Letter to my Kadkadua, Part 2

Fil Am Observer

Agkabannuag

October Issue

Jeffrey Tangonan Acido

Kenka kadkaduak:

In a year and a half you will have to move to Manila—that big city that is home to homelessness and to dreams that have vanished, the dreams of your people, and the dreams of those who have sacrificed a lot to pursue the grand dreams of a homeland.

In Manila—there, there, you will meet your father for the first time—for the first of the time that you ever remember. You will have to get used to his absence. Forgive him. He is in Mindanao fighting a war he does not believe in but had no other recourse but to go down the road of young men who had nowhere to go beyond the fields of his hometown. You will ask countless times what war is like, but he’ll only respond, “the Muslims are peaceful people.” He will tell you the enchantments of the Moros in Mindanao, even speak the language of the Koran, but will never speak of the horrors of shooting or killing anyone. Try not to force the issue. Life is not easy to talk about, let alone war.

In the currency of your dreams your mother will leave you to make beds and cook the food of other people, never yours. For while, both your mother and father will come in and out of your lives. Though in the end you will all be together the distance between you and your parents will be farther than the distance between Ilocos and Hawaii.

When you have learned to love you will understand that your life will be lived in many terminals—bus terminal, airports, jeepney terminals—a constant leaving and going, arriving in places of comfort and confusion, sometimes delusion. These terminals of life will be places of returning and coming: returning to the Ilocos that is vaguely familiar; coming to Hawaii that you will learn to call as home; coming to California that has lost your people’s history; and then returning again to Hawaii that you have learned to call home. There is beauty in this; there is alienation in this.

You will meet many influential people in your lives; the first will be your Chinese professor who teaches Marx as one of the major religions. Oh, the academe will be a place of flourishing for you. There will also be the activists who, in many ways, will teach you to be humble, to lower yourself from the pretensions of the university so you can see the visions of your people—the vision that make love the catalyst of all that we can ever offer, of all that we are willing to give and share with others; the vision that can only be seen on the ground; and the vision that makes us alive because it is one that is steeped in the lessons of justice and fairness. These activists are only active because they want to learn how to love—like your mother. Your childhood and activist friends will be curious on what moved you to have this fiery mouth of yours (often getting you into trouble) and most will attribute it to the activists and academics that nurtured you.

A few will assume that it stems from the hurt and pain you suffered as a child; all the loneliness and painful separations from your family and friends, the many deaths in the ghettoes of Manila that remind you that life is most precious, the historical and present injustices that your ancestors suffer, or even the trauma of dreaming in another language foreign to yours—all these are true but only partially.

For the truth is you act because of the tremendous and resilient love that you received from your family and community. It is a love that grew in the adversities of life; a love that blossomed in the sharing of meals; and a love that continues to grow in the sacred talk-story circles in Kalihi.

This love is not beyond the realm of fantasy; it is lived and real. It is a love that tells the truth, however ugly the truth may be.

If there is any greater lesson you must take to learn it’s this: Never be cynical of love. It will take you many great years—perhaps all your life—to learn but never forget that love is what breathes life into humanity. Do not forget the answer you gave your student when he asked you, “Why do you care so much?” and you answered: “Because I love.” That should be an answer without explanation: “Because I love.”