Dear America Page 3

  Growing up in Pasig, I thought of Lolo and Lola as wealthy people who had unlimited American dollars and an endless supply of M&M’s candy and cans and cans of Spam, which they regularly shipped to us in a balikbayan (repatriate) box. It was not until I arrived in California to live with them that I discovered that they were not rich. In fact, they barely survived, working low-paying jobs: she as a food server, he as a security guard. To this day, I don’t know how they managed to stretch every earned dollar. They didn’t own a sprawling home, as I had imagined, but rented a modest three-bedroom house from Lolo’s sister Florie. One of the bedrooms was for Lolo and Lola; one bedroom I shared with Uncle Rolan, my mother’s younger brother; and the third bedroom they rented out to a friend. Lolo usually worked the overnight shift, while Lola and Uncle Rolan worked during the day. After school, I was in charge of raking the leaves from the lawn, taking out the trash, and making sure the dishes were always washed. If I’d been an obedient son in Pasig, I was an even more obedient grandson in Mountain View. In my mind, it was all I could do to support Lolo and Lola as they struggled to make ends meet, paying all their monthly bills while continuing to support my mama with a monthly allowance. Uncle Rolan, who worked in accounting, paid for whatever expenses I needed at school. At this point, Mama had a steady boyfriend named Jimmy, who worked overseas from time to time. Their daughter, Czarina, my half sister, was barely two years old when I left. Two years after I came to America, they had a son, Carl, my half brother, whom I haven’t met. Jimmy helped raise them and continues to provide support.

  Even though Lolo and Lola arrived in the U.S. nearly a decade before I did, I was their introduction to America—which is typical in intergenerational immigrant families trying to find their footing in their adopted home. Our home was decidedly Filipino. Lola could tell you the news from Manila, but would struggle to explain what was happening in San Francisco, just an hour north of us. We spoke either Tagalog or Sambali, the dialects spoken by the people of Zambales. We ate only Filipino food, mostly rice, fish, and pork. We mostly interacted with Filipino friends and relatives. We used the tabo system even though we had running water.

  Google was founded less than two miles from our house, which is not too far from Stanford University. Mountain View is near the geographic heart of Silicon Valley, the storied region in the San Francisco Bay Area that runs on engineers and entrepreneurs placing their bets as they search for the next new thing. I grew up in the poorer part of Mountain View in the 1990s, before Apple, in nearby Cupertino, was dubbed “the most valuable brand in the world,” and before Facebook, in nearby Menlo Park, would revolutionize the social media era. These days, renting an apartment can cost upward of three thousand dollars a month, and you’d be hard-pressed to buy a home for less than a million dollars. On any given day, at any given time, you’ll spot a few Teslas on the road.

  But my family is from the other Mountain View, which is part of the other Silicon Valley. This is the Mountain View of immigrant families who live in cramped houses and apartments, who depend on Univision, Saigon TV News, and the Filipino Channel for news of home, not the homes they’re living in but the homes they left behind. This is the Silicon Valley of ethnic grocery stores in nondescript and dilapidated buildings, where sacks of rice and pounds of pork are cheaper, where you hear some Spanish, Tagalog, and Vietnamese before you hear a word of English. This is the other Mountain View, in the other Silicon Valley, where the American Dream rests on the outdated and byzantine immigration system that requires families to wait for years, if not decades, to be reunited with their loved ones.

  Where I grew up, Filipinos who populated public schools struggled to figure out where we belonged in an America that sees itself as mostly black and white. If America is a wobbly three-legged stool, with white Americans and black Americans each taking a leg, the third leg is divided between Latinos and Asians, whose histories of struggle and oppression are often maligned and neglected. I’m not sure which leg Native Americans would stand on. As for the Filipinos, we are stuck in the middle of one leg of that wobbly stool.

  6.

  Mexican José and Filipino Jose

  “Where’s your green card?” Mexican José was asking me.

  We were sitting in the very back of the room. It was seventh-period science class, and Mr. Album was doing his best to keep everyone awake.

  “Huh?” I snapped back, totally confused. “What?”

  In my classes at Crittenden, there were only two Joses: Mexican José and Filipino Jose. Me.

  “Your green card,” Mexican José said, before pulling a plastic-covered card from his back pocket. “It’s the card you need to bring with you to school. You know, if you’re an immigrant.”

  I remembered the short television ads I’d been seeing at home, playing over and over again. The ads were about Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to ban “illegal” people from using public services. The 1994 race for California governor was engulfed by Proposition 187. The Republican incumbent, Pete Wilson, was arguing that it was unfair for Americans to support “illegal immigrant children” attending American schools, costing taxpayers $1.5 billion a year. I remembered being confused by the ad. I didn’t know who “illegal immigrant children” were and couldn’t conceive of what $1.5 billion represented. Wilson said that his opponent, a Democrat named Kathleen Brown, would rather spend money on “illegals” than take care of “California’s children.” The ad ended by asking: “Where do you stand?”

  Whenever “illegals” were brought up in the news, either on television or in the newspapers and magazines I scoured at the library, the focus was on Latinos and Hispanics, specifically Mexicans. It wasn’t about Lolo and Lola, or Uncle Rolan and Uncle Conrad, or Lolo’s younger sisters, Florie and Rosie. It wasn’t about me. I didn’t know that the immigration law that allowed my Filipino family to legally come here is the very same law that created “illegal immigration” as we know it. While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act benefited Asian immigrants, it put Latinos at a disadvantage. Before 1965, immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries was largely unrestricted, and there was a government guest worker system called the bracero program that permitted millions of Mexican nationals to work in the U.S. The dissolution of the bracero program and the enactment of the 1965 immigration law created an “illegal immigrant” problem where there had been none.

  I knew none of this as Mexican José showed me his green card.

  All I knew was, I was not Mexican.

  “I guess you don’t have to worry about your green card,” Mexican José told me a couple of minutes later. “Your name is Jose, but you look Asian.”

  7.

  Fake

  The next time I thought about my green card, I was riding my mountain bike to the nearby Department of Motor Vehicles office, just across the street from Target.

  Without telling anyone in the family, I decided I was going to apply for a driver’s permit. I was sixteen, the age when American teenagers were supposed to get their licenses. Sometimes, Lolo drove me to school but couldn’t pick me up, so I often took the bus or bummed rides from friends. After Lolo bought me a newly painted black bike at a garage sale for fifty dollars, it was my primary way of getting around.

  According to a DMV instruction booklet I had found at the library, I had to bring proof of identification with me. Since I was an immigrant, that meant bringing my green card, which Lolo kept in a folder in a filing cabinet in his bedroom. With my green card and a school identification card tucked inside my geometry textbook, I filled out the application form, took my seat, and waited for my name to be called.

  A few minutes later, I handed a curly-haired, bespectacled woman my school ID and green card. Without even looking at the school ID—“Jose Vargas, Class of 2000, Mountain View High School,” it read—she examined the green card, flipping it around, twice. Furrowing her brows, she then lowered her head, leaned over, and whispered, “This is fake. Don’t come back here aga
in.”

  Fake.

  Instantly, I thought she was mistaken, perhaps even lying. She seemed surprised that I didn’t know that the green card was fake. In fact, I was so sure that she was mistaken or lying that I didn’t even bother to question her. I just assumed she was wrong, turned around, got on my bike, and pedaled home, accompanied by a mixtape of Alanis Morissette and Boyz II Men, the music and lyrics muddling my thoughts.

  Of course she’s lying.

  How can it be fake?

  As I approached Mi Pueblo, a Mexican market where Lola and I sometimes shopped for mangoes and rice, my heart stopped.

  Maybe the woman at the DMV thought I was Mexican? Because, you know, my name is Jose even though it’s not José?

  I returned home, my confusion starting to turn into a full-fledged panic attack. But I was sure everything would be fine. Lolo would clear everything up as he always did. Lolo had always taken care of everyone in the family. He stood no more than five feet seven inches tall but loomed over everyone, speaking in a clipped, overenunciated English that exuded clarity. Since Lolo worked the graveyard shift, he was often home in the afternoon. He was hunched over a table in the garage, cutting grocery coupons from newspapers, a cigarette dangling from his lips, when I arrived. I dropped my bike on the ground, searched for the green card in my backpack, and ran toward him.

  “Peke ba ito?” I asked in Tagalog. (“Is this fake?”) I held out the green card and searched his face as my voice cracked, afraid of what he might say.

  Without addressing the question, he got up, swiped the card from my hand, and uttered a sentence that changed the course of my life.

  “Huwag mong ipakita yang sa mga tao.” (“Don’t show it [the card] to people.”)

  His voice was soft, soaking in shame.

  “Hindi ka dapat nandito.” (“You are not supposed to be here.”)

  More than two decades later, remembering the shock of hearing that sentence, spoken by the very man who had sacrificed so much to bring his first grandson to America, still haunts me. Nothing Lolo ever said to me afterward—nothing Lola or Mama has said to me since—weighed as heavily.

  I was speechless. In English and Tagalog. I don’t remember what I said. But so many questions came darting from all directions that I thought my head would burst open to make room for them.

  If this green card is “fake,” then what else is “fake”?

  Who else knows that this card is “fake”? Lola? Uncle Rolan? Does Mama know? Why didn’t anybody tell me?

  Can I get a “real” green card?

  Is a “real” green card something you can buy?

  For how much?

  Where?

  Can I tell my friends about this?

  Can I trust my family?

  Who can I trust?

  All I knew was that I could barely trust myself—what I was feeling and how I was dealing with the shock. It was disorienting, as though gravity had changed and I could float away. Nothing was as it seemed. No one was who I thought they were, least of all myself. I was confused. I was angry. Angry at myself for having gone to the DMV to begin with. Angry at Lolo for putting me in this position, a twisted Faustian bargain that was not of my making. Angry at Mama. They conspired to send me to America to give me a better life without realizing they had created a nightmare scenario for me.

  And I was scared.

  Above all, it was the hardening—the emotional hardening—that I remembered most from that afternoon and the subsequent days and weeks.

  Something within me hardened, and it became a place no one else could go. That I would not allow anyone else to breach. I felt betrayed in ways I couldn’t yet articulate to myself or fully face.

  My first instinct was to run. But there was nowhere to go, no one else to stay with. Another idea I had was to fly back to the Philippines, to go home to Mama. But Lolo told me that even the passport I used to get to America was fake. The photo in that passport was mine, but the name was not. He then told me that he’d bought me another passport with my name on it but not my complete name. Instead of Jose Antonio Salinas Vargas, he put my name as Jose Antonio Abaga Vargas. Salinas was Lolo’s last name, the middle name that I have on my birth certificate. Abaga was Lola’s maiden name. In case we got caught in a lie, he did not want his name, the Salinas name, involved. Salinas is the maiden name of Florie, his beloved sister, and the reason Lolo and Lola were able to emigrate in the first place. Salinas is the last name of Conrad, his favorite nephew. Neither Lola Florie nor Uncle Conrad knew of Lolo’s scheme. Together, the fake green card and the passports cost Lolo forty-five hundred dollars, a huge sum for a security guard who made five dollars an hour.

  It took me time to make sense of the gravity of the deception, the layers of lies. I couldn’t stay legally. I couldn’t leave legally, either. I was trapped. A legal no-boy’s-land.

  Later that night, on a phone call with Mama, I demanded answers to questions I had never imagined I would have to ask. I found out that the “uncle” who accompanied me on the flight to America was a smuggler whom Lolo had paid. The morning I left the Philippines was so rushed because she hadn’t known when I would be leaving. The smuggler didn’t give an exact date or time. The plan was that the smuggler would call hours before my flight was set to depart. I had to be ready at all times. Unbeknownst to me, my suitcase had been packed for months.

  They had to lie about me because they lied about everything else.

  After Lolo arrived in America, he petitioned for his two children to follow: Mama and Uncle Rolan. But instead of listing Mama as a married woman, which she still was, at least in the eyes of the law, Lolo lied and listed her as single. As a legal resident, which he was at the time, he could not petition for his married children. Even more important, Lolo didn’t care for my father, who had abandoned Mama and me; he didn’t want my father to come here. Lolo lied on the petition.

  The lie scared Lolo. He grew nervous that immigration officials would discover that Mama was married, jeopardizing not only her chances of coming here but also that of Uncle Rolan. Lolo withdrew Mama’s petition. After Uncle Rolan legally came to America in 1991, Lolo tried to get my mother here through a tourist visa. But her application was denied three times. Mama was unemployed; she couldn’t prove that she wouldn’t just overstay her visa and illegally stay in America, because she had nothing substantial to come back to. So, at Lolo’s urging, she decided to send me to America with a smuggler. She figured she would find some way to follow me soon, within months, maybe a year at most, as she had promised that morning at the airport. But she couldn’t find a way.

  Their plan was to buy time until I could become legal. Lolo expected me to work under-the-table jobs. Maybe at the flea market where his older brother, David, and his wife, Modesta—Uncle Conrad’s parents—cleaned bathrooms. “Maganda ang trabaho iyan,” Lolo said. (“It’s a decent job.”) Or maybe as a cashier at Fry’s Electronics, where one of his friends was a supervisor. Once I had a job, Lola said I would find a woman who was a U.S. citizen to marry. That was the way to “get legal” and become a “citizen.” I would save up money to pay the woman. Maybe I wouldn’t even need to pay her, because I might even fall in love with her.

  “Hindi ko gagawin niyan,” I told Mama on the phone. (“I’m not doing it.”)

  “Hindi ako magpapakasal.” (I’m not getting married.”)

  Shortly after that unforgettable day, I would learn that in Filipino culture, there’s a term for someone who is in America illegally: “TNT,” short for tago ng tago, which translates to “hiding and hiding.” Finding out I was a TNT was not only the beginning of the lies I had to tell and what I had to do to “pass” as “American,” but the beginning of the way I hid myself from Lolo, Lola, and Mama.

  8.

  Coming Out

  One lie was enough. One lie was already too much. What I couldn’t tell my family was that I did not want to marry a woman to “get legal” and become a “citizen” because I am gay.


  “Sino ang kinakausap mo sa telepono?” Lola asked me as I headed to the bathroom late one night after I had found about the fake papers and all the lies it had taken to get me here. (“Who were you talking to on the phone?”)

  Now it was my turn to lie.

  “It’s just a friend from school,” I answered in English. At that point, I had stopped replying in Tagalog to Lolo and Lola. It was one way to exert control. Independence.

  “Bakit ganoon ka magsalita?” Lola asked. (“Why were you talking like that?”)

  “Like what?”

  I was about to open the bathroom door when Lola grabbed my right hand to stop me. Her eyes started tearing up as she said: “Apo ko, ayokong pumunta ka sa impiyerno.” (“Grandson, I don’t want you to go to hell.”)

  I said nothing. I proceeded to go inside the bathroom. I stayed there until Lola went back to her room.

  Like many gay teenagers of the late 1990s, I discovered I was gay because of Men4Men chat rooms on America Online (AOL). Usually around 11 P.M., when everyone in the house was already asleep, I chatted with all types of men: openly gay men, straight but curious men, still-in-the-closet men, married men, men of all ages. A few of the chats led to late phone calls.

  I lied about my name and age when I was messaging with guys directly, just one-on-one. I told guys that my name was Joey and that I was twenty-one years old. Young and much better-looking guys weren’t interested in chatting with me once I described what I looked like, which I didn’t lie about. I was chubby, which I’ve been since I was a kid. So the only guys who really wanted to chat with me online and possibly meet me in person were older guys, in their thirties and forties, most of them married and still in the closet. I didn’t want to scare them by saying that I was sixteen.