1.
They are almost the size of kitchen ranges, these boxes made of corrugated cardboard and sealed with packing tape, overstuffed with items like canned corned beef, Vienna sausage, bagged potato chips, and foil-wrapped chocolate bars. We bring them with us every time we fly back to the Philippines; they are our silent stowaways. In the days leading up to our flight out, they sit next to large suitcases in our living room, top flaps agape, as my parents debate in Tagalog about what should go in next:
— Kasya kaya dito ang isang spiral ham?
— Spiral ham? Yung nabibili sa Costco?
— Oo. Yung naka-vacuum pack.
— (rummages through box) Kung mga limang pounds ang timbang kasya siguro.
— (pause) Kailangan bang naka-ice pack?
— Hindi na, cured yan! Ganong katagal ba flight natin?
— Mga labing-anim na oras, straight flight tayo. Sana naman hindi ma-delay o magka-problema ang flight natin.
— (pause) Pwede bang idagdag yung ham para isa bawat isang pamilya?
— Pwedeng pwede. Magkakasya pa dito ang isa, doon sa isang kahon kasya pa siguro mga tatlo.
— O sige, dagdagan natin! Para masaya sa Noche Buena!
— (chuckling) Magugustuhan nila yan, imported kasi!
Once each box is filled just shy of bursting, my dad weighs it on a bathroom scale to ensure that it doesn’t exceed the airline’s allowance for checked baggage. Some boxes are so large that they cannot be balanced on a single scale, making it necessary to use two scales, one placed underneath each side of the box — far enough under for the weight to register properly, but not so far that the box obscures the window for the scale’s dial. After the weighing, my dad closes each box and applies a generous amount of tape to secure the flaps and reinforce the corners. The last step is for my dad to write, in his trademark fine printing, my maternal grandmother’s name and address — Lucy Cruz, 93 Blumentritt St., San Juan, Metro Manila, Philippines 1500 — on the outside of the box, to protect against accidental loss.
These boxes are balikbayan boxes, staples of any returning Filipino’s luggage, whose chief objectives are to maximize storage capacity and to minimize weight. From a design perspective, ergonomics and convenience are clear afterthoughts: the boxes are unwieldy despite measures like lashing with rope to facilitate handling. Lugging them around the airport is Olympic-level difficult. Removing one of these boxes from the baggage carousel is always a two-person affair: my dad has to pull the box from the conveyor belt while I steady the baggage cart below, such is the transfer of force when the box hits the cart.
Once we arrive at my grandmother’s house in Manila, the boxes are hauled up a narrow flight of wooden stairs to a frigid air-conditioned room in which my extended family are gathered, eager to see this trip’s bounty, each family member wondering whether their individual request has been remembered. A utility knife slices open each box, an ad hoc caesarean, and one by one, the contents are removed:
Ansbert (my cousin). Tita, nakapagdala ka ba ng KitKat?
Mom. Siyempre naman, kasi kabilin bilinan mo yan.
Ansbert, chewing. Mmmm. Talagang ibang iba ang lasa ng mga chocolate na dala ninyo kaysa sa nabibili dito! Fresh na fresh. Salamat, Tita! Kaya ikaw ang paborito kong Tita!
Dad, from across the room. Pakilagay na muna ninyo itong mga ham sa ref! May instructions yan kung papano lutuin. Siguradong magugustuhan ninyo yan, tunay na tunay na ham yan!
Every time we go back, my extended family celebrates this doling out of pasalubong, gifts from the other side of the world. Like seventeenth-century seafarers, my family has returned from our voyage from afar with plunder, plunder to divide among our landlubbing financiers. Of course, in the case of my family, no actual money is contributed by our patrons; rather, the cost borne by my grandparents, my aunts, and my uncles is my parents’ absence, a cost that incurs a debt that is compounded every passing year, a debt that is paid back over time in monthly remittances and regular phone calls, a debt for which these small gifts serve as mere tokens. Each time we leave the Philippines, there is an unspoken question: after you leave, will you remember us?
My parents emigrated from the Philippines in their twenties, shortly after I was born, in search of a better life and greater opportunity. For them, each trip back is a family reunion and a repatriation, a return to the place where their parents and siblings live, the place in the world where they will always feel at ease and in their element. Every time we are in the Philippines, we spend an inordinate amount of time being driven in mammoth-sized SUVs through standstill traffic to and from the houses of relatives serving large, sumptuous meals. Growing up, I thought that these vacations were nothing more than a carnival of gluttony and self-indulgence, until I got older and realized that these weeks we were spending with my relatives were my parents’ attempt to make up for lost time, to cram all of those missed birthday parties and celebratory dinners and Christmastime festivities into one hard binge, a family-time bonanza.
There is a phrase in Tagalog, utang na loob, which translates literally to “a debt of the inside,” although there is something lost in translation here, as the phrase references a concept that goes deeper than regular, run-of-the-mill debt, and the inside being referred to here is the inside of a person — namely, the person who owes the debt. The phrase refers to a debt that is immeasurably large, unquantifiable, and almost unpayable, a debt that is owed from something deep within the inner self of the debtor, perhaps something from within the debtor’s very soul. It is a phrase that has no real analogue in the English language. I have seen it translated sometimes as “debt of gratitude,” although this isn’t quite the same.
Most years we visit the Philippines, we make it a point to travel to Cabanatuan, the place where my dad was born, a more rural part of the Philippines compared to Manila, where my mom grew up. Depending on traffic, it takes about three or four hours to drive there from my grandmother’s house. Rice fields flank the roads leading there; carabaos dot the horizon. The main roadway is a narrow two-laner, with one lane in each direction and no median barriers, and so it feels perilous for us to overtake slow-moving traffic, which we are often forced to do because of the proliferation of tricycles and other slower means of local transport.
Shortly after arriving in Cabanatuan one year, my dad announces that we are going to visit “The Doctor,” the person who, he explains, paid for all five years of his tuition at the University of Santo Tomas, an act of generosity that laid the foundation for my dad to be able to pursue a lifelong career as a pharmacist. The Doctor turns out to be a wiry Filipino man with a closely cropped head of white hair who lives in a large house at the end of a dusty road. After being introduced, I notice that The Doctor often repeats himself and sometimes appears to forget what he is talking about. Still, my dad engages him in respectful conversation as if nothing were wrong and asks him about their shared past, which prompts The Doctor to respond genially. After listening to them for a while, I get the sense that The Doctor has only a vague recollection of who my dad is. Despite this, I can tell that it is important to my dad that we have come here, and that he pays his respects.
A few years after I graduate from university, my maternal grandmother and three of my mom’s sisters and their immediate families all come to visit us in Canada. It is the largest planned gathering of my extended family outside of Asia; in total, there are fifteen of them, enough for a rugby team. For my mom, my dad, my sisters, and me, it is our opportunity to finally reciprocate the hospitality that has been extended to us each time we return to the Philippines. Some family members stay with my parents at their modest two-storey home, and others stay at my newly constructed townhouse nearby. After a day of getting settled in, we drive everyone to many of the usual Ontario tourist traps (Niagara Falls, the CN Tower, and SkyDome), then we rent two boat-sized vans and drive down to the States, where we visit New York City and Atlantic City (my grandmother is fond of casinos). For these few weeks, we all keep close quarters: when we aren’t crammed into the tiny seats of those rented vans, we are crammed into small three-star hotel rooms, or else we are back in Oakville where we are crammed into either my house or my parents’ house, both of which have been converted into makeshift hostels for a few weeks, always abuzz with activity. It all reminds me of our trips to the Philippines; the cast is the same, only the backdrop has changed.
One afternoon at my parents’ house, while the rest of the family is getting ready to leave for one of our planned outings, I catch one of my aunts looking at the view from my parents’ living room window. Turning to face me, she says, “Look, there are no people walking in the streets here — life is so lonely in Canada!” I remember feeling a sudden urge to tell her that this is an unfair comparison because my parents’ house is located in a quiet suburban neighbourhood and that this is far from how all Canadians live, but then I pause and realize that she is specifically referring to my parents’ experience of Canadian life, which is lonely, at least compared to the life they had in the Philippines. In that moment, I see clearly the life that my parents left behind: a life of company and bustle, of noisy mealtimes and street food vendors, of TV shows and movies in which they got all the jokes, of pouring rain and city-wide flooding, of near-constant close proximity with family members, of a language and a culture of which they were in full command. It is the world that I always get a taste of when I visit the Philippines, the world I am getting a taste of again as my extended family spends time with us here. This is the life that my parents have to steel themselves to abandon in order to be able to provide for us and for everyone else that matters to them. Such is the plight and the irony of all transglobal economic migrants: sometimes, the best way to show your love is to leave.
Once, I have to lift a balikbayan box by myself. The box has fallen off the baggage cart that I am in charge of pushing, likely because I was too hasty in loading it onto the cart at the carousel. The box hits the floor with a muffled thud. My dad has gone ahead with our passports and declaration forms to line up at the customs area, followed by my mom and sisters, all of whom are eager to exit the airport and see our extended family gathered like groupies just outside the concourse doors. I struggle to lift the box for several minutes, with little success. After a while, I discover that I can raise the box a few inches off the ground if I wedge a foot underneath it and kick while stabilizing the box on either side with my hands. This, I realize, allows me to lift the box just high enough to plant the edge onto the cart’s platform, and from there, with a strong heave, I can push the rest of the box onto the cart — voila! Once the box is secure on the cart, I walk briskly to catch up with my family at the customs area, where I know I will find them, waiting in line for me.