Artwork by Kaya Joan
On Christmas Day, my family and I wrapped our warm bodies against the arbitrary demarcations of the Canada-U.S. border. Mom, Dad, Ate Han, Mamita, and I were on the American side, and Tito Ben, Tita Edith, Ate Yang, and Ate Kang were on the Canadian side. We couldn’t cross to see each other, so here, under barbed-wire fences, our limbs reached—cold hand upon cold hand, winter coat upon winter coat, tear-stained cheek upon tear-stained cheek. We stood in the cold, consoled by metal in the dead of winter. Despite being separated by a steel boundary, and despite being unable to close the space between us, we hugged as if our lives depended on it, as if family wasn’t made to be broken.
The word border came from the Old French “bordeure,” the broad, colored band surrounding the shield in heraldry. The ocean was a border that enveloped Tito Ben, who worked as a seafarer for forty-one years. While my aunts were crying at the border, he stood there, now grey-haired and wrinkled, chuckling to himself. The distance wasn’t new to him. He was used to being away and used to his family being away. For most of my formative years, he was gone. My only memories of him from my early childhood were from Christmastime when he would hand me a crisp 500-peso bill tucked in a red envelope as a gift every year. It was fine. When he was back, we were happy. It was like he never disappeared at all.
Mamita sobbed while inserting her arms between the metal slats. She hadn’t seen my cousins in four years, and before she arrived at O’Hare a week ago, she hadn’t seen me in five. I cried when she arrived at the door of my family’s apartment, her nose pink from the cold, wearing my mother’s oversized winter coat, gleaming with more laugh lines and wrinkles than I remembered. She was there when I was born, when I competed in singing contests at six, when I had my period at thirteen, and when I left the country at eighteen. Mamita was there to come home to at the end of a long day, with inabraw and deep-fried banana blossoms, a cup of coffee in her hand. But since my family left the Philippines, we were separated by more than just distance and time. Between us were hopes and dreams rooted in different places, splintering like broken glass in all directions.
In her book Borderlands/La Frontera, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa writes, “A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge.” It was the first book I read when I immigrated to America, lent to me by an English professor who had seen my grief through the papers I wrote for class. “Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” Anzaldúa notes. I felt the harshness of that uncertainty because America loves its borders. Even upon arrival, I knew that where I stood was not safe. My father was walking in front of my house, and a neighbor called the cops on him. This was a place that had clear lines of where one should remain and how one should remain. One day, while scrolling through Instagram, I saw a video of a Trump supporter saying she would let Jesus in “as long as he entered legally.”
My family and I stood there shivering in the cold, shoulders shaking, belly-laughing. It was like we were in a telenovela. The Canadian side traversed the Rainbow Bridge to meet the American side at the point of entry. In fifteen minutes, my aunts and my mom were, expectedly, crying. Soon after, my cousins also joined them in tears while taking pictures of our family. My dad was filming it all on his phone, saying that he would upload the video to Facebook so that our family would go viral and maybe we could make some money from it. The sky above us was clear and blue, the clouds were wispy, and the sun shone so brightly it made us a bit warmer despite the freezing mist from Niagara Falls blowing our faces into numbness. My family longed for this life, one filled with American and Canadian comforts. But even though we had reached foreign soil and earned foreign money, we still couldn’t buy time to commune together in the flesh.
A few years ago, I made up for lost time by harassing Tito Ben on Facebook Messenger with intrusive questions about his life as a seafarer who inspected ship machinery. He told me about what happened to the waves when there was a storm, that they were like walls around the ships, enveloping them. He showed me pictures of him and his coworkers—all male and Filipino—wearing hard hats and blue utility suits, standing on the cranes of the ships, or salting the surface for the snow. He visited Egypt, Australia, Chile, Turkey, and the Panama Canal. In 1985, he spent three months in New York City, exploring it, learning to use the subway. He even visited the World Trade Center before “the terrorists made it explode,” he said. When he returned to New York again in 2021, the year before he retired, he sent me a selfie with Lady Liberty; on the horizon, she looked like a small pillar of light surrounded by dark waters.
From ancient history until the modern era, borders were vague. My grandparents’ house in San Juan was equally borderless. My mom, dad, older sister, and I stayed in one bedroom for the first ten years of my life. Everything was ours: our bed, our drawers, our study table, our computer, our bookshelf, our mirror, our pillows, our lotion, our shampoo, our notebooks and pens. There was no definitive geography of what was mine alone. Mamita, who also lived with us, would allow me to steal the salty, crispy skin of milkfish from her plate; I would dip it in soy sauce and calamansi and eat it with rice. It was our fish. Even now, without saying a single word, I know she would place that fish skin on my plate.
Christmas morning, five of the nine family members who were Canadian citizens drove over to meet us at the Holiday Inn, where we stayed for the night. The other four, the ones without papers, were left behind, but we tried our hardest to celebrate as if we were all there. The night before, we had wished each other a “Merry Christmas,” video calling those who were still on the Canadian side. Because only a Chinese restaurant was open, we got takeout and stuffed orange chicken, fried rice, and egg foo young down our throats. My sister pulled up the Philippine Christmas station ID on the TV, and we watched the annual program where celebrities gather to sing a song about families coming together under warm fairy lights and parols, holding up candles to a meek mannequin Jesus in the manger. My sister sang and danced along with the smiling people on the screen, trying to get me to do the same. We tried to fill the absence of our missing family members with bright, cheery music. But the distance was a border of its own, rendering everything silent.
Tito Ben’s daughter, Ate Yang, crosses the Canada-U.S. border during the week to work as a nurse in Buffalo while living in Niagara Falls, Ontario. She drives an hour each way. When the border patrol agent found out she was pregnant, he barraged her with questions. “Do you want to give birth in America?” he asked, his tone laced with accusation. “No,” she said, “Why would I? Healthcare in Canada is free!” When we met at the border fence, she took a video of us, just like my father. She also cried. The last time I checked, that video had 163,000 views on TikTok.
Mamita was twenty-six years old when she flew to Kuwait with a passport that wasn’t her own. Her agency sent her as Regina Baluyot even though her birth name was Carmelita Colobong. It was the 1980s, and Ferdinand Marcos Sr. was president. He said that Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) were needed to boost the Philippines’ local economy, and Mamita left out of civic duty. She also left out of familial duty: she sent her sister, my mother, to school by working as a domestic helper for an Iranian family for ten years. Mamita raised three kids who weren’t her own—changed their diapers, made their beds, and tucked them into bed at night—all to send money home. When she was homesick and missed her family, she worked harder. Her employers loved her. But as soon as her sister received her college diploma, Mamita came back to San Juan. She has been there ever since.
When I asked her to stay permanently with my family in America, she just smiled.
The plan was to spend the holidays together until the border patrol agent told us about changes in Canadian legislation that didn’t allow Mamita, who was visiting America from the Philippines on a tourist visa, to drive into Canada. He said that Mamita’s electronic travel authorization, a permit allowing foreign nationals to enter Canada without a visa, only worked when flying into the country. We had driven from Wisconsin to New York to Canada only to sit dumbfounded in the customs building. I frantically checked Google Flights for a last-minute plane ticket. My mother begged, telling the agent story after story of our family and how we had not seen each other for a long time. I just looked at the gun on his waist. He didn’t budge, and the flights were expensive and long and my aunt would have to fly from Buffalo to New York City to Toronto, and she still wouldn’t have made it in time for Noche Buena. It was too much. We were unable to cross and wouldn’t just leave Mamita behind, so we walked out of the Customs and Border Protection building in silence.
I once asked Tito Ben if he got bored of the ocean, and he told me no. He would lift weights at their makeshift gym, play card games with his coworkers, and make paksiw with the galunggong he would catch while they were anchored. During off days, they grilled pork belly and swam at the pool on the ship. I asked him about the hardest part of being a seafarer, and he told me about being homesick. I asked him if he missed being a seafarer, and he told me yes. In college, Tito Ben applied to maritime school knowing that he was signing up for a life of absence. Nearly a third of the world’s maritime workers are from the Philippines. “It’s like you being away in school right now,” he said, referring to my move from Manila to Wisconsin and then from Wisconsin to New York to do my master’s degree. “It’s a sacrifice.”
There was no undoing the ways our lives cleaved. I remember Mamita’s shock when we were driving to the Canadian border. We bought two Whopper meals from the Burger King at a rest stop in Pennsylvania, and the drink was bigger than her face. “I will drown in this,” she said. I remember giving her my scarf when we were on the Staten Island Ferry. I remember her first time seeing snow in Ohio, her fascination with the cold, and her utter rejection of it.
When I ask her to migrate to America, I know it is selfish, and of course, she says no. Before she left for the Philippines after New Year’s in Wisconsin, she held my hand as tightly as she used to when we would cross the street when I was a child. Again, we were at a crossing. She held me and cried before letting me go.
In the morning, when the day is simply murmuring out of its slumber, I recite the Glory Be prayer: “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning is now, and ever shall be world without end. Amen.” I think of a world without end, as in eternity, but also a world without the violence of these borders that keep us from each other. I imagine these dividing lines undulating, like the walls of Jericho that once crashed down. I imagine all of my family members seeing each other without being separated by skeletal gates and walls. I imagine us unbound.
I watched myself cry again on the video that Ate Yang posted. Before getting to the border, my family and I drove through half of America. We slept on the road. We stopped at gas stations in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We took pictures across state lines. We watched the snow fall on this country that we struggle to call home. Then we were there with our tear-stricken faces, numb from the freezing mist of Niagara Falls. I remember the broad rainbow surrounding my family, a trick of light and mist, and how it never went away. I remember that my mother still thanked God before we parted, grateful that we were able to see each other even through the bars. I looked up at the pristine sky and the boundless blue above the metal fence between us. I imagined Tito Ben and Mamita and my mother hugging one another with the full warmth of their bodies, our family no longer betrayed by geography. We would be belly-laughing. We would never be cold.
