Trabaho
W
hen I was in high school, I became my mom’s ghostwriter. I remember, then, sitting at the computer with her hand on my shoulder as I adjusted her grammar for her injury report for the Workplace Safety Insurance Board of Ontario. I remember replacing the “your” with “you’re,” turning the present-tense to past-tense, telling her that they might think she’s overexaggerating if she uses hyperboles like “killing me” to describe her back pain, even if it really was—killing her—in the end.
She nodded dismissively while washing the dishes, “I know, I know. Just make sure it sounds good babe.”
It began when I was around 14. Between the speech contests, the essays, and the slam poetry my mom encouraged me to write, I had obtained a sort of mastery over the English language. Before any presentation or performance I had, she would tell me to come downstairs, turn off the TV playing the Filipino channel with its familiar foreignness, and tell me to recite my monologue in front of her. She waited in silence, watching me as I anxiously flicked through my cue cards one last time and handed them to her to read from. I swallowed, my throat bone dry, and took a deep breath before I began.
But even now, in an occupied land across the country, I recall those nights at the computer watching her tired eyes glaze over a reflective screen under the yellow-incandescent kitchen light and the letter that read more like a eulogy than an injury report, and I feel a deep sadness that this is what my mom’s life had become.
“Try again,” she said after I had stumbled over my words one too many times. “You have to memorize this.”
Each sigh would hurt more than the last.
It was years later at the sunset of my adolescence that I realized this was the reason why whenever my parents called, I told them half-truths, little white lies. The reason why I had become such a perfectionist, but also my worst critic. But even now, in an occupied land across the country, I recall those nights at the computer watching her tired eyes glaze over a reflective screen under the yellow-incandescent kitchen light and the letter that read more like a eulogy than an injury report, and I feel a deep sadness that this is what my mom’s life had become. Had come to. That I could measure my parents’ lives in workplace health insurance claims.
“Go again,” mom said, wrapping a blanket around herself. She had just gotten off her shift at the nursing home, her hair slicked back and wet from a shower.
She closed her eyes. “I’m listening. I’m still listening, babe.”
I huffed out and started over from the top.
I wanted to be a doctor, once. It was the obvious choice. The second-generation cliché that was laid out for me when I showed the smallest hint of interest, and suddenly, was at the forefront of my Titas and Titos barrage of questions at holiday gatherings. But it was only during my sophomore year at my Catholic high school when the idea truly began to materialize.
I decided to take a senior-level Kinesiology class, coincidently, with my Kuya—completely disregarding his embarrassment as my older brother. There, I learned anatomy and physiology, memorized the skeletal system, the way interconnected nerve channels and muscle proteins worked together to move the human body from one point to the next. For our final independent project, we were tasked to do extensive research on one musculoskeletal disorder of interest and produce an essay and a scrapbook of our investigation process.
When I told my mom about the assignment one night in her bedroom, she asked me what I chose and I said, “Arthritis.”
She smiled knowingly, holding up her hand against the light of the lamp and looking down at her swollen fingers, now with a solemn expression. Shadows were cast against her palms and her wedding ring looked fastened tight against her inflamed joints as if it was embedded into her flesh.
“Good babe,” she said, sifting her hand through my hair. “Maybe you can find a cure for this.”
I laid my head on her lap. “Maybe I can, mom.”
And for some reason, I really believed I could.
When I moved out of my hometown for school, I began to notice that the first thing people typically said when I told them “I’m from Niagara” was “Like the falls?” followed by my half-assed “Yes, like the falls,” and a variation on a tune that’s almost always “Wow, that’s so nice you get to visit anytime you want!” But the reality is that Niagara Falls is a desolate soulless suburban tourist trap that hides behind the beautiful facade of a natural wonder of the world. Instead of the city preserving the greenery or designating it as a provincial park, they laid down a concrete strip known as Clifton Hill where every summer, the peripheral middle-to-lower class teenage population goes to work for less-than minimum wage; serving drunk tourists ice cream, selling overpriced knickknacks at the giftshop that will be long forgotten on refrigerators, handing over prizes at the counter at the arcade, or operating the SkyWheel or any of the countless “adventures” that get you a “better” view of the falls.
The Niagara that I know is a land of contradictions. A drive-by region with its rundown motels and unaffordable housing, a borderland of sublime generational wealth and poverty. It is a place where the best shot out was not the public school, but the Catholic one that had more funding and resources, so every creed ended up in a religion class, Catholic or not. Outside of the suburban concrete, Niagara is an agricultural countryside, with sprawling fields of cash crops, livestock production, grapes, and their adjacent upscale vineries where all the snobby rich white folk would flock in the warm months.
The first job my Kuya got was during the summer at a greenhouse that one of our Titos worked at growing eggplants just outside our city of St. Catharines and up the highway. It also happened to be the same job that my Filipina friend from high school and her siblings had. An under-the-table position that paid cash-only, like so many other migrants with precarious status are forced to take when they land here.
In August of 2022, news broke out that Jamaican migrants employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Niagara sent a letter to Karl Samuda, the Minister of Labour in Jamaica, pleading him for support due to their conditions that they compared to “systematic slavery.”
My brother quit only a month later. He said the heat was unbearable inside. When my dad and I picked him up, he came out sweating, red-faced, tired, and self-conscious because he thought the other workers were talking about him behind his back in a language he couldn’t understand.
It was not hard to imagine what it was like for the other workers who had no choice to leave or to stay. In August of 2022, news broke out that Jamaican migrants employed under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program in Niagara sent a letter to Karl Samuda, the Minister of Labour in Jamaica, pleading him for support due to their conditions that they compared to “systematic slavery.” They said that under their employer they were treated like animals, were punished for their lack of efficiency, and were exposed to pesticides without adequate protections under a closed-work permit. This was only one complaint in a long list of cases of migrant exploitation, injuries, and deaths in the region with no justice for victims and families.
Walking through The Pen Centre, the local mall, you could see posses of agricultural workers ride their bikes in and fill the shiny tiled spaces of the shopping centre. They wove through the usual flow of teenagers and families, speaking fluently in their foreign tongues as they entered the stores to the visible dismay of passers-by. I didn’t notice until I moved away from home for university, but in a span of a couple of years, Niagara changed in a way I never expected. Shawarma restaurants, Filipino bakeries, and ethnic food markets seemed to be built at a steadying pace. I saw Filipino families and brown bodies in the parking lot of my local No Frills, heard Tagalog in spaces that I had only ever heard my parents speak it. The majority white suburbia I knew as a child was no longer. I was happy, then, for a while. But it was ultimately at a great cost.
In September of 2023, the United Nations Special Rapporteur Tomoya Obokata paid a visit to Canada and confirmed what so many migrants knew all along: The Temporary Foreign Work Program was a “breeding-ground” for contemporary forms of slavery.
The cost for dreaming.
When the lockdown started in March of 2020, I was just finishing up my first year of university in Hamilton when I was forced to move back home. My mom was diagnosed with COVID-19 only a couple months later. It had spread throughout the nursing home she worked at for more than 20 years. It was nothing like they had ever imagined. Bodies wrapped up in black bags, no visitors, countless hours constrained in layers of masks and irritated skin from alcohol wipes.
During the pandemic, Filipino healthcare workers like nurses and other healthcare aides were amongst the first to die due to a lack of personal protective equipment.
My brother, dad, and I all got the virus too, but recovered as quickly as we got it. Though, not everyone was as lucky as us. During the pandemic, Filipino healthcare workers like nurses and other healthcare aides were amongst the first to die due to a lack of personal protective equipment. I know a lot of my friends who got it for the exact same reason. Their parents or family members were cleaners, personal support workers, and nannies who directly dealt with the virus.
In the US, Filipino nurses accounted for 25 percent of COVID deaths in the total nurse population in the country, even though they only made up 4.5 percent of it. In March of 2020, Filipina nurse Rosary Celay Castro-Olega was the first registered nurse to die in Los Angeles, California after coming out of retirement during the outbreak. Hundreds would follow.
I can still see those headlines, the breaking news stories, the social media posts—images of people banging pans together to celebrate the front-line workers’ acts of service for their communities. The evocation of essential workers as “heroes” and “saviours.”
But why only then? Why not, when our people were and continue to be trafficked, scammed, neglected? Why not before and why not now? When does a martyr become a sacrificial lamb? Why must we die for us to be seen?
I don’t remember when my Mama, my father’s mother, died. All I know is that it happened across the Pacific surrounded by my dad’s side of the family I barely knew. I got photos of her funeral on my Facebook page posted by my Tito back home. The blue-painted hall was packed with bodies and its walls were adorned with plastic banners of her face.
Here, she seemed only like a ghost of a presence, just like her husband, my Papa, who had died a few years before in the Philippines on the way to the store.
It was odd to see her surrounded by that many people. Here, I only knew her in passing as she went from house to house of her few children who immigrated to Canada. Here, she seemed only like a ghost of a presence, just like her husband, my Papa, who had died a few years before in the Philippines on the way to the store. When he was here, he worked as a dishwasher at a hotel in Niagara-on-the-Lake, same as my father.
The last thing I remember about Mama is from when I was in eighth grade. It was past midnight and I was on my way out of the bathroom when I saw a light shine down from the cracks of the door upstairs. My parents were both on night shifts that day. I nervously climbed up the steps, slowly, letting the wooden steps give way at my feet with a creak.
When I reached the top flight, I could hear someone in the kitchen and was surprised to find Mama there sitting at the table nonchalantly eating a bowl of rice with bagoong.
“What are you doing?” I asked with a laugh.
She responded in Tagalog or maybe Bisaya or Ilonggo, I couldn’t understand anyway, but I did hear the word “dad” somewhere.
“Trabaho, Mama,” I said loudly. “Trabaho. He’s at work right now.”
She nodded her head with grains of rice sticking to the sides of her mouth as she continued to chew.
Mom told me her memory was getting worse in the past few months. Apparently, she often thought my older sister was hiding in the kitchen cabinets when she was really starting university 75 kilometres away. Mama forgot how to speak English, too. In the end, I didn’t know if she understood me. All those years mastering the English language, and it felt like my master instead.
When we got the phone call that she died an ocean away, it was one of the first times I heard my dad cry. I pressed my ear against the door of my parents’ room, and I heard an unfamiliar sob. Quiet, but reverberating. Maybe, he too, was someone’s child. Maybe, he too, was someone’s son.
A year later, nearing the anniversary of my Papa’s death in the summer when we usually had our family picnic near the park close to the US border, I asked my mom if Mama was coming, and she looked at me strangely. My brother laughed in disbelief.
I had forgotten she was dead. In my head, she was never gone.
In my local library downtown, I am flipping through medical textbooks on arthritis over and over. I rummage through the crowded shelves for a sign, for a tome that could dispel this wicked curse my mom inherited and reverse the decay of a body; the friction of bones and the rotting of skin as it wipes away at a mess on a floor or the bleach against a yellowed bathtub.
My mom was disappointed, of course. I couldn’t find a cure for arthritis. But how was I supposed to tell her that her problem was not her health, but that she was Filipino?
I wanted my mom to live. That was all. I wanted so much for her to live. To live the life she wanted. To see the world. To experience how beautiful it can be when there are no bills to be paid or floors to scrub or shit to wash from the walls. I wanted so much for her that I could not give. I was desperate, confused, and disillusioned. I was a child.
I stopped dreaming of being a doctor during the pandemic. Mostly, because I knew I would be contributing to an institution that failed my mother. That failed so many migrant bodies who had touched it. My mom was disappointed, of course. I couldn’t find a cure for arthritis. But how was I supposed to tell her that her problem was not her health, but that she was Filipino?
That despite everything, the promised land she dreamt of as a young girl in the books that her father did not want her to read was the exact one that was killing her. That the promised land did not want her to begin with. They just wanted her body.
In Vancouver, I am becoming more of myself. I find him in the Titas working as custodial workers on campus, my boyfriend who meets my tantrums with patience and kindness, at a dinner table with kasamas playing cards or eating a feast we all made together, at rallies in public spaces screaming for better wages and working conditions, in zine and art workshops, in small, crowded living rooms sitting around a TV where we speak of our shared histories of forced migration and labour.
At the Tagalog lessons at the senior centre on Fraser, I tell one of the elder instructors, “I wish I had this when I was younger,” and she smiles. “Well, you have it now.”
As usual, Filipino spaces are transient, mobile—wherever they land. As usual, we all take home food that was left over. Little tea sandwiches, siapao meat buns, lumpia, grocery store cookies. We hand each other sheets of foil, sneak gifts in each other’s hands, say “Ingat,” take care and goodbye. We mean it.
On Easter Sunday, I am invited to do a public reading of an essay I wrote about my mom by one of my friends in the Filipino migrant rights organizing circle I’m part of. Admittedly, I am nervous. I haven’t performed for years since high school, and I didn’t bother memorizing my lines this time.
Later that night, I grip the mic in my palm, my throat bone dry. I tell them, “My mom is from Bulacan,” and when I peek up from my pages of text, I see her looking at me in the faces in the crowd. In the Tita at the front shoulder-to-shoulder with her adult son, watching me curiously. In the couple holding hands, leaning on one another as they whisper secrets in each other’s ears. In the woman smiling from the back, nodding slightly when we lock eyes as if to say: “I’m listening. I’m still listening.”
I am reminded of all the stories that have been given to me in haste like little gifts. All those journeys far from home. All those hard lives in the Philippines and those hard lives here. All different, but all the same when you close your eyes and let the soft sound of longing wash its way ashore. I tell a new one this time.
I look back. I huff out. I start from the top.
