COMING TO TERMS WITH OUR TRAUMAS AS IMMIGRANTS

My mother always seems to find a way to laugh at anything like missing her bus, not getting enough tips from tourists, and even when she cuts her finger while slicing tomatoes.
Given my mother’s context such as the struggles she had gone through, I have always more than appreciated her laughter—that lightness in her laughter as if the wrong things can be righted easily. Her laughter contains almost a bittersweet emotion, something that I cannot fathom at times, something that eludes my understanding. I am an immigrant Ilokano now having the stamp of being an American and I cannot, for the life of me, understand how in the heaviness of being, one can, like my mother, take things lightly and in a delirious fun.

But now I realize that her joys are always juxtaposed with the tremendous emotional negotiations she has to deal with.

Western logic has taught me about two things not being able to occupy the same space. But this cannot be true to my mother; this logic falls short of how I should come to terms with our traumas as immigrants, hyphens and all, layers and all. I give up: I cannot apply this logic of the West to my mother. Her context challenges this assumption. I believe that her experiences of joy and sadness have merged and created a distinct emotion, unique only to her situation and experiences. It is a kind of emotion that becomes, to me, a curious admixture of sadness and joy, hope and despair, violent anger and self-restraint. The space she occupies is fragile, requiring her to always keep her balance. If she leans too much on the right she risks turning her despair into suicide; if she leans too much on the left, she turns hope into disillusioned optimism.
As a child of an immigrant mother, I had to leave my country of birth to find that ever-elusive “American dream.” But as I was growing up, I realize that the complexity of unearthing my trauma is inexplicably bound with my mother’s. If I am to explore this deep, dark, but indispensable historical-social biography, I must be wary of the emotional and psychological wounds that my not be ready for surfacing. Here, I must make my assumptions clear. I do not believe that my mother has taken the time to reflect and perhaps heal from the many traumas that she has accumulated in her life. My mother’s process of immigration, which included a lengthy separation from her children and husband and the intensive labor required in working in hotels and restaurants, only to send so much of her earnings to the Philippines to support her family has been physically and emotionally draining. The only way our parents have dealt with this trauma is to repress it, relegating it in the storehouse of difficult memory and pain.
This issue of separation and immigration is not unique to my family. It is part of the narrative of the Ilokano—and Filipino—diaspora. This process has bread many forms of violence and alienation among Ilokano and other Filipino families as well. Domestic violence, breast cancer, youth joining gangs, disconnect between parents and children, are symptoms of the oppressive realities the immigration process may cause.

Given all these, the task now of the youth is to learn from these traumas by identifying and naming these sources of oppression. It is only in coming to terms with these that we are all able to become whole and healthy again.

In order to heal our parents and ourselves we need to articulate a new form of language that brings about non-violent communication, one that teaches us the virtue of patience. We must learn to see beyond the action and emotion of our parents and question the things that have led them and us to this point. Could it be some internalized oppression, a kind of self-hate, self-inflicted deprecation, which makes them feel inadequate to address our current and difficult living conditions? It might take a simple question, “how are you feeling?” to begin to get to the bottom of things. A simple conversation, a simple dialogue, has the potential to find light in the dark and allow the straightening of strained relationships.

The children of the diaspora like us must develop a kind of patience that allows us to respect the experiences of our parents and ancestors while acknowledging our own difficult and traumatic experiences.

The young like us must admit that although we had not grown up knowing and experiencing the political and economic hardships of our parents in the Philippines, we too have had our own challenges living in this new land we have come to scratch out a life.

Indeed, to be alien to the culture of our parents and simultaneously not being accepted as a true “American” is very complicated. Only by listening to the emotions and experiences of our parents can we understand our own complexities and internalized oppression. It is a difficult and daunting task but our liberation will always be inextricably bound with the liberation of our parents.