The heirlooms in our bones
In middle school, we were asked to bring a family heirloom to present to the class. A classmate asked what an heirloom is, and my teacher said it’s something that carried meaning in our family’s story and our history.
Of course, I went straight home to ask my parents. I’m sure they were as confused as me, though they didn’t show it on their faces. They immigrated to the US in the 90s, so this idea of an heirloom might have been foreign. Within a few days, my mom procured her dad’s pocket watch. It was a simple and small gold pocket watch, with a knob to adjust the time. It was big in my hands, small and precious in hers, but it never felt cold.
“Would this work?”
I said ok, though I wasn’t sure. This presentation was for English class, but I didn’t have the words to say it wasn’t quite right. School doesn’t prepare you to have conversations like that anyway. I took it with me, wrapped in its original pouch, housed in its original box, in the deepest part of my schoolbag. I couldn't afford losing it.
When the time came, I presented:
This pocket watch belonged to my grandpa. He was an airport mechanic from the Philippines who fixed planes for the US on Kwajalein, in the Marshall Islands. I never met him, and he died of leukemia a few years before I was born. His service helped my family get US citizenship, and this pocket watch is one he brought with him during his work.
My mom asked me what my grade was later. It was a B. Maybe. I don’t remember because I thought the assignment was weird and innately knew it wasn’t what my teacher was looking for. As an adult, I feel grief. That grade must have felt like rejection—of my mom’s personal history, and in it, her own grief.
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Immigrating to the US requires sacrifice. For my parents, it meant giving up their pasts and the lives they’d built, for a future—for us.
But what are the rules of that sacrifice? What parts of your culture do you give up to assimilate properly? What parts do you keep to survive? You can only bring what you can carry. The people you’re leaving behind won’t know what you need. The new people you meet might not understand what is valuable, what is necessary, from your old life. The most thrilling and terrifying thing is that you get to decide.
This is most deeply exemplified in the language we lost. My parents knew English, which made their assimilation easier. They learned it in college. Dad expanded his vocabulary with crosswords, Mom through her own work as a marketing executive. Their words never sound accented to us, until someone pointed it out. As children, we laughed at Tagalog. Not out of malice or mockery, but as children do. New sounds are new playmates, fun and exciting until they’re as familiar as your family.
Fun to us might have looked like shame to them. My mom says we always laughed, so we were never taught and we never learned. I see now that what was safe in our own home was a symbol of otherness outside. My parents left comfortable lives to give us more potential in our futures. If speaking English meant our family’s success, then we would be the blank slates they practiced on.
It was just another offering to the American dream.
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We found ways to our culture in different ways. Food is the obvious way, but in so many other unnamed ways too. Counting them doesn’t make me more or less Filipino, but I know that there are parts of it in me.
The legacies of our families don’t live in the items passed through generations. Families like ours, from countries deeply and perpetually altered by imperialism and colonialism, don’t get to carry material proof of our stories. Our stories are kept safe within us, breathing with us, dying with us.
Our stories are intertwined with our survival, as fundamental as the DNA that binds us.
My father’s grandfather is a Katipunero. The Katipunan was a society of Filipinos who rejected and revolted against Spanish imperial rule. Their success led to the First Philippine Republic, which would later fall to the US in the Philippine-American War. Katipunero kept fighting against this colonization. Even if they failed, they fought. His father, with his hands, would build the Manila municipal buildings, and then the main street of Baguio, where the US Clark Airforce base would be built.
My mother’s family nurtured acres of farmland and the people who lived on them. My grandmother was a teacher, ironically, an English teacher. My grandfather’s work helped them build a business that would support our family and community’s survival. Their farmlands helped them get through Japanese occupation, and martial law enacted by the Marcos regime. My grandfather’s leukemia is undoubtably a result of the US atomic bomb testing in the Marshall Islands.
Both my parents lived through martial law, and deeply understand the cost of revolution and the privileges of survival. Their own stories of loss and life have influenced my upbringing and my views. What single item could dare to represent the myriad of experiences that make us?
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Families like ours have a unique position, straddled between past and present; what is and what could have been. If my parents had simply chosen to stay in the Philippines, our lives would be so different. My family has survived because of hard work and because of luck. I often think about how different my life could have been without either. We have developed a gift to hold multiple truths alive within us and see it around us.
The legacy of nurturers, of revolutionaries, of builders, of writers lives in me. It doesn't live in the weapons they used or the tools they used. It lives in the lives they affected and the people they raised. My words can keep these stories safe. For me, and for anyone who could love my family too.
If someone should ever ask for an heirloom again, I'll tell them it's in my bones, deep like the marrow within them. And, better than any object, they can ask me what our story is.