Notes from quarantine

I’ve made it to Manila for the second time since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. This time is a lot different now that we know so much more about the disease.

There was a lot more paperwork involved and a lot more protocols to fulfil before flying. Despite arriving at the airport a full four hours before flight departure I only just made it on board. Be warned. The flight itself had been cancelled and rescheduled several times and in the end entailed a 15-hour transit time. It was fantastically and astronomically expensive, even without the compulsory 14-day quarantine in Manila on the way in and then another 14-day quarantine when I get back to London.

Air travel used to be a regular and fairly uncomplicated undertaking. Now it requires you to be really committed. This journey is deeply, personally important. My mother who wrote in these pages ever since Max Soliven and Betty Go-Belmonte invited her to contribute is approaching her 80th birthday. Her health is not what it was. In my mind it is a necessary pilgrimage to honor her, my essential mother. The money, the risk of infection, the time, the sacrifice pale in comparison, not just because of everything that she is and everything that she does, but also because of what I consider to be important in a universal sense.

As regular readers will know, in this column I try to write a “Relative Values” piece that looks at the experience of Filipina/o immigrants through their family relationships. The way family relationships are altered because of the dislocation of its members is traumatic for all families wherever they are and from whatever culture, but I think especially for cultures like the Philippines which is so centered on family and, in turn, I would argue, centered on the mother. All the assumptions that parents bring to the way they raise their children are disrupted.

The other day at the wonderful Kapihan in Battersea, south London, I got chatting to a group of young Filipinos visiting from Wales over Spanish latte and champorado bibingka. I told them about the column, and one woman in particular was enthusiastic about the idea and said she’d be happy to be interviewed about it. CJ looked so cool in London terms: her hair highlights dyed platinum blonde, funky ripped jeans, with amazing make up and really quite gorgeous. Her interest was because she told me she thought it was really wrong that Filipino parents want to raise their children as if they’re still in the Philippines. It made me realize that while people used to things in the UK would look at her and think “Cool,” in the Philippines she would probably stand out because of the way she dresses.

I was also reminded of a column I wrote here about Francesca Humi and her mother Veronica. I actually met Francesca because we were both doing a Tagalog language course last year, and there was an additional surprising connection because her father was a CNN correspondent out of Paris at the same time as I was working for the international broadcaster. When interviewing her mother, she explained how conservative her upbringing had been in Manila and how Francesca would only realize she’d been lucky that Veronica had let her have so much freedom in Paris once she’d been to Manila and seen how different things were back then.

It was very much the same for me. My mother and late father were raised during wartime and the post war years. They would tell stories about the trauma of those years, the poverty and struggle that mirrored the struggle of the entire country as well as the tyranny of conservative Catholic Christian family values, which on a personal level can be just as tragic. I could not fathom, for example, how my grandparents could send my uncle to a seminary whether or not he wanted to go. My mother says that when she was a girl she wanted to be a nun, because she considered it the pinnacle of feminine achievement and St. Augustine of Hippo’s writings were the bedrock of her philosophy studies. It was an environment that gave little room for free thinking or critical analysis.

The political tyranny of the Marcos years sent them into exile in London when they had to raise five children in 80s London. It was where punk was born but our parents hadn’t even experienced the 60s and 70s.

Now that I’m a parent with my own children I can understand and feel a real heartbreaking empathy for their difficulties, because as a teenager, I know I must have broken their hearts with my behavior that was perfectly normal in London but appallingly wild in their memories of Manila. It turns out I am not alone. That’s what “Relative Values” hopes to achieve.

And so, I make a grateful child’s pilgrimage, sitting in quarantine. Relative Values will return to this space soon.