Balikbayan Part One: Home
“Home” was originally part of the Balikbayan series, a collection of short stories from my childhood, which eventually inspired the full-length play of the same title. Self-published in 2017 after a trip to the Philippines, I refrained from editing this piece because I wanted to keep the thoughts and feelings I had as a 23-year old to remain as they were— without judgement and censure from the person I am today. I wanted to share these stories again, because as I was re-reading them, they felt like prologues to the inevitable journey I find myself in now.
Balikbayan [ba-lik-ba-yan]
noun
A former Filipino citizen who has been naturalized in a foreign country and comes or returns to the Philippines
A friend once asked me in college what I was doing for summer break.
“I’m going home,” I answered, referring to my mom’s house in Maryland, but for some reason, it felt foreign on my lips.
As I as well into my sophomore year, I quickly dismissed that feeling and assured myself that the only reason I had such a hard time associating Maryland with the same familiarity was due to the fact that I’ve only spent a handful of weeks there since starting school in New Jersey. I recently remembered this moment and couldn’t help but think about the word “home” again and I realized that “home” for me has referred to many different places.
I was born and raised in Bacolod City, in the Philippines, up until I was eleven years old when my family immigrated to the United States in 2004. We got on a plane and moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Anaheim, California, where we spent two years getting acquainted with American culture, which to me at the time meant getting lost in gossip magazines, family-sized bags of Doritos, and afternoon reruns of 90210. In middle school, after my mom got a job at Johns Hopkins, my family moved to Maryland, where I very excitedly experienced my first snow fall; the novelty of which I have to sadly admit has definitely worn off. I despise the cold. After high school, I packed my bags (more like overpacked— seriously don’t listen to those college checklists it’s just another way for companies to make you buy things you don’t need) and drove up to New Jersey where I spent four years pursuing higher education and stacking up an enormous amount of student loan debt. After graduating, I spent six months in New York, where I ate a strict diet consisting of overcooked pasta and fried egg sandwiches (I was on a tight budget) and ran around the city like every other bright-eyed college graduate with an unpaid internship. I eventually had to move back to Baltimore when I ran out of money, but I was determined to get myself back to the Big Apple.
Bacolod, Anaheim, Baltimore, Madison, and New York City— at some point in my life I’ve referred to each of these places as “home.” I’ve associated it with so many different places that I’ve started to feel disconnected not only with the word itself, but also with the places I’ve tried to label it with. Not to say that I didn’t enjoy my time in these places. In fact, each of them holds many fond memories for me, but having moved around so much, I’ve never actually felt rooted. There is, however, one place on that list where the word “home” (and all the Hallmark emotions that come with it) has always fit and I’m getting on a plane headed there tomorrow morning.
When I was recently packing up my bags to leave New York, a friend had asked me what I had planned next.
“I’m going home,” I answered, but I wasn’t referring to my mom’s house in Maryland.
