Return Flight

WE immigrants, like lovers with unresolved romances, generally carry a torch for the old country. In our hearts the native country always keeps the dreamy hues of past love affairs.

When we heard Filipinos who have lived for decades in America  talked about going back to the Philippines "for good," we thought  it was just the periodic flaring up of an old flame. We expected it to flicker back into an unobtrusive nightlight. Lately however, the old flame has turned into a conflagration.

Years ago, we left the Philippines feeling America as redemptive even if we were not sure what redemption we were seeking. And through the years, we increasingly saw the Philippines as harsh reality, an ancestor we were ashamed to talk about. But this time it has turned into the New Dream, the New Redemption. What is this sudden, obsessive desire to live once more in the Philippines? A need to seek the resolution of something unfinished? A desire to chisel years of nostalgia into solid Philippine marble?

Some of us feel that our years in America is an unfinished symphony badly in need of a third or final Movement. It was a life after all which started with the opening rondalla strains of Filipino folk songs then transposed abruptly into a full orchestral rendition of America, the Beautiful. During our years in America we had our share of cultural discordant notes. There must be this desire this time to clean up the contrapuntal American melodic shifts, to restore some harmony in us. In the Philippines, perhaps, lies that special corner where we can "keep the music playing".

Spinning in the whirlpool of our ambivalence are fragments of curiosity, adventure, and even exorcism. How can we reshape ourselves to fit into an environment and culture that were once natural to us but must now feel alien? Will it be easy to revert to some atavistic ways or will we find ourselves imposing our American ways on our old home?

With considerable success we had turned ourselves into professionals, the labor force, the husbands and wives, the parents, the property owners, the community leaders in the daily American landscape. But there are days when we find our sense of pride in these accomplishments tarnished, no different from the coinage of daily living. The thrill is gone. The heart of adventure in America has become as tired and as sclerotic as our bodies. We now feel the need to jump once more into that swinging rope bridge, Indiana Jones-style, to cross that cultural chasm, hoping the other end is that exotic land where we were born.

When we go back, the faces of the people, the smell and texture of the land, the taste of the food, the voices and the rhythms will be the same. But we and the people we left behind will have changed. We will need to spend some time and effort to live and adjust with the changes.

As we doze luxuriously in Business Class on our flight back, the Southeast Asian sun rises as the American sun sets. Somewhere, our American-born children commute back and forth in the traffic of that American Dream we once had as we carry back live images of "amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties".