The Philippine Online Chronicles

What was it about the martial law years that made the West seem so attractive to Pinoy baby boomers? Whatever it was, on the eve of EDSA 1986, the Pinoy diaspora was in full swing and a second wave of migrants were already preparing their resumes and visa applications.

In ’74, my two younger sisters left within months of each other, one for Australia and the other for Canada.  They would not see each other for almost 20 years; that was not the way they planned it, but that was how things panned out.  My sisters were in the first big wave of non-medical migrants.  It was different then, when it was easier to apply for migrant visas. Those were the early days.  There were no airport tubes yet – you went out on the tarmac and boarded the stairs, turned around at the top of the stairs to wave to family and friends, and then you were swallowed up by the plane and suddenly you were gone from their lives and arrived on another planet.

Departures were a new thing then.  Whole families would rent jeeps and mini-buses from the province to give their son or daughter the proper send-off.   They brought their own baon: pancit and adobo and rice in kalderos and Tupperware, and also plates and crockery, and they shared lunch in the carpark outside the (old) Manila International Airport. Departure day was like All Saints Day at the cemetery.  The children bawled and squabbled and played with the automatic doors and spilled Coca Cola on the marble floors inside the airport reception area.  Outside there was an army of vendors and onlookers and loiterers.  Everywhere there was picture-taking. Souvenir shots with Uncle Nonoy and Auntie Floring and cousins and barkada.  Pinoy culture in spades.  You would think they had said all their goodbyes at home before setting off for the airport, but Pinoys could never have enough goodbyes. Last minute reminders to call up Tio Peping and Mareng Virgie when you get to San Francisco. Talagang makulit ang Pinoy.

There was one last crazy goodbye rite to be done.  When the plane doors closed and the engines sprang to life, the crowd would move on up the stairs and on to the airport roof.  Their eyes would follow the plane as it taxied up the runway.  The crowd would move to one side of the roof and as the plane moved in the other direction, the crowd would follow on to the other side of the roof, all the while waving and trying to catch a glimpse of their son or daughter in the airplane windows.  Unbelievable now but that’s how it was done.  Then the plane would take off and the crowd would yell and maintain eye contact until the plane was a speck on the horizon, and until it was gone from sight.  Then they would disperse.

There was even a kind of dress code, back in the early seventies.   Departing women wore pant suits and some even that most inconvenient of all attire for going to the toilet, the one-piece jumpsuit.  The men wore coats or bush jackets.  They would be stuck in cattle class for 15 to 18 hours, but what the heck, you had to look good for the photos.  Nowadays, we expats tend to get on the plane wearing the daggiest of T-shirts, loose track pants and a weatherbeaten jacket with pockets for passport, eyeglasses and cell phone.   That was a long way away then. The new migrant would check in, clinging to that ubiquitous documentation envelop with X-ray test result as tightly as if it were his beating heart.  He would shake loose from family and barkada, retaining the vision of a teary-eyed nanay blowing a last air kiss, and go out the doors, onto the tarmac and the stairs that Ninoy Aquino would make famous much later.

In 1979, my sister in Canada got married and my father and my wife and I came to America to give her away.  The first stop was to visit in-laws in California.  That first trip to Los Angeles in the spring of ’79 was golden.  The days were smog-free and the freeways were smooth sailing.  Like most men of my generation, I look at freeways as the most liberating of all inventions.  You get in your car and drive off, roll up the windows, turn on the aircon and the radio, adjust cruise control, and then you travel unbelievable distances coccooned in privacy.   What a relief from the enforced face-to-face intimacy with strangers on a jeep or tricycle.

I look back now and I think maybe it was Disneyland that did it for me – the happiest place in the world – or the wholesomeness of Toronto; maybe the clear air, the absence of rubbish on the streets and the orderliness of queues, the expectation that if you went to a government office for service, you would get it and not have to reach into your pocket every step of the way just to renew your driver’s license. You didn’t have to be rich to get what you wanted. And you were in a better position to help family members left behind.

In ’84, I visited my other sister in Melbourne, Australia, and was astonished to find a slum-free city, a laid-back lifestyle, and millions of trees so leafy you could hardly see the houses.  I knew already. After EDSA, as both Central Bank and DBP began offering retirement incentives to prune down their workforces, my wife and I put in separate migration applications for Canada and Australia. A heart attack cruelly ended the bank executive life for me and while I was recuperating, the approval came from Aussieland.  It was time.  We held a garage sale for household furniture and appliances, gave away some, threw a party to say goodbye to kith and kin, sold the car, sold the house, closed the door, and opened another.

On the airplane coming over, I kept remembering a billboard slogan I had first seen in Michigan on that first sunny springtime trip to the West.   It read:

You can always go home again.

In the beginning, a lot of migrants think they can.  Earn a few bucks, watch the kids grow up, then go back and buy a cliffside property in Tagaytay.  Now, I don’t know.  I think now, sometimes you can’t.  Sometimes you leave and make a new home in another land and then that’s where, in your heart, you go when you say you’re going home.