After being saved by the parents once again, I was able to confirm today that a trip to the Philippines is definitely going to happen for me. I’m totally stoked for this experience.
I would really like to visit the towns that my mother lived in, but am struggling with possibly hurting her feelings (?…). I’m not sure how to put into words, but there seems to be a strange run-around/animosity towards me visiting these places. According to the mother, there’s no real reason to go back to the towns. I toyed with the idea of telling my mom that it would be great for me to get pictures to show her, but then again, she’s told me not to do it because of the “danger of getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time” (which I’m not sure what that really means anyway…’getting caught by rebels’ perhaps). I, however, wonder what’s really going on in her head about this.
Nonetheless, I’m planning for a pretty amazing trip. I originally started thinking that flying into Cebu then taking the western route through Palawan up to Luzon to ultimately fly out of Manila would work out, but it seems that perhaps the opposite direction might work out better as to swing through the provinces of Isabela and Nueva Ecija where the mother lived. I think even visiting her university might be fun to check out her classrooms.
So in thinking all of this out, I also started wondering about what my Pop’s thinking about all of this. We’ve actually talked a lot about going to El Salvador and he seems way more stoked to check out his home town than my mother does about hers. He’s also planning on visiting the E.S. with me whereas my mom has sort of avoided the idea of going back.
Anyway, I don’t really know what to expect with this trip. It’s going to be way different than any other trip I’ve taken to the South East because of the perhaps not-so-obvious connection I am going to have with the locals. On the outside, I may look like an American-born-half-Filipino, but for a large portion of my life, I was raised like a full-blooded Filipino by my grandparents. I laugh (now) about the things my mother tells me about her childhood and how my grandparents raised her because I was raised the same way by them. Let’s face it, we were both disciplined by a chinella and the meter-stick if we did not finish our sinigang by our nanay (which means ‘mother’ in tagalog as opposed to me calling her ‘lola’ or grandmother like my other cousins).
Which got me thinking that I wish I was going to be travelling with some family so as to hear all the stories of the past. But back to what I was saying at the start of this post, perhaps the past isn’t as romantic and care-free as I imagine it to be. Either way, I look forward to going back to where my mother, my family and I am from.
