This post was originally published on our Medium blog.
At the end of February, I returned home to Canada after a month-long trip to the Philippines, my motherland. I missed all of the border closures by just a couple of weeks experiencing no major inconveniences or challenges on my travels. When I think about all that has happened in the last month or so, I am immensely grateful to have made it back to my adopted home where I am safe and comfortable during a time of global crisis.
All of this has made me think deeply and critically about my privilege as a hyphenated Canadian — slipping easily back and forth between places as it suits me, as it conveniences me, and, in this specific moment, as it keeps me safe.
When I returned home, I brought with me so much pasalubong (souvenirs) and merienda (snacks) as a gift and offering to my Filipinx-Canadian community in Toronto. I had high hopes of bringing friends together to swap stories of our experiences traveling to ancestral lands and discussing, as we often do, the complications around this concept of “home”. But of course, none of that happened as the COVID-19 outbreak escalated.
Instead, I am here playing dress-up at home wearing my best Filipiniana wear thinking about my inang bayan (motherland) during this global crisis, a place where one in five people live in extreme poverty, where access to resources and to healthcare is far more precarious.
I am thinking about my pamilya (family) and all my kababayan (countrymen) who are now in the midst of a lockdown under a president with dictatorial tendencies — a president who, after ordinary citizens staged protests over a lack of food amid this crisis, gave explicit orders for police and military to “shoot them dead.”
I am thinking of my homeland as it slowly descends into dictatorial rule using this pandemic as a cover for “protection” of citizens.
As I wear my heritage from the comforts of my Canadian home, I continue to interrogate my position as a Filipina-Canadian who straddles not just these two cultures, but these two countries — these two physical places — as I see fit. How I can visit one home for leisure and leave when it is no longer convenient or safe for me. How straddling that in-between place, no matter how often and how much I agonize over its complexities, is an extreme privilege. How I reckon with this duality.
In these desperate times, as I hope to do in all times, I am thinking about how I can support and amplify the voices of my people not just in the diaspora, but in the homeland too.
How do I use my hyphenated identity to act as a very real bridge in time of crisis and beyond? How do I fully embody my role and carry out my responsibility as a, well, living hyphen?
And I reflect these questions back to you too.
How are you using your hyphenated identity to act as a bridge during this time? How are you embodying your role and responsibility as a living hyphen?
As a community largely made up of diasporas from around the world, we know all too well what it means to love from afar. This global crisis we now find ourselves in gives this phrase a whole new meaning, but we, of all people, know how to navigate its complexities intimately.
