Sunlight in Strange Lands
My favourite stories about my mum are quite self-indulgent because they’re rooted in what I believe is a trait we share. Her flashes of ferocity, sometimes warranted, sometimes not. How she vowed to carry a brick in her handbag to a housing association meeting after a threat of eviction or suggested sending my boss a dead chicken when I’d been fired.
One I like to retell is a memory that still makes me cackle thinking about it. A tale of a young man reclined against his car, on the phone and eating an ice lolly with his hazard lights on, blocking the exit of our road. I think she’d picked me and my sister up from school that day straight after work. She stopped behind him, asked if he’d broken down and could he move. With unprovoked belligerence, he had repeated her in a kind of pidgin Chinese accent. Before I knew it, there was a metallic thud of the car door slamming and, like some bootleg Tarantino movie, she appeared marching up to him with the windshield framing the drama that was about to happen.
It’s not every day you watch your mum kicking someone’s car in, in a full nurse's uniform. Her kicking, him pleading for her to stop, having to abandon his lolly before relenting and moving the car, mounting the pavement in his haste. The door slammed open and shut again and we sped away. My sister and I quickly swivelled round in our seats to stick our middle fingers up at him from the rear window, frothing with glee.
There are more stories. I love them because they shatter the British preoccupation with politeness in the face of someone being a prick and I think of all the other occasions I don’t know about where, alone and in a new country, she broke up the monotony of the stiff upper lip. But I also don’t want to veer from pride in ethnic or cultural identity into stereotypes. My mum isn’t a “typical” Filipina, whatever that means, she’s quiet often to the point of shyness, but she does share a commonality of first-generation immigrants of having an extraordinary well of mettle.
Engagements, pregnancies, new jobs and new mortgage announcements had come thick and fast. Then an India-meets-Jamaica wedding where a friend had recoiled in cringe at my inability to stop ugly-crying at the romance. I’d been struggling to sit with that feeling of ‘what do I do next?’ until I’d decided to belly-flop into the unknown of a decade-late gap year. If nothing else, the maths of it all, of being in unknown territory and overstimulated to the point where any extraneous anxiety doesn’t have room, would surely be positive? It felt like a forward trajectory at a time where everyone was moving on without me.
My mum helped me pack the giant suitcase I’d rescued from a TK Maxx sale that I now refer to as The Big Bitch. As I’d remove a sock or lipstick hoping it’d bring the number on the luggage scales down she decided now, during this delicate operation, it was time to have a big talk. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up. In case it doesn’t go as expected.” Assuming this was part of our family’s collective M.O. for catastrophising, without looking up I asked her why she was shitting on something that hadn’t yet begun. She continued, “It’s different when you’re on your own, when things are unfamiliar.” I was annoyed but didn’t want to fight before I left. She had come to the UK for a better life, I was leaving the UK because I was having a tantrum and didn’t need a reminder of that.
But as the sun glowing red through my eyelids woke me up from a nap on the floor of Houston Airport, it did occur to me...maybe mum might have a point. In pursuit of cheaper rent and a long visa I’d voluntarily opted for four days of travel and one request from a heavily-perspiring man in a suit to “look after his hand luggage”.
By the time I landed in Mexico I was past that point of unwashed, unslept hysteria where the stank of scalp and dried drool from opportunist naps started to set in, and all you want is a clean bed and power shower. Even in the late afternoon, the abundance of sunlight was overwhelming and made Costa Rica feel like some faraway fever dream. And then came the worst part.
The Spanish in Mexico is fast and punctuated with slang and elision, like flicking the tautest string of a guitar and letting it reverberate out. All the slow, sing-song phrases I’d been leaning on and delivered with the international language of being a mime clown was met with blank stares.
I somehow made it to the rental car I’d hustled, kicked the backseats down, atlas-stoned The Big Bitch into the boot and started to drive hoping chomping an entire packet of peppermint gum would keep me just enough awake to get to a hostel. My late arrival and severely crossed wires meant the only room now available was next door to a pretty pumped Quinceañera where I could see the ceiling had been filled with pink and purple balloons braided together. Quickly, I learned that “Gasolina” was to Mexico what House of Pain “Jump Around” is to any family function in middle England after, like, midnight. Defeated, I slunk back to the car instead, draped my stinky laundry over the windows to block out that brutal sun and curled up on my suitcase.
The next day, crumpled and depressed, I paused outside what was to be my new apartment block, mentally preparing myself for having to butcher more Spanish to the landlord.
“Ellll proh-blaymo?” A very red, porcine man with a Stateside accent who’d sidled up beside me out of nowhere, asked.
“Are you OK?” he asked this time.
“Yes, I’m waiting.”
“Are you new here? Where’s the accent from?”
“I’m from the UK.”
“Waaaowow! A Brit! Well, ya might be waiting a while, y’know how these Mexicans love to start work late and leave work early, haha. They love that asterrr man-ya-na!”
In a streak of pure psychopathy, I decided to reply in my best accent, “¿Qué? Lo siento, señor, no le entiendo.” Bewildered, he trailed off but sustained a polite grin. Then let himself into the building and held the door open behind him for me expectantly, to which I responded by slamming it shut again. I thought: I may be down, I may have poor language retention skills, but there was no fucking way I was going to end up like him.
I took that apartment and starfished on the bed at last then plugged in my now long dead phone. The first thing to flash up was a Facebook message from my mum. When I first left home as a teenager, she would insist on occasionally sending me snail mail handwritten in beautiful cursive which, I think, she would’ve loved to seal with a wax stamp. I’d always hassle her to just get a proper mobile phone and eventually as I moved from one bleak houseshare to the next, the letters stopped, though I kept them all. But in the rubble of this year has been the unexpected joy of getting to know her all over again through written messages.
To describe my mum’s appetite for words and books as voracious would not fully illustrate just how well-read she is. Doorstop novels, dusty dictionaries of plants and flowers or nonfiction odysseys on colonisation. Her absolute favourites, however, are all the British classics I could never sit still long enough to get into. Your Jane Austens, your Brontës, your Dickens. I’d moan at the “toodle-pip” of it all and sit stoney-faced through her BBC period dramas. She likes a classical rose, I like Hibiscus. She’d dreamed of Austen’s sweep of quaint countryside and Dickens' townhouses, I dreamed of palm trees and sunshine. I could never understand why someone would move to a grey sinkhole.
In between her letters, we’d meet for lunch in town and do something fancy and cultural for her, followed by something brash for me. I took her to this bar and restaurant in Soho which, at that time I thought was, like, the height of taste. Full of wankers in painstakingly styled outfits talking loudly about TV pitches and cocaine. I was straightening my hair into submission to achieve a slick Lego-like mullet and trying to ‘get’ NME despite still, religiously, only listening to Destiny’s Child and DJ EZ. Exactly the kind of Jekyll and Hyde time-wasting you’d expect from someone failing their degree.
We sat smirking at each other like “look at us, eh, in Soho with the C-list celebrities and drag queens!” when the waiter came over. My mum began her order, briefly mispronounced something on the menu to which the waiter let out an audible snort. He only stopped his chuckle when he looked back to me and found I was staring at him, face now drained of any goodwill, menacingly spinning the stem of the cocktail glass on the table. I remember she had flushed ever so slightly in response and not looked up from the menu. But we didn’t talk about it, just ate the meal in near silence.
Afterwards, as we walked back down Old Compton Street to the tube, she planted her arm into the crook of mine. We stopped on the way in Chinatown in search of bagoóng from the supermarket and got two custard buns for dessert. That moment of rudeness felt like such a small, inconsequential annoyance at the time that I’ve wondered why I’ve revisited it in my head. The only explanation I can come up with is that feeling of wanting to protect the one who has protected you. Someone who uprooted everything they had, studied, hustled and pushed through only for some little shit in a sub-par restaurant to guffaw at them.
This is all to say I look forward to her messages now. How the sentences rise and fall, how the cadence drifts. How she will build up the theatre of a story even if she’s talking about, like, missing a Sainsbury's delivery. How she peppers in Tagalog and knows what to write when everything else feels so heavy and uncertain. She doesn’t know it but they make me feel that if she can move to a strange land and master a language, then maybe I can do it too.
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