Phone Call
The first phone call came on the day after my 6th birthday. “Happy Birthday, anak” a stranger’ voice had greeted me. Anak which means child in Filipino. I would later on associate this stranger’ voice as the voice of my mother, a woman I had never met. From that day on, our relationship would be defined by a series a phone calls, all cold and distant. The only home I ever knew was also the place my parents desperately wanted to leave behind. With the promise of a better life, both of my parents had left our small-town life in the Philippines in pursuit of a bigger one in the United States. A phone call was the only connection I had with my estranged parents, who both had left without any memories for me to keep. All of the phone calls went the same, like a routine. They had always asked the same questions. How are you? Are you eating well? Are you getting good grades? “Yes,” I would reply. Then, for the hundredth time I would ask, “When are you coming home?” And like they had rehearsed for the hundredth time, they automatically promised “Soon.” Little did we know “soon” was the equivalent of fourteen long years. Many times, I had become tired of taking their calls, but guilt had kept me from severing the only connection we had. Everyone had constantly reassured me that they had left because they loved me, because they had dreamed of a better life for me. But a child what could a child understand? The life that I wanted was the one I had. I was happy being a small-town girl with the warm and humble community to raise me. Why would I ever want to leave? I did not ask my parents to give me a better life, or dream one for me. I only asked that they come home. “How are you?” my mother asks in one of those phone calls, the pattern all too familiar. “I’m doing well,” I politely reply, like I always had for the past ten years. I was eleven years old at the time and it had been a decade since my parents left. A phone call was the only thing that held our family together. I had grown up emotionally distant from my parents. No matter how many phone calls they made, nothing could close the gap that had come between us. We lived very different lives and walked in very different worlds, separated by a fifteen-hour time difference. “Parents” had become a mere label; To me, they were no more than strangers. In our living room was a picture of an unsmiling couple, young, and with hopeful eyes, a daily reminder of the family I never had. On a humid May morning in 2013, I had received the phone call that changed my life forever. The phone call was not from my parents, it was from my grandmother. She was crying when she broke out the news to me: My U.S. visa had been approved. My parents were not coming home to me, I was coming home to them. I was fifteen years old then, fourteen years since my parents had left. It was an exciting news for everyone but me. My life, my friends, my goals and my aspirations had been centered around the life that I had, not the life that my parents had built for me in some far off land. I dreaded the days as the date on my plane ticket came closer and closer. In August of 2013, I arrived in the United States, anxious of the life that is waiting for me. In the months that led to this day, I felt shattered, but what I saw at the airport broke me even more. My father had come to pick me up. Gone was the young man with hopeful eyes in the living room. My father stood before me, wearing a heavy trench coat, his face was old and weary. His eyes were tired but happy. That was my first memory of his face and it was an image that will be burned into my mind forever. In that single moment, we had crossed that distance that had seemed insurmountable just yesterday. In the many years that we have been away from each other, I started to forget that fourteen long years changed them as much as it changed me. I knew my parents’ migration story by heart, but never did I internalize this until the moment saw my father at the airport, exhausted, but happy to see me. They came to America with nothing but their passports. For years, they had lived in a makeshift room at a friend’ garage. My father had to wake up at three in the morning to catch the bus and make it in time to work a fifteen-hour shift. In the winter, they had the warmth of a single comforter and each other. Whatever the could send, they sent back to me. They had not created a better life for themselves and yet they created a better life for me. The man with tired eyes that stood twenty feet away from me, happily waving his hand was not a stranger anymore, he was my father. As I take my first steps on the cold pavement of San Francisco International Airport, I knew I was finally ready to embrace the life that my parents had dreamed for me. “How are you? Are you eating well? Are you getting good grades?” My mother had asked, no longer than a week ago. These calls have become a routine as well, all filled with my parents’ constant worries. I am living away from them to attend college. It had been three years since I had moved to the United States and even to this day I still think about the life that I had left behind. But I had to start a new life. Many nights I thought that I will not be able to push through. But here I am, the first in my family to go to college in the United States. “When are you coming home?” My mother asked. “Soon, Mom‚Ķ” I promised. “This coming weekend, I think.”