.png)
I have not been back to the Philippines since 1997.
Growing up, we went every other year. My parents would stitch the trip together with stops in Hawaii or Korea or Japan, and underneath all of it ran a single quiet message that I did not fully understand until I was much older. Your life is so different because we left. They said it with love, and with a kind of weight I can only name now that I am the one carrying a family. They wanted me to know what was given up so that I could have what I have.
This year I turn fifty. And for the first time in almost three decades, I am going home.
The Thread That Never Goes Slack
I keep using that word, home, even though I have spent my whole adult life somewhere else. That is the strange math of being the child of immigrants. There is the place that made you, and the place your parents came from, and they are not the same place, and yet some thread runs between them that never quite goes slack. For most of my life that thread has just been there, humming in the background. This summer I am following it all the way back.
“Your life is so different because we left.”
When the Stories Become a Place
My kids are coming with me. They have never seen where their grandparents grew up. They have heard the stories, the way you hear stories about a country that exists mostly in photographs and the smell of certain foods. Now they will stand in the actual streets. They will meet the actual people. I do not have words for what it will mean to watch their faces when the stories become a place they can touch.
More Than a Vacation
There is so much packed into this trip that calling it a vacation feels almost dishonest. Yes, there will be beaches and too much food and the good kind of exhaustion. But there is also history in it. Reflection. A birthday that marks a real turn in the road. And a question I have carried quietly for years, the one that lives just under the surface whenever I think about that message my parents repeated: what would my life have been like, if they had stayed?
Going Back Is Its Own Answer
I am not going to find a clean answer. That is not how these questions work. But I think going back is its own kind of answer. You return to where the thread begins, and you bring the people you love, and you let the place hold all of it at once, the gift and the cost and the gratitude and the ache.
This is a homecoming. I will be sharing pieces of it with you as we go. Thank you for being here for the tender ones.