Come Inside and Eat

For my mom and dad, who always trusted me to know myself.

For my mom, who waited so patiently for me to find my way home.

“We are made of blood, earth, and stardust. The ancient sources of life that built our bones and pulse through our veins proclaim that we are because someone, many ones, gave us life. We do not get here on our own.”

“We tried to teach you Tagalog, remember,” my mom says with a laugh. I do: The babysitter was deputized to teach all six of us kids—I’m the second youngest—and it was chaos. That was life in the diaspora in northern California. Even today, I’m humbled in the presence of native speakers; I can’t keep up with an entire conversation in Tagalog, let alone any of the Philippines’ other indigenous languages (there are close to two hundred of them). What I know are the phrases and words that my parents and their friends slip so effortlessly and instinctively into English, taken from Tagalog, Kapampangan, Ilocano, and Pangasinan, each language getting its shot, sometimes three at once in a single sentence, without a hitch, as if it were all one clamorous tongue.