Straddling the Fence

It happens to all immigrants. You live in a foreign land long enough and you begin to ask yourself which country you really belong to.

When you first arrive in the United States, everything’s new and impressive. Disneyland in Anaheim. Seaworld and the San Diego Zoo. The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island. The White House in Washington DC.

You travel across the country and the camp sites are endless – from Kilauea Volcano National Park in the Big Island of Hawai'i to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachians. Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, the Rockies -- you may have seen them on TV or the movies, read about them in books and magazines, but they appear so spectacular in full living color.

You marvel at works of art displayed in the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum, the Getty, and so many other places in this vast country. You can’t believe the limitless number of shopping malls, restaurants, resorts, wonderful places to see and experience.

If you are a typical Filipino, you can travel back and forth, from one end of the United States to the other, without staying in a single hotel. There is always family -- a relative, or a friend of a relative, or a friend of a friend -- in every state and corner of the country, from Pearl City, Hawai’i to Long Island, New York, from Stockton, California to Tampa Bay, Florida.

You develop a circle of kababayans, then Filipino-American friends at work or at church. You widen that circle to Asian-Americans, and other ethnic Americans, and to Americans who can trace their roots to the Mayflower.

You have Italian, Polish, and German friends, who trace their roots in America to three or four generations when their grandparents or great grandparents left Europe to seek a better life in the new land. You have friends from Mexico, Vietnam, and India who trace their American origins to one generation. And you have Native American friends who can trace their roots all the way to Dancing with Wolves or Big Feather.

At first, you speak to your children in your native tongue. They answer back in English. Soon you are conversing in English at the dinner table. Later you don’t realize if you are speaking in Filipino or in English.

You get involved in your church and your community. You vote for the local mayor and for the state governor. You contribute to the Presidential campaign. Before you know it, you have become Americanized.

You never think of yourself as American – despite the fact that you rent or own a house in America, work in America, have kids that act and speak like Americans. You think you are a Filipino, staying in America for an extended sojourn, but longing to return and eventually retire in the Philippines.

Yet, you go home to visit your beloved homeland, and you notice that the customs officials no longer think of you as native. You have become a Balik-bayan. A visitor in the old country.

No, you are not really an American (at least you don’t feel like it, American citizenship and passport notwithstanding), but you are no longer a Filipino either, in that you don’t reside in the Philippines, you don’t earn your livelihood there, you don’t send your children to school there, you don’t attend Sunday Mass there, you don’t vote there, you don’t contribute to the economy there.

You have become this strange creature – a man or woman without a country.

You read the LA Times and the Manila Bulletin. You watch American Idol and TFC. You shop at Albertson's and Seafood City. And if you are like my friend, you eat anchovies in pizza with rice. They might as well drop you in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!

I remember talking about this with a Filipino activist back in the late 70’s, prior to EDSA and People Power. At that time, he was frantically working with other Filipino expatriates to transport firearms to support the rebels against the Marcos dictatorship.

If the impending revolution succeeded, I asked him, would he return to the Philippines? He thought about it for a while. He was married to a Filipina. He had three kids, one of whom was studying at Harvard. He had a beautiful house in California. He had a job with the state government.

Would you go back to the Philippines? I asked. He said he was not sure; he was “straddling the fence”.

I’ve also had discussions with Filipino doctors who went back to the Philippines to practice there. Some stayed, some returned back to the United States.

Straddling the fence. That bothered me. This see-sawing back and forth. This split between residing in America and wishing to live in the Philippines.

Until I came across Carlos Bulosan’s “America is in the Heart”. Until I read Fr. Thomas Green’s books and the concept of "the third culture".