The only thing that felt normal this holiday season was a video chat with my family on Christmas day. I signed up for a Facebook video call from New York City while my mom and brother were calling from California. Aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews have joined from more states in the US, UK, Canada, Qatar and the Philippines.
The platforms we have used to keep this tradition going have changed over the last few decades. Before Zoom became the lifeline to stay connected during the pandemic, immigrant families like me had to rely on the technology available to stay in touch. Ways to reach out over long distances are nothing new, that’s what we do in a diaspora.
This year, I stuck to the screen all Christmas morning, and I was amazed at how much bigger my nieces, nephews, and foster children have gotten since I last saw them in person – which in most cases was years. I mostly saw them grow up on screens.
Before there were apps like Skype, it was even harder for us to connect. My dad moved to California from Manila, not long after I was born to set up a life for us in America. Before my mom and I joined him, the only way my dad could see our faces was in photos my mom sent him.
“Dad, just want to show me my complete set of teeth … and my dimple …” my mother scratched at the back of a photo of my two and a half year old. Another copy of the photo will end up in my very first passport.
Once the three of us, plus my American-born brother, were all abroad, there were expensive, hurried calls with family members in the Philippines on our landline. Those calls caused another furious phone call. You had to correct the household so that each person could call for a moment. “Hurry up, say so-and-so to pick up the phone,” shouts someone holding the receiver. “It’s a long distance!”
Skype was a game changer when it started offering free video calling in 2006. I remember logging in from the desk in my parents’ bedroom when I visited the university. There I would see my grandmother in the Philippines squint to see our faces in the blurry webcam picture. Before that, it was just an expensive luxury to just hear her voice. Suddenly it was free – and I could look her in the eye while we talked for as long as we wanted. By 2009, I had set aside my own Skype account from my parents, and it seemed like all my cousins, aunts and uncles did the same.
Now I have a whole directory 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 whether we are using the right app: will switching to Viber or Facebook provide a better signal or be easier for elders to use?
These calls also seamlessly merged into personal events. My mother’s side of the family held a reunion every year on New Year’s Day before my mother was born. We’re a big family (my mom only has eight siblings), so it’s a big production. My mom can rarely attend in person, but she calls every year. The last time I attended the reunion in the Philippines in 2014, my mother was still in California. I call her from my laptop and put her on a table with a good view of the party. Other family members abroad did their rounds on cell phones.
For the first time in more than 60 years, the reunion did not take place in person. I still found comfort in talking to my family on New Year’s Day about another video chat, but it did not miss me any less. The sadness is still there when the holidays are over. It will be there when the pandemic ends. Going home is not always as easy as a plane ride if you are an immigrant. There is a lot of red tape and luck involved in crossing borders. And there is still no app that can help me kiss my mom on the cheek or pick up my nieces and nephews before they get too old to do so.
For me, the education of physical togetherness was for the promise of more security in the future. And while technology may not fully bridge the gap between family members, it has made separation easier.
Video calling is now a standard way to connect with other family members who have been waving around the world in search of a future with greater possibilities. An important factor in our family calls is help finding work abroad and making a home for you in a new place. I have often heard it said that the Philippines is the largest export of its own people. Its economy is dependent on more than 2 million overseas workers, including many health care workers, whose money accounts for about a tenth of the country’s GDP. The small island group is the world’s leading provider of nurses – including my mother, many other family members and the nurse in the UK who administered the very first authorized vaccine in the world against COVID-19.
However, finding opportunities far from home involves costs. We always miss our loved ones. There is a shortage of health workers in the Philippines, and an exorbitant number of Filipino Americans working on the front lines of the pandemic have died from COVID-19.
Many people around the world have sacrificed time with their family and turned this virtual holiday season into virtual celebrations to stop the spread of COVID-19. For that I am grateful because it keeps my mother and other family members who work in health care safer. There are other immigrant-essential workers who are more exposed to the virus and who for years have cared for industries that take care of the sick and elderly and that bring food to our table – perhaps at the expense of being on holiday. A video call will never be as fulfilling as sitting in the same room with the people we love. But it’s more than some of us have had in the past or even now have access to.
The photos my mom sent my dad of mine while we were still living in the Philippines are now neatly bound in a photo album. It is a reminder that ingenuity in immigrant communities was more than finding ways to move forward. We found ways to stay connected.