But I was lucky. Unlike the migrants of today, I was neither detained, spat on and beaten up, separated from my children and called a rapist or drug dealer by the president. Unlike Bulosan's generation of migrants in the 1930s, I wasn't denied housing, faced constant starvation, forced to do back-breaking stoop labor, endure the stink of canneries, burned and bombed out of work camps by angry whites, jailed and forced to walk on foot till my soles bled while followed by laughing cops who, after stealing my last $2, nudged me with the bumper of their car to get me to walk faster to the border.
I came by jet plane and bus, not, as with other manongs, in the dank hole of a ship and not by jumping on rail cars, enduring the cold and the sickness of other hobos, escaping from train detectives by leaping out into the dessert, sleeping in musty rooms with lice-infested blankets, forced to hide a knife under my pillow and witness other Filipinos brutally assault each other. I wasn't incarcerated in a concentration camp, lynched by white mobs, threatened for associating with white women. I was not killed nor was I driven to kill anyone. On the whole, it could've been a lot worse—as it continued then for many citizens and non-citizens alike—but at the rate things are going now, who knows? So here's to 40 years.
Lila read my palms and said I had a very short life line. There was something oddly comforting in knowing that I would not live to become an old man. That the way out would come sooner rather than later.
In September of 1996, I got news of my father’s sudden death. I was in Ann Arbor, just having finished doing a talk and seminar when I received a call from brother, David. He was sobbing, visibly shaken. He told me that my dad was at the hospital after having suffered a massive abdominal aneurism. He was bleeding to death after an artery in his stomach burst. He and my mother were coming home from a wedding, went to lunch, came home to nap when he started to complain of severe stomach pains. He began to vomit blood and collapsed, and my mom had to call the neighbors to bring him to the car and drive him to the Cardinal Santos hospital. I saw the x-rays they took afterwards of his stomach expanding, filling with fluid, then collapsing. The last photos of my dad.
I hurried to return to Manila by way of San Diego. While waiting at the airport, thoughts of death filled my mind. I found myself looking at others and imagining what they would look like dead and how they would die. I found sharing something in common with perfect strangers, realizing that we all shared the same fate as well as our ignorance about that fate. Their strangeness seemed reassuring in the face of the implacable alienness of death and I began to have compassion towards them. It was a vivid experience. I often tell this story to my students who are initially freaked out. I ask them to turn to their seatmates and imagine how they will die. Not to think of them as dead, but to think of them as headed towards death. It’s always unsettling. But there is again a weird sense of community in that unsettled feeling, a new sense of sociality amid life’s ruins.
After Thanksgiving, I was driven home last night by my 18 year old step-granddaughter and her best girl friend from birth. I sat in the back as they cranked up the music so that the entire car shook, the bass lines tearing through the doors, sending the seats trembling. I marvelled at their raw energy, their friendship and love as they danced and sang, and laughed and videotaped themselves, finishing each other's sentences and jokes as we sat thru the holiday traffic. So much joy in the two being with one another, in being 18 and not a day older. And they completely ignored boomer me, which was a good thing. PS: she's also a great driver, much better than I'll ever be.
