![]() ![]() So, in the beginning, we didn’t start as good partners, but we eventually got it to work. I, on the other hand, was hanging out with my new friends, smoking pot, and acting like an American. The students mocked her accent, put her down, and made her feel like an outsider. We lived with two other families, and my mother became a high-school teacher. She and I had started the pursuit of the American dream together. The news made my mother nervous and agitated. Needless to say, I was excited to tell him I was enlisting. He’d call attention to how much he had sacrificed for the well-being of the family, to coerce me to stand down. We grew distant, and as I got older and learned to talk and physically fight back, he would get emotional, to make me get emotional. If, for example, he told me to come home from playing outside by six o’clock, and I came in 15 minutes late, or if I was tinkering with my phone and didn’t stop when he asked me to, because I was absorbed, he would yell, and then hit me with a belt. His visits would always begin with a little celebration that was inevitably followed by days of strict discipline. He only visited my mother and me twice a year, for two weeks at a time, and it was usually when I was in school, so I didn’t see him much. He had left our household when I was five years old to work in the Arab Emirates. He had not been a part of my life when I was growing up in the Philippines. To find out, I went down to the Army recruiting station in Tarzana, California. I had watched HBO’s “Band of Brothers” and testimonies of military valor, and the unifying theme was that soldiers had heard “the call.” I was convinced that now, I was hearing mine, though I didn’t know if I had it in me to answer. Army advertised through the Los Angeles Times that they needed Filipinos who spoke the Tagalog language, I felt like Uncle Sam was calling me personally. I was 22 years old, living in my parents’ loft, aimless in academics, and frustrated in competitive Brazilian-Jiu jitsu. In October 2012, I was an international college student facing deportation for failing two classes. ![]()
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