Coming Out, Coming Home

Adolfo Aranjuez

You know how they say travel changes people? How being thrust into a foreign context inevitably forces you to reconsider what you find ‘right’ or ‘good’, and which parts of yourself you are comfortable with? Well, naff as it may sound, it’s true – at least in my experience. (Totally authoritative, relying on a significant sample size of one, but as they say: write what you know.)

I’m not talking about my trip to Japan in September 2016 – solo, after I’d broken up with a boyfriend who, shall we say, I had deemed lacking (but whose birthday present for me, in the form of a plane ticket, I decided to stay in a relationship with). Nor the incredibly portentous, but in the end rather pleasant, trip I made back to the Philippines, the motherland, over Christmas that same year (conservative Catholic family learns to embrace initially threatening queer boy with weird hair and tatts). Nor the fancy-as trip to Thailand in July 2018, all expenses forked out by the kingdom itself because I’m an impressive queer whose queer expertise is extensive enough to merit my presence at an LGBT+ conference (y’know, as the token Q in a sea of alabaster Gs).

No, I’m talking about the protracted, life-changing trip I made in 2003: to Australia as an international student. You could say being an international student is the ultimate form of travel. You’re visiting, but also kind of staying. You’re not just shedding the trappings of your usual life for several months tops; you’re changing core elements of your personality to adapt to an entirely new environment.

My parents wanted to ship me off, at fifteen, to a Western country because, as they put it, ‘There’s no future for someone so brilliant in the Philippines.’ To accomplish their goal, which we’ll call ‘The Plan’, they paraded me through various American cities – San Francisco, LA, Reno, Vegas; then to the east: New York, Richmond, DC, Jersey – in the hope that I’d fall for of one of those potential future homes. But I was (and remain) a picky bitch.

The Philippines-based Australian consul general (a tennis friend of my parents’ – which betrays my disgustingly privileged upbringing) tipped them off that international students in Australia could apply for permanent residence after two years in the country. This was true at that time, before immigration laws changed, so they swapped the Land of the Free for the Land Down Under. Sydney was in their sights – it was big, it was booming – but I got there and . . . no. Melbourne wasn’t even in their purview, which was weird because my Ate (older sister) was already there, completing her master’s. But life has a penchant for throwing curveballs: we detoured there to attend her wedding and, golly, was I bewitched by the place. Like most romances, it’s difficult to explain – something about the wide streets and leafy trees; the grey-white light of mid-morning; the temperamental rain and the smell of wet grass recalling Manila after a monsoon.

This is a sprawling origin story, I know. But the backdrop for the seismic disruption that was to occur in my life is important: the dislocation wasn’t only geographical – it was also about affect, culture, intent.

Back home, my life was pretty set-up. You may have guessed by now that I’m a huge overachiever, and that overachievement was in full flight by the time I migrated. I was on track to become the school paper’s editor-in-chief and graduate top of my class, while also kicking butt in choir, mathletics, cheerleading, the school council, and so on. Admittedly, I had no real friends, and my sense of self was entirely grounded in accomplishment. Plus, I felt my parents’ love was conditional on me bringing home another award or performing in another talent show, or two, or five. But this was my life. While I really did fall for Melbourne, my parents’ decision to extract me from my stable, streamlined Manila life, without my consent, was pretty fucked: I had to discard everything I’d built up to that point and start all over again.

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My relationship with my birthplace is much the same as my relationship with my family: rocky, and replete with both affection and avoidance. I was my parents’ golden child – a trophy they could wave around at family reunions. Lots of passive-aggression and guilt-tripping were deployed to make me play piano or sing for relatives, even when I was shit-scared. And the compliments were often backhanded: but how come I ‘only’ got second prize in that last school competition? Until early adolescence, I was obedient and hardly spoke up at all – the consummate child for the traditional Asian family, for whom kids should be seen, not heard.

I loved school, though. There, I felt an immense sense of mastery over my life; I did what I wanted, worked hard and got results. I suppose this engendered a fabricated sense of belonging or purpose, compared to my stifled silence at home; it was at school that I could be myself.

High school is infamous for being a pressure cooker of hormones and emotions and existential crises: Who am I? What do I want to be when I grow up? Why does this pimple keep reappearing on my chin? But being booted off to another country by your own parents, who have the gall to not move there with you (Ate took on de facto parenting duties, bless her – apparently she felt responsible for me because it was by her request that I was conceived in the first place) certainly intensified things for me. And it really was tough: the increased independence, coupled with Australia’s secularism, led me to question and soon abandon my faith. My mental-health issues also made themselves felt around this time – I developed anorexia and did some self-harming, with the first blushes of yet-to-be-diagnosed bipolar and anxiety soon to follow. Geographical distance catalysed an increasing emotional rift between me and my parents, and the more I came of age, the more the chasm between us – which had always been there, seething beneath the surface of ceremony and courtesy and my striving to be the perfect child – solidified.

You could say my parents really messed up by sending me to live in a liberal Western country: in Australia, their silent, servile child couldn’t stay silent or servile for long. Then again, they’d messed up earlier than that by sending me to a cosmopolitan, English-speaking, super-prestigious inner-city private school whose corridors have been graced by the offspring of celebrities, diplomats, media figures, artists, sportspeople and expats. In both cases, I know my parents were doing the best they could. It’s said that we inevitably regurgitate the parenting styles we’re exposed to, and the world was very, very different in their youths – though Mom grew up rich and Dad working-class, both were similarly expected to be deferential and defined by their achievements. Perhaps they just miscalculated, with my rigorous education breeding in me a rebellious philosopher instead of a hyper-qualified follower.

Thankfully, school in Melbourne offered sanctuary once again. By the end of Term 1, I’d re-established my overachiever status: four school bands, the school play, school council, yearbook editor, debating team, accelerated-learning program, A+ average. On top of that, I’d achieved something I never had before: I actually made friends. Within six months I’d even come out to the whole school and, two months later, I had a boyfriend (who, seven months later, would cheat on me on a school trip to Paris – but that is an essay for another time, likely a confessional one on anxious-attached dating styles).

Another naff trope we all know and love (to hate) is the ‘bumpy coming-out’ episode, and mine, shamefully, matched this trope to a T. Everyone in my family always sort of knew, but it was at the six-months-in-Melbourne mark that I made it official: first to my sister, then my mother and, finally, my father. Dad reportedly didn’t eat properly for a month afterwards, and I discovered later that he’d grovelled to Ate’s then-husband, begging him to teach me to ‘be a man’. I thought my mother was on side, but Ate soon clued me in to Mom’s secret whispers of longing that I would one day ‘just find a wife’ so that I could ‘give her grandkids and not be lonely’.

I’d anticipated this antipathy. Identity in the Philippine context is heavily premised on communalism: anything said about you is said about your family. So there’s a lot of pressure to blend in, to be ‘respectable’, to do things ‘right’. While the Philippines is broadly accepting of queerness, thanks in part to pre-colonial conceptions of gender that transcend the binary (bakla, an expansive term that lacks a true English counterpart, for instance, tends to be translated to ‘gay’ even if it spans a range of identities across the Western gender and orientation spectrums), this acceptance is complicated by class and status. In my case, bourgeois Manila society would have frowned upon me identifying as, not to mention performing the identity of, a bakla. Homonormativity – that desire to ‘pass’ as a member of the majority, to appear straight-adjacent and conservative-approximate – permeates everyday life, so queerness is reined in through play-acting what a ‘normal’ cisgender, heteronormative person would deem palatable. And this isn’t even to broach the still deeply-rooted influence of the Catholic Church, which literally demonises queerness.

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One of the first things I learnt in Australia was the phrase ‘She’ll be right.’ It wasn’t clear to me who the mysterious ‘she’ was, but the sentiment quickly piqued my curiosity and captured my imagination. More than just a stock saying, ‘She’ll be right’ is a philosophy for life, a mode of being in the world. This optimistic phrase encapsulates Australia’s predominant laidback ethos – informed, arguably, by centuries of serendipitous luck (what country just strikes gold?), isolation and relative safety from invaders (the irony!), and vast expanses of land and resources. It embodies a stoic attitude towards hardship as well – one that conflicted with my overachieving life, which had always been about pushing against, pushing away, pushing and pushing until everything was ‘fixed’ and my body and brain had reached their limit.

The prevailing migrant narrative is one of always doing more than expected, to the point of effacing yourself. And this is heritable: speaking anecdotally, I’ve found that second- and third-generation migrant folks exemplify this in their often-stereotyped, but nevertheless observable, work ethic, their frugality, their success. Privilege aside, self-effacement was key to my own upbringing. Growing up in the context that I did, I consciously amassed tools with which to dodge unpleasant situations, suck it up, shut up and put on the best face. Why wasn’t I like all the other boys? Why couldn’t I just do what Tita (aunty) asked one more time? Why didn’t I have a girlfriend? Little did I know that, in Australia, this crafty resilience would serve me well – as a queer person.

Coming out, like moving countries, is a journey: you’ve got a target destination, even if the direction you take to get there isn’t all that clear. At the same time that you labour, pushing feet against pavement, you also have to let the road take you where it leads. You both know and don’t know what you’re doing, so you have to settle in – and surrender – to the movement. I took heart in the Aussie brand of Zen. Divorced from familial expectations and the familiar context of Philippine Catholic conservatism, I had to not only grow up pretty damn quickly, but also learn to embrace my distinctive tribulations. The completely unnatural upheaval that coincided with puberty forced me to really think about who I wanted to be and what I wanted to do with the rest of my life: not just to keep kicking butt at school, at work and in relationships, but also, ultimately, to be happy.

There are things you can fix and things you file away or feel your way through because they ‘become right’ in their own time. In two years, I’d finished high school (graduating dux, of course), applied for another student visa, finished uni (with a high distinction average), applied for temporary residence, almost got deported but managed to secure permanent residence. Ten years after first immigrating to Melbourne, I finally got my citizenship (at the ceremony, I was given a certificate and a native grass; the latter died within a week because this impressive queer has no clue how plants work). I’ve sped through this part of the narrative not because it’s irrelevant – it amounted to a decade of living, waiting, wondering whether The Plan and my happiness would ever eventuate – but because, when it comes down to it, it isn’t special. All migrants go through a bumpy path to citizenship, and despite the dark place I went to when faced with the prospect of deportation, my experiences were nothing compared to the devastating difficulties that asylum seekers, less fortunate migrants and Australia’s First Nations peoples go through.

Still, there’s something compelling about the specific, intertwining experiences of queerness and migration. Much like how I managed to eke out for myself a place in this land I now call home, a ‘new normal’ has emerged in my family dynamic – not a fully-fledged embrace of my bakla ‘tendencies’ per se, but a respect for my assuredness in owning who I am and my ardent advocacy for others to be able to do the same. In my overachiever life, too, I’ve broken new ground in terms of meshing my values with my accomplishments, and understanding that the person I am is so much more than the next accolade or sought-after byline. Most significantly, my queerness is now manifest to its maximal degree – and at no other point in my life have I loved myself sick.

This descriptor, queer, can’t help but remind me of the critical framework of ‘queering’: going against the grain of a text or artwork, or prying deeper to uncover alternative, sometimes unintended, readings. Because identity is eternally in-process. Ideological constructions such as ‘gay’, ‘Filipino’ and ‘Australian’ are so fallible, and frequently fail to embody the shifting, ever-evolving notions that we’re trying to pin down. I’m a naturalised Australian, the processual suffix highlighting that I’m forever locked in a struggle of reaffirming that I belong. Never just natural, I’ll keep getting asked, ‘Where are you really from?’ In much the same way, my queer identity is processual because I’m constantly changing. The word itself – signifying ‘weird’, ‘odd’, ‘left of centre’, ‘going against the grain’ – encapsulates what I’m about, encompassing sexual attraction, gender performance, even overall lifestyle. It’s an acknowledgement that fixity is fallible, that perhaps it is always an illusion. The journey – to find home, to embrace myself – continues.