The only thing that really seemed normal this holiday season was a video chat with my family on Christmas Day. I joined a video call on Facebook in New York City while my mom and brother called from California. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews came from more states in the USA, the United Kingdom, Canada, Qatar and the Philippines.
The platforms we use to maintain this tradition have changed in recent decades. Long before Zoom became the lifeline for staying connected during the pandemic, immigrant families like mine had to rely on whatever technology was available to stay in touch. Finding ways to reach long distances is nothing new, it is what we do in the diaspora.
This year, I found myself glued to the screen all Christmas morning, marveling at how much taller my nieces, nephews and sons of god have been since the last time I saw them in person – which in most cases has been years . I mainly saw them grow on the screens.
Before there were apps like Skype, it was even more difficult for us to connect. My father moved from Manila to California not long after I was born, to establish a life for us in America. Before my mom and I joined him, the only way my dad could see our faces was in the photos my mom sent him.
“Daddy, I just want to show my complete dentition … and my dimple …” my mother scribbled on the back of a photo of me, two and a half years old. Another copy of that photo would end up in my first passport.
Since the three of us, plus my brother born in the United States, were all in the United States, we received hurried and expensive calls to relatives in the Philippines on our landline. These calls triggered another frantic phone game. You needed to corner the family so that each person could have a moment on the call. “Hurry, tell the guy to answer the phone,” shouted whoever was holding the phone. “It’s a long distance!”
Skype was a game changer when it started offering free video calls in 2006. I remember logging on to my parents’ desktop computer when I was visiting my college home. There, I would see my grandmother in the Philippines squinting to see our faces in the blurry webcam image. Before that, just hearing your voice was an expensive luxury. Suddenly, it was free – and I could look her in the eye while we talked for as long as we wanted. In 2009, I had my own Skype account separate from my parents, and it seemed that all my cousins, aunts and uncles did, too.
I now have an entire folder of apps on my phone that my family uses for free long distance calls. There are so many platforms to choose from that each of our calls tends to start with the question of whether we are using the right app: will switching to Viber or Facebook offer a better signal or will it be easier for the callers to use?
These connections have also merged perfectly into personal events. My mother’s family side holds a meeting on New Year’s Day every year, since before my mother was born. We are a big family (my mother alone has eight brothers), so this is a big production. My mom rarely goes in person, but she calls every year. The last time I attended the meeting, in the Philippines, in 2014, my mother was still in California. I called her from my laptop and set her on a table with a good view of the party. Other relatives abroad circulated on cell phones passed by guests.
For the first time in more than 60 years, the reunion did not happen in person this year. I still found comfort in talking to my family in another video chat on New Year’s Day, but that doesn’t make me miss them less. The headache is still there when the holidays are over. It will be there when the pandemic ends. Returning home is not always as easy as taking a plane when you are an immigrant. There is a lot of bureaucracy and luck involved when it comes to crossing borders. And there is still no app that allows me to reach out and kiss my mom on the cheek, or grab my nieces and nephews before they get too old for me to do that.
For me, sacrificing physical union for the promise of more security in the future was part of the growth. And while the technology cannot fully close the distance between family members, it has made this separation easier to bear.
Video calls are now a standard way to connect with other family members who have spread across the world in search of a future with greater possibilities. A basic element in our family connections is helping to find work abroad and build a home for you in a new place. I have always heard that the biggest export product in the Philippines is its own people. Its economy depends on more than 2 million foreign workers, including many in the health field, whose remittances represent about one tenth of the country’s GDP. The small archipelago is the world’s leading provider of nurses – including my mother, many other relatives and the UK nurse who administered the world’s first authorized vaccine against COVID-19.
The search for opportunities away from home, however, has costs. We are perpetually missing our loved ones. There is a shortage of health professionals in the Philippines and a disproportionately large number of Filipino Americans working on the front line of the pandemic have died of COVID-19.
Many people around the world have sacrificed time with family and turned to virtual celebrations this holiday season to prevent the spread of COVID-19. I thank you for that, because it keeps my mother and other family members who work in the health area safer. There are other essential migrant workers who are more exposed to the virus and who for years have maintained industries that care for the sick and elderly and bring food to our table – perhaps at the expense of being with family and friends during the holidays. A video call will never be as rewarding as sitting in the same room with the people you love. But it is more than some of us have had in the past or we have access so far.
The photos my mom sent of me to my dad when we were still living in the Philippines are now perfectly bound in a photo album. They are a reminder that resourcefulness in immigrant communities is about more than finding ways to make progress. We found ways to stay connected.