I suppose that those of us who choose to live and work abroad do so out of idealism. "Distance fuels fantasy;” we are lured by dreams of a paradise that is not just around the corner. I was a provisional emigre in Holland, and then in Hawaii, and am still one now in New York. My husband, Pietro, was assigned in 1982 to be the manager of the Philippine National Bank in those places. Having uprooted myself from a career in the Philippine government, I was suddenly transplanted to a land where I knew neither the language nor anyone in it. Thus started a series of journeys which up to the present has never failed to amaze me in its richness and capacity to surprise.
In the beginning, I made up my mind to avert the danger of becoming merely a drifter. After all, I was in a foreign land not by my choice, but because my husband's career demanded it. Not that I complained, because wanderlust had been ingrained in me ever since my childhood when my peripatetic father took his family abroad on a yearly basis. He probably believed, as Bruce Chatwin did, that: "(t)he act of journeying contributes towards a sense of physical and mental well-being, while the monotony of prolonged settlement or regular work weaves patterns in the brain that engender fatigue and a sense of personal inadequacy."
In true Pinay spirit, I set out to conquer language barriers, education problems, and expensive expatriate accommodation. Not easy tasks, for having landed in the Netherlands on a frigid December morning, the winter was cold and lonely beyond imagining, and the fact that we were isolated in a tiny suburb made things infinitely worse. Thank God that I was aided immensely by a three-year old daughter who was always ready to embrace adventure, and who forgave my daily bouts of depression during the first six months. We moved closer to the city, and gradually, as my hesitant Dutch became more coherent, I dared to break the ice with complete strangers in the cobbled streets around the Damrak, in the little grocery stores, and in the halls of the University of Amsterdam. With Pietro constantly occupied with his bank, Kathy went to Dutch school, and I joined foreign societies, took French and cooking classes, traipsed over tram tracks, gazed at gables, attended concerts, and scrutinized Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh. I became entranced by the city, and not wanting to live in the fringes of a foreign society, I withstood the temptation to pick at and taste only what was familiar or digestible. I learned what anyone who lives abroad for a longish time does, that each collision of cultures breeds a new knowledge, and, ideally, a new understanding.
When I arrived in Honolulu three years later, I fell into the languid, easy living of the Islands with its amiable, hospitable people. Pietro found a house for us literally nestled between the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other. With the flawless blue sky overhead and gentle breezes regularly caressing my face, I felt I was truly in Paradise. I found work as Director of a Learning Center for children and adults, and relished the opportunity to design instruction programs for both gifted and slow learners. There were many more of our countrymen in Hawaii, and with several former schoolmates, we formed the Philippine American Society of University Women, which had as one of its lofty goals the "upliftment" of Filipinos both in Hawaii and the Philippines. The eight of us dove into schemes like forming Filipino youth clubs in the less privileged sections of Honolulu, staging wildly successful Filipino fashion, musical and food shows in the Hawaiian Museum, and arranging forums in the University of Hawaii and on TV regarding the predicament of the Filipina domestic helpers and hotel employees.
Four years in Honolulu spoiled me for New York, but this magnificent, cold city of concrete, glass, and steel has grown on me so that I can now say that there is no other place I can call home. Like Joan Didion, in "Goodbye to All That," I fell in love with New York: "I do not mean 'love' in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across 62nd Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage."
Here in New York, and especially in a high-powered law firm, I have to resist being a cog in the machine and try not to earn my way from one moment to the next. This kind of discipline has made me tough, without losing sight of the fact that the toughest quality can sometimes be gentleness. Even though New York is famous for its rudeness, there are kindly strangers here who can later on turn into genuine confidantes. And the friends one makes in a city known for its artifice and sham are friends for life. The city offers so much in terms of books, art, music, dance, theater, learning, and food, but it is durable friends who have sustained me all these years and have taught me the most essential things.
My daughter is eighteen now and is just as adventurous, if not more so; and Pietro has at last discovered that spending time with family is more important than career. Our lives are simpler now, and more peaceful. Where we live in Upper Montclair, the voices are softer, the air is softer, and in my garden, there is a bush that sends out a scent sad and sweet enough to break the heart. Little pleasures, or call it cheap thrills, but paradise, as Pico Iyer remarked, “may ultimately be more in the eye of the beholder than the heart of the beheld. . . . Perhaps the search for paradise may really come down to nothing more than a search for a paradise within.” Thus, wherever one is, one can carve a life in which there are ample moments of clear, bright, sufficient, joy.
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