Stay Safe

By Shella Parcarey

/ Nonfiction /      

One day after my tenth birthday, I stuffed a suitcase with nearly all my clothes. Underneath them, I tucked a small round treasure chest made of woven rattan, inside which I packed bracelets from friends who already said their goodbyes. In the house I shared with my aunt and grandparents, I put my toys away on a shelf. I played one last song on my piano. I learned a new word: immigrant.

On my last morning in Pitogo, I didn't bother to go to school one final time to say I was leaving. But my friends ran out of classrooms to the top of the hill above our house and shouted my name and held their arms in the air, all waving to me. I looked up and waved back. 

Ingat ka. 

I boarded a multicolored jeepney and traveled for many hours with my aunt and grandparents. Our long day took us away from Pitogo, a small fishing village on the island of Luzon. Of the more than 7,000 others that made up the archipelago of the Philippines, it was the largest. But where we lived in the rural province, there were no traffic lights, no phone lines, and only a hint of electricity prone to blackouts and brownouts. Indoor plumbing was rare, and many villagers retrieved their water from a community well. 

Our jeepney climbed a steep, dirt road away from Pitogo, where the deep green forest made it tough for drivers and passengers to see the armed rebels of the New People's Army that sometimes roamed the area. The roads were not paved until after we passed bigger and bigger towns, joining more jeepneys and buses on the road headed for the capital.

Ingat ka. 

These words sat heavy on my shoulders as uncertainty grew the farther away I traveled from the place I considered home. Ingat ka. Translated literally from Tagalog, it means take care. But unlike its rough equivalent in English, it is not said lightly as a farewell, an encouragement for wellness, a sentiment in place of good luck to wish someone good health. In Tagalog, saying it implies an element of danger, recognition of a treacherous path ahead that may be full of harm. There is a more honest translation of ingat ka: stay safe.

We arrived in Manila after a full day of travel that stretched about eight hours, sometimes longer when traffic congestion was at its worst. There were billboards amid the urban sprawl, displaying words in English I didn't understand. These were not simple accommodations to foreign travelers. They were also a reminder of the United States' influence, entrenched in the country's capital, even after most American soldiers left at the conclusion of World War II and finally ceded government control of the Philippines to its own people. The jeepneys clogging the streets were also a reminder of the two countries' ties that bear the trappings of a client state relationship. These vehicles were originally made from military jeeps that the American military left behind. 

Manila, even in the 1980s, was already a metropolis. The country's turbulent past showed in the faces of the architecture. Western-style, muscular steel and concrete buildings soared up to the sky, housing the privileged few lucky enough to get jobs that prevented them from ending up in squatters that served as substitutes for homes. Facades of churches, government buildings, and the Walled City of Intramuros sighed with rusty colored water stains, grown tired from standing since the Spanish and then Americans said: these islands are ours.

In Manila, we stayed in my uncle's apartment that doubled as a restaurant. He and his family kept their bedrooms upstairs and served home cooked meals downstairs to students at a vocational college across the street. It was in this cramped home that my extended family and I shared rooms and beds for what seemed like endless days while filling out documents and even more documents that both the Philippines and American governments needed before a bureaucrat I would never meet somewhere inside the U.S. embassy decided if I could be with my mother. 

She had long left the country when I was a one-year-old to escape a government that would not let her have a better life, to escape a government that decided her marriage and those of others in the entire archipelago are permanent -- even if he doesn't love you anymore and you don't love him anymore. Hundreds of years ago, the colonizers of Spain brought with it Catholicism. And the Catholic church brought to all the islands its stoic view that divorce is against their god's will and therefore against man's law. Even the divorce decree the state of Illinois would later grant my mother is just for her own peace of mind and remain invalid. Even now, she is still considered married in the country she left. 

After landing in Chicago, my mother became an overseas Filipino worker, one of the Philippines' top export products used to shore up the country's economy. It was from Chicago where my mother began the many years-long process for asking the American government to let me be with her, to give us permission to be together. From my uncle's house in Manila, my aunt and I religiously boarded jeepneys for days on end to go to the offices of the American embassy in the more affluent parts of the city. We took our seats on generic metal chairs, knee to knee with dozens and dozens of other Filipinos. 

We were all there for one reason. We were asking America to let us in. I don't remember a number system to make the waiting make sense. By the end of the day, maybe they would have called your name, maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they would have called your name and sent you to another room to sit, knee to knee with even more Filipinos. Endless rooms full of brown faces, eager to start the dehumanizing process of immigration. 

You are no longer a person. You are an application form. 

It was like spending every day in a typical American Department of Motor Vehicles waiting room, except poorer, more crowded, and in a Third World country. 

It took my mother ten years of asking America for permission before she got her papers and left the Philippines. It would take another ten years before we saw each other again. We got to know each other only through letters, photographs, cassette tapes of recorded voices sent back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. I was ten years old when she arrived at Manila's international airport. She came back only once, when America said you can take your daughter with you. 

While I waited for permission to leave, I watched the rule of law disintegrate in my country as wrongful imprisonment of the opposition to the reigning dictator and human rights violations that included the use of killings and tortures escalated. The year before I left, newspaper headlines somberly reported the assassination of former Philippine Senator Benigno Aquino. He was shot while debarking an airplane, back to his country from a self-imposed exile in the United States. He was our hope for the true end of martial law. He was our hope for true democracy. He was our American dream. 

The assassination ignited mass demonstrations against then Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, who was thought to have ordered the killing. Imagine a street in your city, packed with people, shoulder to shoulder, not one inch of room to move, sidewalk to sidewalk, shouting in unison for democracy. Imagine police repeatedly shooting tear gas into the air. Imagine mother and daughter trying to reach each other before political uncertainty and the violence that comes with it engulf both their future.  

Ingat ka.

In one of the last buildings I went to during the visa application process, an immigration officer took me into his office. My aunt stayed on the other side of the closed door. He asked me to take all my clothes off. When I stopped at my underwear, he said all of them. He walked around with his eyes on me as I stood naked. Why did he do that? Was he a doctor? Do all immigrants have to do that? To this day, I remain haunted by the questions I never asked out loud because shame overshadowed any feelings of violation.  

There was no other adult in the room. I was a child. I was scared. I decided to stay silent because I thought that was what it meant to be strong. I knew I needed to be one of the lucky ones to get those immigration papers that I will forever need to protect like family heirlooms. 

I finally saw my mother again in person at Manila's international airport a few weeks before we were to leave the Philippines together for America. My mouth was open as I ran to her. If I let out a cry, I did not hear it in the luggage area thronged with others in their reunions. I sighed into her arms and my teeth almost bit into her chest as we embraced. I fought the urge to cry. Any tears on my face would only have elicited questions I was not ready to answer about how I was struggling to make peace with the possibility of never seeing friends and family I grew up loving while I began a life with my mother on the other side of a vast ocean.

During my last days in Manila, the sense of loss only deepened when my grandmother became ill and was confined to a hospital. Over the years, she had become one of the women to take the place of my mother. I did not call her lola, grandmother. I called her nanay, mother. When doctors decided her stay at the hospital needed to be an extended one, my family said we could no longer wait for her to recover and be conscious enough for our goodbye. It was time for me to immigrate.

I don't remember how I arrived at the hospital. The image that has stayed with me is that of nanay in a hospital bed. Her eyes were closed, and she didn't know I was there to say goodbye. By the time she was conscious and went back to Pitogo, I was already in America, breathing in the frigid air of my first November in Chicago. I struggle to recall the last words I said to her, but the grief that paralyzed me the last time I saw her grew to live in me. If she had been aware and awake when I was there, I tell myself she would have said to me, "Ingat ka."

I grew up in the rural Philippines with my country excusing my mother's absence and the absence of many thousands of other mothers by instilling in the minds of children left behind that America is the land of opportunities. What they never see once we clear immigration at our destinations is the shock and trauma of assimilation. 

Stop speaking your language, swallow your grief, try to hide your skin, blend in. Assimilate. 

This November will mark my forty years of living in America, but there has not been one of those days when I have felt American. From an acquaintance’s family member once asking me if I was wearing my native dress to his professional colleague asking how my English is to another coming into my home for a dinner party thinking I was not its owner but a maid, there are always reminders that I still don't really belong. I am here with permission. 

This point has never been more palpable than during present day America. The erosion of civil liberties and heightened persecution of immigrants since the start of 2025 have only underscored how hesitant I've been, even after all these years, to call America home. Home is not where a government orders children who look like me be separated from their caregivers seeking asylum at the border. Home is not where masked government workers abduct brown bodies who look like me from their families while guaranteeing safe passage for white bodies into this country. Home is not where I had to learn how to hide myself. 

During the Covid pandemic, a neighbor across the street in my neighborhood saw an Asian man walking his dog and yelled out to him, "Go back to Wuhan." Go back where you came from. When I hear these stories, often I secretly think that I do want to go back where I came from. I, too, want to feel at home.