Customs Declaration

The balikbayan box is the only piece of Philippine infrastructure that has never failed.

I. DESCRIPTION OF GOODS

T

he standard balikbayan box measures 24 inches by 18 inches by 18 inches. It holds 60 pounds. This is a fact you learn in the body before you learn it anywhere else—you learn it the way you learn the weight of a sleeping child, by carrying it across a terminal, by hoisting it onto a luggage cart, by watching your mother wrap it three times in industrial plastic at the wrapping counter in NAIA Terminal 3 because she has heard stories, because there are always stories, because the box has made this journey before, and she knows what the journey does to things.

Inside a balikbayan box from Riyadh circa 2004, documented by researchers studying OFW remittance patterns, you might find: six cans of Milo, four packages of dates, one bottle of Dettol, two stuffed animals purchased at a duty-free shop in King Khalid International Airport by a woman who could not remember anymore, in the fluorescent blur of a double shift, exactly how old her children were. The stuffed animals were for a daughter who had turned nine in February. The box arrived in March. The daughter had been told not to open it until her mother's voice came through the phone to say buksan mo na.

Item 1: One (1) box Milo, 400g. DECLARED VALUE: ₱180.00

Item 2: Assorted clothing, used. DECLARED VALUE: ₱500.00

Item 3: One (1) bottle perfume, 50ml. DECLARED VALUE: ₱350.00

Item 4: Miscellaneous foodstuffs. DECLARED VALUE: ₱600.00

Here is what the form does not ask you to declare: one month of silence between calls. One Sunday when the network was down in Al Khobar and the children sat in front of the laptop for 45 minutes before accepting that the face would not appear. The particular quality of a child's hunger for a person who is physically absent—not grief exactly, not tantrum, something quieter and more total, a hunger the body holds in the jaw, in the shoulders, in the way it stops asking after a while because asking has started to feel like its own kind of loss.

The Bureau of Customs has a tariff code for perfume. It does not have a tariff code for the reason the perfume was purchased at 11 o'clock at night in an airport duty-free after a 13-hour shift, bought quickly, without smelling it, because the flight was boarding and there was still the box to seal and there is always the box to seal and the box has to be right, the box is the one thing you can still get right from this distance.

II. PURPOSE OF TRAVEL

You leave because the leaving makes sense in a way the staying no longer does. You have done the arithmetic of it—the salary differential, the peso-to-riyal conversion rate memorized the way you once memorized the multiplication table, the cost of your daughter's private school tuition divided by what a public school teacher earns in a year. The arithmetic does not lie. The arithmetic has never lied to you. The arithmetic is the clearest-eyed thing in your life.

Also true: the mango tree in the backyard that your mother planted the year you were born, which fruits every April, and which you have not seen fruit in four years. The smell of rain on hot concrete—the particular Filipino rain that comes sideways in July, that floods the street to knee-height in 40 minutes, that your children jump into in their school uniforms while you shout at them from the doorway that they will get sick, that they will catch a cold, that they—and here you pause, because you are not there, you are in a kitchen in Jeddah folding laundry that belongs to someone else's children, and the rain is not sideways here, the rain here is rare and vertical and smells of dust, and your children are jumping in the flood with your mother watching from the doorway.

You watch them do this on a phone screen, 12 seconds of video, slightly blurred, sent on Viber with the caption hahaha gulang. You watch it seven times. You do not tell anyone you have watched it seven times.

Purpose of travel: EMPLOYMENT

Duration of stay abroad: 24 MONTHS (RENEWABLE)

Expected date of return: _________________________________

The line for expected date of return is always the hardest line to fill. It requires you to believe, at the moment of departure, that there is a fixed point at which the leaving ends. Most OFWs, when surveyed, report that their original contract was for two years. Most OFWs, when surveyed, report that they have been abroad for longer than two years. The distance between these two facts is not a mistake. It is the structure of the thing.

By 2023, the Philippine Statistics Authority estimated 1.96 million Filipinos were working overseas at any given time. This is the official count, which excludes undocumented workers, which excludes those on tourist visas who are working, which excludes the woman in Barcelona who has been cleaning hotel rooms since 2011 on a sequence of visa renewals her employer arranges and which she does not entirely understand but which have kept her legal so far, so far, she says this phrase the way a person on a tightrope counts steps, so far, so far.

III. ITEMS RESTRICTED OR PROHIBITED

You cannot mail a person.

You can mail nearly everything else. You can mail bagoong, the fermented shrimp paste that has survived longer journeys than this one, that has been confiscated at the Singapore border and waved through in Los Angeles and arrives in Sharjah wrapped in three layers of cling film and two Ziploc bags, still smelling exactly like itself, exactly like the Tuesday afternoon your grandmother made it in the kitchen while you did homework at the table and the house smelled of the sea. You can mail this. You cannot mail the afternoon.

Here is a partial list of things the balikbayan box cannot carry: the way your mother's hands look when she is praying the rosary, the specific burden of her silence when she is worried, the sound of your barangay at six in the morning before the jeepneys start. Here is a partial list of things it carries anyway: Safeguard soap, because your family prefers it, and it is expensive there. Vitamins. A prayer book. Dried mangoes from Cebu, the kind with the sugar crystallized on the surface, the kind that will be eaten in one sitting by three children who do not know yet that their mother bought them thinking of nothing except their particular faces at the moment of opening.

The Bureau of Customs has a list of prohibited items. Firearms. Pornographic material. Certain chemicals. The list does not include grief. Grief is not prohibited. Grief travels freely across all borders, undeclared, weight unassessed, duty-free.

Are you carrying more than $10,000 USD in currency? NO

Are you carrying any firearms or weapons? NO

Are you carrying any items for commercial purposes? NO

Are you carrying any agricultural products? YES—see attached

The dried mangoes are agricultural products. They are also, technically, a declaration of love, though the form does not have a field for this either. The form was not designed for what the box is actually for. The form was designed for commerce. The box is commerce, yes—the balikbayan box privilege, under Republic Act 10021, allows returning Filipinos to bring in up to 150 kilograms of goods tax-free every calendar year, a policy that functions as a quiet subsidy to the remittance economy, a way of letting the money stretch a little further in both directions—but the box is also something the economists cannot account for, which is the persistence of attachment across the geographies of separation.

You can reduce a balikbayan box to its economic function. You can note that it generates consumption in the receiving household. You can note that it reduces the need for certain purchases in the Philippine market, that it moves goods across the global supply chain in a direction opposite to the usual flow, that it is a form of reverse import, that it has implications for the balance of trade. You can note all of this and still have said nothing about why a woman in Riyadh spends three hours on a Saturday—her only day off, the day she had planned to sleep—standing in a Filipino grocery store in Batha comparing prices on two brands of shampoo because her daughter mentioned once, in passing, that her hair was dry, and the woman has been thinking about this ever since.

IV. DECLARATION

I, the undersigned, declare that the information provided on this form is true and complete.

The undersigned is 38 years old. She has been in Hong Kong for six years. Before Hong Kong, two years in Singapore. Before Singapore, she was in Leyte, in a city by the sea, in a house with a corrugated tin roof that sang in the rain. She has three children. Her eldest is now 14 and wants to be an engineer, because, she told her mother on a video call in November, gusto ko mag-trabaho dito sa Pilipinas, I want to work here in the Philippines, and the mother nodded and said magaling, very good, and kept her face arranged around the right expression until the call ended, and then sat for a while in the kitchen of the apartment she cleans but does not own, in the city she knows by heart but cannot claim, with the specific feeling that has no name in English, only in Filipino, which is the combination of pride and grief and the awareness that her daughter's desire to stay—to stay, the most ordinary wish in the world—is in fact a radical act, a reversal of a current that has been running for 30 years, and whether the current can be reversed depends on decisions being made in rooms the daughter will not be invited into for a long time, if ever.

This is what the declaration does not declare: the political condition inside the personal one. The policy failure inside the family story. The 30 year accumulation of structural adjustments and underfunded schools and factories that were never built and industries that were never developed and engineers who were trained and then sent abroad to build someone else's infrastructure—all of it compacted into a girl in Leyte who wants to stay, and the mother who knows what wanting to stay costs, and the gap between them which is not failure but love, and not love only but also, stubbornly, inexhaustibly, hope.

The balikbayan box will arrive in 45 days. It will be heavier than the last one. She has been saving things since April: the good moisturizer, the vitamins with the high dosage of Vitamin C, the dried squid wrapped in foil, the chocolate purchased at the duty-free in a moment of abandon, the small stuffed bear she saw in a shop in Mong Kok and could not walk past. She does not know yet what her daughter will say when she opens it. She knows the daughter will send a video. She knows she will watch it more than seven times. She knows she will not tell anyone.

She seals the box on a Sunday. The tape gun makes its sound — the specific mechanical sound of a balikbayan box being closed, which is the same in Hong Kong as it is in Dubai as it is in Riyadh as it is in London as it is in every city where Filipinos seal boxes on Sundays and the sound travels the same way the grief travels, freely, across all borders, duty-free, undeclared, arriving always before the sender does and staying always a little after she leaves.

Signature of Declarant: _________________________________

Date: _________________________________

For official use only:

Assessed by: _________________________________

Total dutiable value: ₱ _________________________________

The total dutiable value.

As if you could assess it. As if there were a rate. As if the Bureau of Customs, with all its forms and all its officers and all its years of processing the movement of goods across the archipelago's borders, had ever designed a form large enough to hold what is actually moving—back and forth, forth and back, in both directions simultaneously, the money going one way and the longing going the other, the goods going one way and the absence going the other, the box traveling always toward home and the woman always, for now, traveling away.

She lifts the sealed box. 60 pounds. The exact weight of a seven-year-old child. She carries it across the room and sets it by the door, ready.