I’ve got a ton of thinky-thoughts this Monday, and some of them revolves around the themes I’ve presented in Outlaw Mage.
In Outlaw Mage, you have a main character desperately trying to carve out her own identity apart from her family–a theme so frequent in my novels it’s not a matter of IF it’ll show up, but what flavour it’ll come in.
I grew up in the diaspora, like Rosha. Like Rosha, I was raised elsewhere, and have looked longingly back in my past despite knowing why we’ve had to leave. And, like Rosha, I’ve had to come to terms with how to embrace all of this.
I can’t say (without spoiling) what answers Rosha will find in her epic journey, but for me, the answer is in my kids.
Apt, probably, because we just left the Mother’s Day weekend and I have some lingering thoughts about what raising children in the diaspora means. My husband shares a very similar background to me–he, too, came to Canada in his teens (which was when we met). Our partnership over the years has comprised of trying to navigate this new world in ways different from our immigrant parents.
One of the ways we carved out that identity is in finding a shared joy in the outdoors. Both our fathers loved the outdoors, but the wilds of Canada is a different beast from Philippine jungles. We learned all of this slowly when our first daughter was just a little baby. Bit by bit, we learned to hike long distances, pull overnight trips rain or shine (or snow), and rely on nobody but ourselves.
Along the way, I realized a lot of the North American mindset revolves around this rugged independence–a kind of “frontier, me against the world” outlook. And it has its uses, but as our first daughter grew up (and we welcomed our son into the world), we felt like something was missing. It’s something that a lot of diaspora in our culture talk about, too–this struggle of being in-between cultures, of not knowing where one truly matters.
That ‘something,’ we came to realize, was community. In our culture, children aren’t–shouldn’t–be raised in a bubble. In our culture, children are raised by multiple adults and older children, surrounded by these circles of (hopefully) loving family members and extended family, who teach them social structures and offer wisdom and advice before they start to navigate the wider world. This is a double-edged sword, obviously, but the takeaway here is that so much of our culture just can’t be learned from a book or on the fly. The nuances are almost impossible to explain.
And yet we wanted our kids to grow up Filipino, even if that meant rejecting some Western sensibilities (because we didn’t want to raise our kids with the old notion that the old ways are bad and the colonizers’ ways are good. Both can be good, both can be toxic. There needs to be more conversations about how to navigate both). So we took the time and effort to expose them to community. Frequent get-togethers with family and friends, where we encouraged the kids to talk to and be around people other than ourselves, which culminated into a trip last year in the Philippines. And we were so surprised by how easily they adapted to everything there. The literally HUNDREDS of relatives, the days revolving around nothing BUT social construct, the heat, the food…oh, they loved it all. When we left, my daughter cried. We belonged there, no matter how hard we tried to belong here. And the fact that we can’t live there will always hurt.
We returned to Canada, and I started writing a new book with all my thoughts and feelings about one’s hometown being unable to sustain its youth. In the meantime, my kids have been busier than ever chatting up their cousins and spending more time with people in their community. It’s amazing to see how much deeper their self-esteem had gotten, and how much more eager they are to practice the Tagalog they’ve been learning all these years. My daughter, who had been dealing with her feelings about being bullied by kids in her Scouts group and elsewhere in the past, seemed to find comfort in the idea that even if the world doesn’t accept you, there will always be a place where you can be yourself, where you can be loved and never questioned: home.
In other news, there’s this book. It comes out in August. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I hope you give it a chance.
