The author’s family posing for a family portrait. Photo courtesy of Adam Arca.
My inay taught me to clean from a young age: to dust, then wash, then dry. To reach every crevice from the ceiling to the floor. To distinguish the best textures of cloth for wood and for glass.
But I was a child. So, some days, when I was off playing outside and she would come back home for a fleeting hour with some cash in her hands, and put on her floral scrubs for her next shift at the nursing home, she’d give a scornful look at me and the mess I left, and ask:
“Why is my house dirtier than the ones I clean?”
I could never answer.
I’d just pick up the red bucket from the laundry room and start to mop. Like she would be, 20 minutes away in the better part of town. Like my dad would be, 10 minutes away at the car factory past the canal. For years, I wouldn’t tell my friends what my parents’ jobs were. I’d be vague. My mom the nurse. My dad the factory worker. I’d hide them, tuck them away where they couldn’t be seen. Like a dirty secret. Like trash.
***
The news reported that over 100 containers with two tonnes of garbage waste disguised as plastic recycling were shipped from Vancouver to Manila starting in 2013.
I was 12.
That same year, nearly 30,000 Filipinos became permanent residents in Canada, and I celebrated my confirmation at the local church.
That same year, Super Typhoon Haiyan hit, and my mom and I would keep up with the news on the 24 Oras program on the GMA Network; watching Mike Enriquez narrate the trajectory of the almost 315 km/hour winds that would knock down whole barangays in the Eastern Visayas region in a language I couldn’t understand.
That same year, my future boyfriend in Samar would go four months without electricity. We would send remittances back home to our family members, along with over 2.3 million overseas Filipino workers who felt their motherland cry out.
***
In Vancouver, the most home I have ever felt is after midnight at the University of British Columbia when all the students are gone. With the lights dimmed and the shroud of student life shredded, the custodial workers become fully visible. Their bodies take up the seats. Their language and their laughter and their chismis fill the silence and echo through the empty spaces they have long memorized. Most of the workers I see are Filipino. Most of them are ignored, overworked, and underappreciated.
Who then, will clean up after the revolution?
They remind me of my parents.
In my organizing with Sulong, a Filipino youth collective, we talk to these custodial workers for a campaign to restore their access to the on-campus food bank. In one of these conversations, we talk about the encampment outside the student centre. The barriers of flags, art, and miscellaneous items that in themselves contain the hopes of a better liberatory future, for an unoccupied Palestine.
Though what I heard from one worker is far from that reality.
She tells me that, as some students were protesting, shit was thrown onto floors and walls in a washroom that she had to clean up. I was livid. For her sake. For my parents’ sake. I imagined my mother having to scrub the stench off the tiles, to swallow her dignity and pride to keep the job, to support the family, to get food on the table.
By rejecting the institution through waste, they failed to recognize the very ones who labour to clean it. The very ones who keep it running.
Who then, will clean up after the revolution?
Who then, will clean up the mess of the world after you’ve won?
***
“Sayang!” She yelled, “what a waste!”
My inay took the green vegetables I threw into the compost bin when she wasn’t looking and with a large sigh, placed them back onto my plate to eat. I had gotten too excited for ice cream sandwiches.
I can still recall the taste of that broccoli with its hints of coffee grinds and onion on my tongue. I can still feel the shame. The crunch in my teeth. The earth reclaiming itself in my mouth. I swallowed it down, gagging.
“Anak, be grateful for what you have.”
***
On the #10 bus, my boyfriend and I are debating about the differences between Toronto and Vancouver, and I say I like the grittiness of Ontario more. That Vancouver is too sanitized. That they concentrate their disposed into one area in the Downtown Eastside. He agrees.
“But Vancouver reminds me of the Philippines because of the mountains,” he says, smiling.
And I, with embarrassment, remind him that Ontario is the only home I know. That I was born here. That I am not like him.
He disagrees. “You’re as much of a Filipino as I am.”
Later that day, we make kaldereta with some other kasamas in their apartment. We thank the workers and the farmers whose hands and bodies harvested the vegetables on our plate. We thank the Earth herself.
Adam and his partner looking out at the view of the landscape at Whytecliff Park in Northern Vancouver.
I ask one of them, a civil engineer, about the waste systems in Vancouver. They say the sewage systems are not separate from rainwater which can cause overflow, a problem exacerbated by increasingly frequent downpours.
I ask about the Philippines, and we talk about how vital protective infrastructure has been violently degraded through mining operations, logging, and increasing militarization. That the Sierra Madre, the vast mountain range in Luzon that protects urban dwellers and local Indigenous peoples from typhoons forming in the Pacific Ocean has considerably depleted.
During the bus ride downtown, outside the window on Burrard Street, I see the office building for OceanaGold, a mining company that expropriates resources from the Philippines, and I wish for it to burn.
***
In 1988, then-president Corazon Aquino confidently stood before overseas Filipino workers in Hong Kong and called them the Bagong-Bayani, the “modern-day heroes” of the Philippines, saying that the sacrifices that they had made for their nation were worth it.
My mom was a live-in caregiver at the time in Singapore, attending to the domestic duties of some wealthy family. The youngest of five, she abandoned her studies so she could send money back home by taking care of another’s child.
Eight years after that, in 1996, my sister was born in St. Catharines, Ontario.
A year before my sister took her first breath, in 1995, Flor Contemplacion, a live-in caregiver in Singapore was sentenced to death by the Singaporean Supreme Court for the alleged murder of another Filipina domestic worker and a child. An explosion of outrage would follow. Migrante International, a migrant rights organization for overseas Filipino workers, would be created in response.
Sometimes I wonder if Flor thought herself a hero, then.
Right before they placed the noose around her neck.
***
During the U.S. occupation of the Philippines from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, it was the waste and sewage systems that were among the interventions meant to both uplift the Filipino people from their “savagery” and protect the American military forces from the Filipinos’ “predisposition” to disease.
If I have learned anything from my graduate degree in public health, it is that health has always been a tool of control. Because if the Filipinos didn’t survive, if the waste and sewage systems were not reconstructed, then who else would clean your homes?
***
One of the earliest memories I have with my dad is at Port Dalhousie, watching him diligently polish boat after boat. I think maybe it reminded him of Cebu. The ocean. The bangka gliding through the clear waters into a limitless horizon.
After he lost his job, my mom would get a second one under the table as a cleaner. He doesn’t talk about it much, or of anything, really. That was the issue.
“I hate him,” I’d whine.
Complaining in my mom’s bedroom became almost ritual.
“He loves you,” she’d assure me, stroking my cheek. “He cares so much about you.”
“Then why can’t I feel it?”
I remember watching through the crack of the door as he gave his credit card information to a man on the phone who told him that our family won a cruise trip. I heard the excitement in his voice as he readily listed off the security code in broken English. He was going to do something good for us.
It was a scam of course.
My mom was furious. He had a habit of being taken advantage of. Of being too nice, too friendly to his white co-workers who would laugh behind his back. Too naive.
Still, when we drive by the canal, I see his longing eyes watch the huge shipping boats with their loads of crates pass by. I know. His home is not here.
He’d purse and point his lips.
“Look.”
***
In 2024, Migrante BC protested in front of the Promise Land Consultancy in Vancouver to call attention to the thousands of migrants scammed for upwards of $300,000 by fraudulent immigration consultant services. The agency would promise permanent residency, but upon their arrival to Canada, would leave racialized migrants stranded without status or work.
In 2000, a typhoon hit a large 22- to 45-metre-tall municipal garbage dump in Manila that housed around 3,000 impoverished Filipinos. The monsoon rains would cause a large avalanche of garbage that buried shanties and killed hundreds of people. Entire families lost underneath carpets of grime.
The locals call their community Lupang Pangako: The Promised Land.
***
And if it’s true.
If dirt really is “matter out of place” as Mary Douglas and environmental scholars say, then my mom and my dad, custodial workers, Filipino migrants, must be the dirt of the world.
If to be clean, is really to be pure, to wash oneself of sin, of muck, of dirt, then why is to clean, to be discarded, invisible, dirty? How is it that the people who clean are considered unclean? Why is the work of waste not the work of care?
I wonder why our ancestors became humans when we could’ve become butterflies. Why people created borders when we could’ve been free.
***
At a Palestine protest downtown, I walk up to the podium with conviction, sweat dripping down my back. I tell the crowd that the bombs that rain down in Gaza are the same ones that rain down on Lumad Indigenous school kids in the Philippines. That the Philippines is one of the most dangerous places to be an environmental activist and land defender. That the Philippine government denied their involvement in the kidnapping of environmental activists Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano for simply opposing the land reclamation of Manila Bay, one of the last coastal frontiers protecting the city from the effects of increasingly dangerous tropical storms. (After going against the official government narrative, they were accused of spreading fake news and being leftist organizers.) That Filipinos, regardless of their status as the “best caregivers,” are not cared for. That the flow of trash from Canada to the Philippines parallels the flow of migrant labour from the Philippines to Canada. That Palestine and the Philippines will never be free without environmental justice.
I am screaming. I am angry. I am grieving.
I almost pass out from the heat.
***
In a story my mom often tells me, she is doing the laundry in Singapore when a black butterfly lands nearby. That’s when she knew her mother died, her soul flew across the ocean to find her, to say her last goodbye. Her brother would call a month later telling her that their mother was gone, had died weeks earlier, but they didn’t want to worry or distract her. That there was no funeral to attend anymore. To work. To keep working.
I wonder why our ancestors became humans when we could’ve become butterflies. Why people created borders when we could’ve been free.
Maybe mom was right. Maybe only in death do we return to nature. Maybe “out of sight, out of mind” is a lie we tell ourselves to not face the realities of our disposability.
Maybe the truest form of care in this world is the care that goes unseen.
*This essay was the winner of the creative non-fiction category of our 14th annual Writing in the Margins contest, judged by Erica H. Isomura. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Regina Public Interest Research Group (RPIRG) for this year’s contest.
