Chapter 13:
Winter 2018
The road you took
Took you far, far away.
And you never stopped to look.
Because you knew you wouldn’t stay.
“Have you ever advocated, directly or indirectly, the overthrow of any government by force or violence?”
I blinked and managed to override any sarcastic impulse answers with a respectful No.
The immigration officer adjusted her glasses and typed a few words into her keyboard. With her chin-length blonde hair and blue floral cardigan, she reminded me of pre-conviction Martha Stewart.
She looked at my husband of seven years, waiting for him to answer too.
“No,” he said.
“Have you ever been involved in genocide or torture?” she asked.
Hmmm, let me think.
“No,” we both answered.
“Have you ever forced, or tried to force, someone to have any kind of sexual contact or relations?”
Negative responses all around.
The Green Card interview seemed to be going as well as one would hope so far. He and I had been separated for almost a year at that point. And after weeks of exhaustive preparation, Google searching, and consumption of flippant legal advice from the apathetic company lawyer assigned to help us, we were both ready to answer any curveball questions thrown our way about our marriage.
I knew what time the technically-still-my-spouse generally went to sleep. I could describe at will the color of not just our kitchen wall, but also our living room curtains. He could confirm whether or not we had a night table in our bedroom and could even go so far as to describe what it looked like if prompted.
If we needed to supercharge Operation Convince The Government That Our Marriage Was Legit, I had an arsenal of photos dating back to 2008, proving that I had embarked on many a romantic excursion with said spouse over the years.
One would hope never to have to brandish one’s secret weapon, but just in case, I was prepared to readily summon a signed and notarized letter from my best friend, who had witnessed and could vouch for the legitimacy of my marriage.
With our grossly bulging folder of meticulously color-coded documents, ill-fitting wedding rings that we ordered off of Amazon, and anxious but respectful smiles, we had done everything that we could do to not get deported. Now our future was up to the woman sitting behind the desk with her clear plastic glasses and floral sweater.
The lady in question squinted into the screen, hit Backspace several times with her right pointer finger, and bit her lip. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard like she was about to type something, and then her hands dropped to the desk as she changed her mind. She furrowed her eyebrows at the computer screen.
I shifted in my seat as quietly as I could.
“I’m sorry,” she said finally. “There’s this completely new process that Trump wanted, and they just barely trained us on this. I need to make a quick phone call.”
Oh yes, probably best to consult someone knowledgeable and properly trained. It’s only our lives we’re talking about here.
I smiled tightly and nodded. I could tell the spouse was doing his best to stay calm.
Officer Martha picked up the phone and punched a number in. “Hey,” she said in a hushed voice. “Can you come and look at something for me real quick?”
She paused for a beat. “Okay, okay. Thanks,” she whispered before hanging up.
We sat in silence until we heard a knock. The door opened slightly, and the upper half of a man in a brown suit swiped clockwise through the opening, the bottom half of his body hidden behind the door.
“Hey, what’s up?” the torso in the brown suit half-whispered.
Why are we whispering? I wondered.
“Hey, so I pressed this button here and I need to undo that,” Officer M said, relieved as she pointed to where “here” and ”that” were on the monitor.
Brown Suit stepped fully into the room and walked to the desk to investigate. After a few minutes of experimental typing, he asked Officer M to step outside the room with him for “a sec.”
The spouse and I were left alone in the interview room. It had been fifteen minutes since we were asked to enter the interview room, present our documents, and answer their important questions designed to catch any immigrant who so much as harbored the tiniest half-formed seed of ill intent toward America.
“I really hope they don’t ask us if we’ve accidentally murdered at least three of our house plants. You know how my face gets when I attempt to lie,” I joked lamely after a moment of nervous silence.
We both smirked tensely.
After what felt like a lifetime of waiting, the door opened again, and Officer M came back in. She closed the door behind her, walked back to her desk the way one would after coming back from a lunch break, and settled into her chair.
She adjusted her glasses and looked up at us. “Okay, great,” she announced as if we were clued into the conversation she had just had outside the room.
She rifled through our documents until she found our driver’s licenses.
“Okay, so tell me your address,” she asked.
The spouse and I both recited the addresses on our driver’s licenses. We confirmed our birth dates, middle names, and last names.
Five minutes later, the interview was done, and we were told we could leave. We would hear word on a decision within two weeks.
We stood up, left the interview room, walked through a full waiting room of other hopeful Green Card applicants, rode the elevator down to the parking garage, went into our respective vehicles, and drove our separate ways back to work.
And that was that. Thank god they didn’t ask me about the house plants.
Chapter 14
Spring 2010
I want to see cities from above the clouds
And watch sunsets through oval windows
I want to fly for hours against time
Until the minutes and seconds stop to matter
I want to be lost in a sea of foreign words
Just to witness a smile become universal
I want to see the Northern Lights
I want to hear the ocean’s heartbeat
I want to see the world
I want to see all of it
“Amping sa biyahe,” my little brother said as he hugged me tightly. He was telling me to have a safe trip. It was 10:15 PM, and I was at the Mactan-Cebu International Airport with the husband of three months, surrounded by family and all the luggage we were going to take with us in order to start a brand-new life in America.
I remember the flickering fluorescent lights and white tile floors. The people coming and going all around me. Families saying good-bye or reuniting. Bursts of laughter and lively conversations in Cebuano, my native tongue. No matter how tough life was in a developing country like ours, Filipinos somehow always found ways to laugh and be merry.
I remember the large red numbers of the airport clock telling me I was less than an hour away from leaving the life I’d always known on the island I had called home for twenty-four years. I remember my parents sitting on either side of me. I wonder what they were thinking then, knowing their only daughter was flying off to the other side of the world to start a brand-new life with their brand-new son-in-law.
I remember feeling calm and wondering if I should be more emotionally agitated. Sometimes the most pivotal moments of our lives can feel so ordinary when we’re right in the eye of it.
It wasn’t until the clock hit 10:45 PM, when it was time for the husband and me to go through our gate, that I finally started crying. My brothers and I were extremely tight, and the thought of not getting to see them every day anymore made me really sad.
I was Papa’s girl through and through, and I was going to miss waking up to the smell of his cooking and the sound of his Sunday music. My mom was my hero and my inspiration. It would be hard not to have her as an anchor to draw strength from when life inevitably threw me some punches in the future.
I remember seeing our luggage being carried on the conveyor belt through the security scanner and being spit out on the other side. I remember my brain vaguely registering the metaphor of how my own life was about to be spit out on the other side too by this time tomorrow.
It was a twenty-five-hour trip to get from Cebu City, Philippines, to Salt Lake City, Utah. We would take a five-hour flight to Tokyo, have a four-hour layover, take a ten-hour flight to Los Angeles, and then a final three-hour flight from LAX to SLC.
I remember seeing Utah for the first time from the plane. It was April of 2010, and the Wasatch mountains still had snow on their peaks. Beyond that, it was mostly a brown desert landscape. It couldn’t have been more different from the aerial view of the Philippines, a cluster of lush green islands amid a vivid blue ocean.
When our plane landed at Salt Lake City International Airport, I soaked it all in. The air was cold and dry, the exact opposite of the muggy, humid, hot air I was used to in the Philippines. People were rushing all around me to get to their gates.
Everyone was so tall and beautiful. Everyone spoke English. They had blue or green eyes and beautiful blonde, brown, or red hair. In the Philippines, people were either speaking Cebuano, Tagalog, or another dialect, depending on which part of the Philippines they grew up in. The Philippines is made up of thousands of islands, and there are hundreds of languages spoken in the country. Most everybody had dark brown eyes and jet-black hair like me. You didn’t really see physical variations in the Philippines as you did here in America, and I found myself feeling awestruck at all the beautiful Caucasian people I saw at the airport.
A teenage girl, who was a good half a foot taller than me, caught my eye and smiled at me. I smiled back. People didn’t smile at strangers where I grew up. I mentally filed away this new behavior, and the next time I caught someone’s eye, I smiled. They smiled back.
What a cool norm. I should make sure to smile at strangers more often the next time I’m back in the Philippines, I thought.
I remember seeing California Pizza Kitchen’s bright yellow neon sign as we made our way to ground transportation, and I remember feeling like we had made it. Nothing says “first world” like the idea of pizza with the name “California” attached to it.
The servings were outrageously enormous. Who ate a meal this big? My first meal in America was worth three meals for me. I discreetly sneaked peaks at the other tables around me. People were busing their own tables instead of leaving their trays on the table like people did in the Philippines.
The fast-food workers didn’t know what I meant when I asked for tissues. It turned out that people called them napkins here. That was going to take a minute to remember. Napkins in the Philippines were feminine pads.
There were a lot of little things like that that we had to learn as we navigated our new life in America. I discovered that the KFCs here didn’t sell rice as a side. What a disappointment that was.
When you went to a department store and an associate asked you how you were doing, I learned that I didn’t need to tell them my life story of how I had traveled all the way from the Philippines and how it was only my second day in America. You simply said, “Doing well, how are you?” You would wait for a similarly brief response and then you wrapped up the interaction and moved on.
I got very good at subtly observing all the norms that were new to me and mimicking those behaviors. I built my vocabulary of English words and phrases, movie references, iconic names and places, and figured out a way to be funny in English (Filipino humor just didn’t translate as well into English).
There was something special about going to a public place and knowing with absolute certainty that not a soul there would know who I was. I was completely anonymous, and that was exhilarating for me.
Over time, I made new friends and settled into a career that I loved. I learned to think in English, instead of thinking in my native tongue then translating that into English in my head before it turned into verbal output. I even started dreaming in English.
My first year in America turned into two years, then three, then five, then seven. Before I knew it, I had rebuilt a life and a career from scratch in a foreign land that didn’t speak my language or know my culture. And damn if I wasn’t proud of that.
Chapter 15:
Spring 2018
Maybe I’ll stay
Maybe I’ll go
Maybe I’m okay
With what I don’t know
It was lunchtime on a Thursday. I stood in line at the Arctic Circle next to our office building, bantering with Jesse, one of my closest coworkers. As we stood in line, we got into a lively discussion about the merits of chocolate versus vanilla ice cream waffle cones.
At that point, it had been one week and four days since the Green Card interview. Waiting was not my strongest suit. And waiting for news that would directly determine my future was agonizing. Agonizing.
Our visa had expired months ago, and the technically-still-my-spouse and I were on a six-month visa extension while we waited for a decision on our Green Card. We couldn’t leave the country for travel because the extension documents we had were not enough to grant us re-entry to the U.S., and we were days from reaching the end of our temporary visa extension.
I had two boxes labeled Ship to the Philippines and two other boxes labeled Donate in case we didn’t hear a decision in time and we had to fly back to the Philippines in less than a day's notice.
We personally knew a family who had been blacklisted from America for overstaying past their visa expiration date. The company lawyer had advised them that it was okay to stay in America while waiting for a visa renewal. It turned out that it was, in fact, not okay to do that. They got blacklisted and were forced to move back to the Philippines. They hadn’t been able to re-apply for another visa since.
It’s interesting to see how people behave when their life hangs in the balance. I chose to start a gratitude journal, and during one of the most agonizing two weeks of my adult life, I somehow found an abundance of things to be grateful for.
I was grateful for the lessons I had learned over the last seven years. I was grateful for the people I had met in America, the friendships I’d made, and the strength I had discovered in myself. I was grateful to have found a career I loved. I was grateful for the privileges I had enjoyed living in a first-world country.
Four days before our extension expired and having heard no news yet, I started mentally preparing myself for rebuilding my life again in the Philippines. I started reminding myself of all the things I missed about my home. I started convincing myself that I was excited to see my old friends and go back to being an island girl.
That day, standing in line at Arctic Circle and cheerfully debating ice cream flavors with my coworker, nobody would have thought I was days away from potentially being deported.
The lady standing in the line behind me definitely did not know that, but that didn't stop her from forming conclusions about me. I’d never seen her before in my life, but somehow she had decided that I was nothing but a dumb giggly Asian girl who needed to grow up. I knew this because she told me as much.
As I was bantering with Jesse while standing in line at the Arctic Circle, she started mimicking my laughter behind me. I didn’t understand what was happening at first. I turned to look behind me and saw a woman who was about my age, fuming as she mocked me. She had box-dyed black hair and a predisposition to go heavy on the eyeliner.
My first thought was that she was having a stroke, so I asked with sincere concern, “Are you okay?” (In my defense, it’s surprisingly easy to mistake angry mimicry for early signs of stroke.)
She turned livid. “Oh my god, I can’t believe I have to stand behind someone with such a low IQ! Why don’t you get yourself an education? Oh my god. I can’t believe this.”
She started launching into a tirade about having to listen to airheads and how I had the lowest IQ in all of mankind as she mimicked my apparently obnoxious laughter in between her angry grumbling.
Jesse had stiffened next to me, absorbing the confusing interaction amid the fast-food chain restaurant. Everyone around us had gone silent.
She was so angry, there was no space for me to put a word in edgewise. I was also a de-escalator at heart, and matching anger with anger was never my style.
As upset as I was that she was injecting herself into my life, judging my intelligence based on a two-minute conversation she overheard (which she wasn’t even a part of to begin with), I couldn’t help but think, She must be having the worst day. Maybe the worst year. Maybe the worst life. Does she even have friends and family that genuinely care about her?
When her tirade wore down, I looked her in the eye and said, “You must be having a bad day. You don’t know me. What makes you think you’re in a position to judge a total stranger’s intelligence?”
There’s no talking sense into someone so emotionally enraged like that, and I decided to let it go. Jesse and I got our ice cream cones and left the lady alone to stew in her anger over airheads and dumb people while she waited for her fast-food lunch.
I wondered what it took for someone to get to a point where they thought throwing vitriol at random strangers was acceptable. Maybe she grew up around hate and anger. Maybe that was a generous way to look at it.
In the end, I felt I had stood up for myself without expending too much unnecessary energy on an unnecessary interaction. For her sake, I hope she experienced more love than hate from the people around her.
Reflecting on my own behavior, I should have been more aware of the environment I was in. I wasn’t in the Philippines anymore. Loud laughter and animated conversations may be common and accepted where I grew up, but not so much where I was living now.
Having spent the last seven years adapting to American culture, my EQ was already pretty up there. But that day, I could practically hear my social-awareness and social-regulation skills maxing out, like a strength-o-meter slamming into the bell after an enthusiastic steroidal crossfitter smashes the spring-loaded lever with a padded mallet.
Step right up, folks. Test your emotional literacy right here!
Later that afternoon, I was in the middle of a leadership training, still trying to shake off that strange lunchtime interaction, when I received a text from the husband-of-seven years: “Check your email.”
My heart started pounding. The trainer was in front of the room, pointing at a whiteboard, where the differences between management and leadership were outlined in two clean columns.
I pulled up my Gmail app on my phone, fingers shaking. I clicked on the email with the subject line, “Green Card Application Update.”
Scrolling past the impossible-to-comprehend lawyer talk, I finally found the words I had been almost afraid to hope to see: our Green Card had been approved.
We were permanent residents of America, valid for ten years. We could travel and visit our families. We could unpack the boxes labeled Ship to the Philippines and Donate. In five years, we would be eligible to apply for citizenship.
We had made it.
I felt painful tears prick my eyeballs, and I shot up from my chair and ran outside, mumbling to the trainer that I had to run to the bathroom as I rushed past her.
I ran through the revolving doors of our main office building, gasping as I finally made it outside and breathed fresh air. I ran for the less heavily trafficked corner of the building and finally collapsed on the grass, sobbing.
I called my dad first.
He picked up on the first ring. “Anak? What’s going on?” my dad asked gently.
“We got our Green Card, Pa,” I sobbed almost incoherently into the phone. “We got approved!”
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