“To me, homing is an action, a constant moving in an attempt to find a place. I think of a dog turning in circles before settling down on a spot to rest.”
Grace Talusan teaches writing in the English department at Brown University and serves on the board of the National Book Critics Circle. Her memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Her second book, The King Died of Grief, will be published by Restless Books.
Why does this piece mean ‘homing’ to you? How does it resemble your relationship to place?
I like that “homing” is a gerund. To me, homing is an action, a constant moving in an attempt to find a place. I think of a dog turning in circles before settling down on a spot to rest. My essay, “Returners,” traces some of the journeying that I’ve done back and forth between Manila, where I was born and where I sometimes visit, and Boston, where I’ve lived most of my life. There’s also the internal home. I am constantly moving between different work identities as a writing teacher and as a writer who teaches, two important homes. I feel most like myself when I’m doing what I care most deeply about. The essay also reveals the recursiveness of my experience as an immigrant, a writer, a teacher, a tita (or aunt), and a person who tries to be there for other people.
This essay’s focus shares a title with the last chapter of your memoir, The Body Papers. Would you say your relationship to the term has changed? Do you see its meaning—and the place it represents—differently after writing about it?
I was thrilled when I learned of the term, balikbayan. I was so happy to know that there was an official, governmental designation that described how I felt. The Philippines is not my home in the sense that I don’t receive mail or bills to any physical address, and yet, it is a place where I can feel the most at home as well as the most foreign. There’s so much I don’t know about being Filipino, but I want to learn. I am curious about this other, imagined life I would have lived if my parents had not left home for the US.
Like homing, balikbayan describes a movement that is constantly in motion. Balikbayan is a portmanteau of the Tagalog word, balik, which means return, and bayan, which means country. I am constantly leaving and returning home—in my head, in my mouth by eating my mother’s cooking, in the Filipino dishes that I try to replicate. I return home in my writing concerns and in my reading habits. There is always a part of my attention that is attuned to the Philippines. It’s been like that for me for as long as I can remember. Even as a small child, I was constantly looking for the Philippines. I found it in the Phillips head screwdriver in my father’s toolbox and the manila folders at the office and in the Goya Adobo seasoning mix in the grocery spice aisle. I’ve accepted that I’m a balikbayan without ever crossing a border.
How does writing help us return home? Do you see your writing ever being able to complete that journey?
This notion of writing being a way to return home is one of the strongest intrinsic motivators for me. Without thinking about product and output such as publications, my writing practice is important to me because it is a way to come home, to be with myself, to hear my own voice as it is. Very little of what I write is for others’ consumption. I write to please myself—a deeply selfish act—and nothing else feels like returning home, no matter where in the world I physically am. Through writing, I can access a feeling of home inside of me.
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Returners
Grace Talusan | Nonfiction, Homing
I have lived most of my life in the US, far away from where I was born, the Philippines. Every decade or so, I travel by plane the 24 hours to the other side of the world, to the place where my life began. Before airline travel, the journey would have taken months. My great grandfather made the trip from the Philippines to the US by ship in 1903, and it took him several. He got on a train to St. Louis and made a few other stops, including Boston, before he returned home a few years later.
One time, when I had made that trip home to Manila, I asked a bookseller to help me find picture books for my Filipino American nieces and nephews. It was important for them to see themselves reflected in books and this was rare in the literature they could access from their American schools, libraries, and bookstores. I wanted them to love books and feel a sense of home inside the pages. I wanted them to see themselves as main characters, even heroes in books, and to feel included in the human story.
The sales clerk at National Book Store, the largest bookstore chain and office supply store in the Philippines, loaded up my basket with thin slippery books in bright colors and I felt momentarily wealthy, nodding and waving to encourage her, but my entire pile of books would have cost less than what I would spend buying one or two hardcover picture books in the US. I can’t get my hands on it now despite my efforts, but one of those picture books haunts me to this day: a story about a small child in the Philippines whose parents are Overseas Filipino Workers in another country and remit money home. His parents regularly send the child balikbayan boxes, cardboard boxes full of treats and toys, expressions of their long-distance love, to their child’s caretakers.
Some of the pages show what we now call, thanks to online videos, unboxing. The child takes delight in discovering what his parents packed for him, but it’s clear that at the end of the unpacking process, what the child really wants, his parents, cannot be replaced by material goods and gifts. The child longs for his parents desperately. Whatever riches the balikbayan box contains, it is never enough to make up for his parents tucking him into bed, eating meals together, celebrating holidays, and offering open arms for warm hugs. As the years pass, the child grows taller and older. In the balikbayan boxes his parents send are a kind of apology for not being home, but he needs to understand that this is what they have to do. They love him; that’s why they are sacrificing and working so hard abroad. It’s all for him. And doesn’t he enjoy the chocolates and video games they put into the box this month?
Over the years, the child continues to miss his parents, but he has learned to live without their company. This is what humans must learn to do: Create a life despite loss. In his neighborhood, a street of houses empty of parents and bought with Euros, Saudi riyal, and all the different dollars, US, Canadian, and Hong Kong, his friends also miss their parents. They console each other; they create a band of children who long and have learned to live without. I don’t know what it’s like to be left in this way.
When one can’t return home, one can send a cardboard box from wherever one is working, Alaska or Abu Dhabi. The balikbayan box is your proxy; it goes home for you. The balikbayan box contains the gifts that you would have carried home if you could return: chocolates, toys, clothing. Every month, approximately 400 thousand of these boxes are sent home from Filipinos working globally. This number is exponentially higher during the Christmas holidays.
When I was awarded a Fulbright fellowship, I left home. I don’t have my own children, but I spent at least one day a week with some combination of my young nieces and nephews. When I returned to the US from the Philippines after being abroad, my oldest niece clutched my arm and said, “Don’t ever leave again. Promise you won’t do that to me.” I was not her primary caretaker and I had not even been gone long enough to mail a balikbayan box, which can take months to arrive, but she still experienced my absence as loss.
My youngest niece was five when I presented her with the suitcase of picture books . Because I was rich with words and time, I was prideful. I read her book after book and held her attention until I got to the one about the balikbayan boxes. I made the mistake of not reviewing the story in advance.
Towards the end of the book, a final box arrives. The child is excited, but this box is different. It is not filled with gifts, but a single item. There was an accident while the father was working abroad. Overseas Filipino Workers often work in conditions that are risky and dangerous, taking on jobs that workers in-country would rather not do. The child’s hair hangs so you can’t see his face as he opens the last box. I can’t get over that illustration of the child in profile, his arms hugging the cardboard, staring into the abyss of his father’s cremains.
My niece was just a little girl when I read her this book. I didn’t want her to know this story yet. She had the rest of her life to learn about the capriciousness of birth and class, the inequalities of global economic policies, and the dangers facing Filipinos working abroad. At age 5, my niece didn’t need to connect how the same boxes and shipping system that can send toys and the latest electronics from Hong Kong can also deliver death. So I made up a different ending, about the parents sending an airplane ticket for their son to join them abroad so that they could live happily ever after, together, complete. A lie for a little girl. I closed the book quickly, removing it from her library, where it is still lost somewhere in a box in a garage piled high with boxes, to this day.
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I am a balikbayan. A returner. Balikbayan means to return home. In Tagalog, a Filipino language, “balik” translates in English to return and “bayan” translates to country or town, other words for home.
When I travel to the Philippines, I am not a typical tourist. I am homecoming. My official designation at the border is balikbayan. What does it mean for me to come home to the place where I was born, but have lived away from for most of my life? How can I claim that this place is home? And yet, there is no other place in the world where I feel the way that I do when I’m in the Philippines. I don’t allow myself to remember this feeling of belonging, otherwise, I will be too distracted from my life in America and do what scores of immigrants before me have done: spend their lives longing to return home. And yet, I also know that I have spent too much time away from this home. I don’t speak the languages; not even body language. Right away, they know I’m American.
A balikbayan, according to the government of the Republic of the Philippines, is a Filipino citizen who has been away continuously from the home country for over a year or is a Filipino overseas worker or is a former Filipino citizen.
A balikbayan, according to the OED, is a “Filipino visiting or returning to the Philippines after a period of living in another country.”
How long exactly is a period of living? Who exactly is a Filipino?
I was born in the Philippines and left at age two with my parents. I returned, after a period, at age 19 and returned a few times more for brief visits when my life changed, after college, during graduate school, and after I married. During my honeymoon in Manila, at a café in Bonifacio Global City, a cousin looked me in the eyes and said, “Come back here for longer. Come back here to live. You will not regret it.”
At the time, I could not see how it was possible to return home again, but within a couple of years, I found myself back in the same spot, the same café, living full time in the place I was born. During that period, I had special incentives, also extended to my husband, from the Philippine government under their Balikbayan Program. As a former Filipino citizen, I could stay in the country without a visa for a year. There were also some financial incentives, exemptions from the travel tax and in-country duty-free shopping.
The Philippine government created the Balikbayan Program to entice overseas Filipinos to return home. The term “balikbayan” is credited to President Ferdinand Marcos in 1973 to encourage overseas Filipino workers to come home from wherever in the world they were working and sending remittances from. If they came home, especially during the Christmas season when families reunited, they could infuse more of these foreign currencies into the economy. One stone, two birds.
I am a balikbayan, but I am not a bagong bayani, a new hero, the term used to describe Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs). This is what the parents of the child in the picture book are. I don’t contribute remittances to the GDP, of which the Philippines is the fourth largest recipient globally. When I am in the Philippines, I experience a returning and a leaving home all at the same time.
Every time I return to Manila, I experience both new and familiar homecomings. I try to visit the eternal resting place of my maternal grandparents and the other relatives buried near them and at the same time, I remember that I am not here on All Soul’s Day to pay them homage. I visit the ancestral house in Victoria where my mother’s side of the family lived for generations. I visit the barangay in the province where my father’s side came from and read my last name on memorials, political campaign signs, and flyers stapled onto telephone poles, something I have never experienced in America.
I spent several months living in the Philippines writing in cafes and returned home with the manuscript of my first book. Those were wonderful days that stand still in time: I would wake up and check the yogurt that I incubated overnight. For breakfast, I would eat a freshly baked pan de sal from the bakery downstairs with a smear of peanut butter and a small native banana. I would walk to the fancy gym at the fancy mall and exercise for a couple of hours. I’d meet my friend Joanne at a café after she dropped her son off at daycare. The café workers knew our names; we were regulars. When I approached the counter, they would say things like, “Another ensaimada and soy latte today, Miss Grace? Or do you want to try a slice of the banoffee pie?” Joanne and I had several hours to write together before she left to pick her son up. While she fed him lunch and put him down for a nap in the afternoons, I would interview sources or visit a library. At night, we’d reconvene for dinner and talk about the books we were reading and writing, or I’d visit with family and friends. It was an ideal life for a writer.
Because I mostly spend my time in Manila writing and not teaching, which is the opposite way that I spend my time in the US, I feel most like a writer when I’m back home. I feel rich with time and time is what writers and artists need. I continue to return home to the Philippines every few years to find what I want to write about. The book I’m currently writing was an accident; I found the spark of it on a quick trip home when standing at my grandfather’s grave.
If what a writer needs is time, I can afford more time in Manila. I don’t worry as much about what I spend on housing, food, and research materials and trips because the US dollar is a superpower. In the Philippines, I can create the best conditions for my writing and stretch them out over a longer period of time. Instead of feeling pressure to grind, I experience a luxurious sense of spaciousness and peace that allows me to write with focus and more deeply than when I’m toggling multiple pressures. Sometimes my writer friends and I will remember our time at artist residencies, where we had a studio to write in, food that just appeared, and the company of other creative folks. We experience “residency time,” where one can finish years of writing projects in the span of weeks. Time gets gooey and the impossible becomes easy when one has everything one needs. I try to recreate those ideal writing conditions as often as I can for myself within the confines of my daily life, but the biggest part is missing—unscheduled, luxurious, open time.
Like the OFWs and most people, I am also caught up in systems of global capitalism and the accidents of socioeconomic class. My income from writing is inconsistent, unpredictable, and a net loss. Even if I wanted to earn money from my writing, very few authors do. A 2022 Authors Guild income study revealed that for book authors, “the median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2000.” Since I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift in graduate school, I let go of any notion that my writing should earn money and instead thought about how I could protect, nurture, and care for it. I’m not comparing writing to parenting and I don’t think of my published book as a child, but I constantly make choices that prioritize my writing. Whenever I’ve applied for a job, I consider how it will impact my writing time. Other important factors were in the mix, but I ultimately decided not to become a mother because I couldn’t imagine how to make that work and still sustain my writing practice. When I was still young enough to contemplate this question, I was standing with a colleague at a party and his teenage sons. After the boys walked away, the poet sighed and shook his head. “After you have children, all of your decisions become very easy. You do whatever is best for the child,” he said. I kept this to myself, but I wondered how one could know what was best for the child. Or was this just another story we tell ourselves?
Sometimes, when I’m working through my lists of things I need to do, I fantasize about living and writing in the Philippines, how money buys more time there, how the hours unfold in long, luxurious stretches, where I’m breathing tropical air and eating delicious, fresh Filipino foods and enjoying the company of people I love, but of course, that’s not where most of my writing gets done. What’s best for my writing happens in the daily showing up in some way for my creative life.
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When that niece grew older, the age of the child in the picture book, her mother took her home to Manila. I was on that trip, too, but I was too busy working to spend much time with them. When we did have a moment together, I asked my niece how she was enjoying Manila. Even though she lived outside of Los Angeles where the Asian American population, particularly the Filipino American community, was large, nothing prepared her for the experience of being in the Philippines. My niece was visiting a lot of shopping malls and restaurants with her family. She said that she was often distracted by seeing herself everywhere she looked. She had seen several young teenagers who dressed and styled their hair exactly like her and wanted to follow behind them, to see how her doppelgangers lived.
I’ve never received a balikbayan box—the route of those boxes is usually one way—but I do stock my freezer with ensaimada from Filipino bakeries, and I make my own pastillas with powdered milk. When friends travel to the Philippines, they always return with pasalubongs for me. Cans of cookies shaped like ears, dried mango, even small glass jars of bagoong, fermented shrimp paste to spread on mango. My mother’s cooking—adobo, sinigang, pancit—also fuels me. I never leave her house without plastic shopping bags and reusable containers filled from her refrigerator. I’ve never sent a balikbayan box to the Philippines either, but a few summers ago, I was signing copies of my memoir after a literary event at the Ayala Museum, and for a moment, I considered my book as a kind of balikbayan box. Instead of a cardboard box stuffed with candy bars and toys, my writing is an expression of love that I want to share with others, mostly strangers, with our entire relationship as reader and writer, contained in that object. Some of the dearest people in the world, I know and love through stories.
On the journey back to America, my niece told me that she already wants to return home to the Philippines. We are both returners, balikbayans. She in her own way; me in mine. “I know,” I said. “I’m thinking the same thing.”