a midtown concert, an impromptu pizza get-together, with her middle-school friends after the bell rang on the Upper West Side. Because she dreaded the long commute. Because her new home became the less desirable outer borough of Queens. Because her mother abruptly decided to pack up and leave the family’s Manhattan apartment, and separate from her father.

Shhhhh. I quietly held on to Julia, tightly. Only after many years of silence would she tell me how worried she was. For me. For her mother. And how hard she tried to gather strength. To stop the fuzzy feeling of helplessness; at being unable to prevent my imminent collapse from deep pain.

Shhhhh. Each day I reach out to my daughter, on FaceTime, the phone; holding on to her image, to her voice. Tightly. To be my child’s anchor. To be each other’s anchor.

Naglulupasay! Kicking and screaming on waxed wooden San Juan floors in my brand new frock, I did not want to leave the comfort of Lolo’s home for the jungles of Borneo. I cried and I cried through the entire plane ride.

The Kadazans loved to invite Dad back to their remote huts, in between his regular visits to check and spray for malaria. They trusted the brown man who slept on jungle floor overnight and grilled snakes for sustenance. But to feast on goat curry and dance to gong music, we were expected to trudge through uneven footpaths. Once I had to follow Dad to the edge of a cliff, where we could not see bottom. If he had not slammed on the brakes, our Land Rover would have scuttled a loooong way down—the road just suddenly ended! And only after a wild ride on bamboo raft down a circuitous river did we get lunch. Seeing I could not find anything to hold on to, Dad calmly instructed me to keep my balance, so I held my breath and stilled my frightened little heart.

Why do we have to leave home so many times? I was so sad, every time we left Manila. I was so sad, every time we left Borneo.

British classmates teased me because I mispronounced scissors [slowly instead of fast], misspelled aeroplane, and forgot the words to God Save the Queen. Whenever we returned to Manila, I was teased again, because I spoke with a funny accent and ate mini sausages and gherkins on toothpicks for lunch!

It couldn’t be helped, Mom tried to explain: I, too, had to leave my island when I married your Dad. Manila was a big shock People spoke a different dialect.

We couldn’t separate family, dearest—watch the crumbs dear—

At the break of dawn in the Pacific, Dad would hurry to shore to secure freshly caught tuna, sometimes the rare migratory blue fin, and set off on his land rover to visit Mom. Before he’d officially begin his rounds as Negros island’s chief malariologist, he’d head up the hill to call on his first love at first sight and deliver his daily offering—not of frivolous flowers or of commonplace fruit, but of the most heartfelt romantic bucket of wriggling sea bounty lain at Mom’s feet.

Dad wasn’t exactly handsome but had attributes attractive to Mom I assume, for why marry three months after first meet-up—much to the chagrin of my paternal clan expecting years’-long engagements aimed to prove suitors’ good intentions—through serenading, chopping wood, the whole shebang—after which maybe, just maybe, the elders would proffer the woman’s hand to the man’s family. So three months? The big shot Isagani from the big city impressed Emma; the local teacher found him suave and erudite and remarkably generous: treating not just malaria but colds and fevers and refusing money for services; though happy to accept the live chickens and fresh vegetables the locals left at his office. Dad won hearts—though apparently not everyone’s that mattered.

In his capacity as adviser to the souls of the community, Father Rowe made his objections public and warned Emma to stay away from the evil medicine man from Manila. Clearly, Emma was not moved by church directive, for she continued to accept Isagani’s overtures. Not even after she was fired from her first teaching job.

For sure Dad carried a temper, which flared when driven to the edge of reason. I learned early that he abided by a very strict moral code handed down by family and the Catholic church, though modulated by a liberal American college education. But in 1954 Cauayan, he and Mom were up against the power behind Father Rowe’s word, which was law. Mom was admonished for shamelessly cavorting in public. The esteemed Jesuit priest had reported as much, punctuating with innuendo that my mother engaged in sinful sexual acts. Mom was no longer morally qualified to teach children, the school superintendent announced.

Persistent, Dad knocked on Mom’s locked door, armed with fresh catch before his daily rounds. Each morning, he listened intently as Mom expressed how confused and pained she felt at the prospect of not being able to teach again. How could she show her face to anyone? Each day, as he descended with his army of technicians on land rovers along remote villages, his thoughts meandering, unsettled because of Mom’s suffering.

Until one hot day, when he was off to another remote site in his rounds, Dad saw the priest alight from a car onto the same mountain road. He quickly beckoned his driver to stop and jumped out. "Whatever happens here, you didn’t see anything.” He turned to reiterate instructions to his chauffer, in vernacular. “Understood?"

Dad was 5’4” at his tallest I recall, and his nemesis he took by his ungodly collar in 1954 I imagine stood upwards to 6 feet. Nevertheless, by every account Mom’s protector took an impassioned leap. But beyond the oft-repeated story that Dad beat the revered town priest to a pulp, I struggle with the suggestion that a man of God was in love with my mother. All those Sunday Catholic catechism classes deeply inculcated the notion that romantic love is forbidden to the clergy, and most certainly not directed at—and forced upon—a layperson who does not love him back. Being human, conceivably the defeated priest couldn't help being smitten with Dad’s lovely provincial teacher. And having lost his love to another man—and a brown unequal at that—the holy Father uncloaked and wrested power as colonizer to strike back at his competition and impose his will on the island beauty.

Who was the more romantic man, for Christ’s sake?