My daughter finally falls into an afternoon nap. Toys scatter across the floor. I sit on the carpet, back against the couch, and rest my feet on the fluffy sloth and panda. Rain patters gently on the window. I cannot help but compare the puny raindrops to monsoon torrents. Home feels transient like Vancouver weather. Phone in hand, I scroll my free-time away and come across a social media post about gentrification in Joyce-Collingwood. I click the link to an article. A multinational company, it reports, has applied for a rezoning application to develop the area, which the city deems commercially weak. In response, a Filipino scholar quips, For whom is it weak? A group of Filipino youth promptly launches a campaign to oppose the rezoning application, which would result, they point out, in the destruction of a number of Filipino stores and restaurants. In one photograph, the group poses around a banner: PROTECT OUR CULTURAL FOOD ASSETS! The establishments are not closing anytime soon, but as the clouds dissipate and the sky clears up, I feel a sudden urge to share some Filipino food with Nanay who still lives in the neighbourhood.

The affair reminds me of an essay by Dai Kojima, where he conceptualizes the relationship between migrant displacement and mobility by interrogating the sociality and basue tactics of queer migrants in Vancouver. In it, he describes the Japanese term, basue, as “a certain depressed aesthetic and melancholia of a social place, such a dingy bar, a rundown motel, or a dirty eatery where the poor gather and secret lovers meet, hiding from the bright city lights and the noise of modern prosperity.” The sari-sari stores and turo-turo restaurants on Joyce Street, I think, are a basue, where people move in and out of the relatively cramped space, their sociality shaped by labour, culture, and linguistic affinities, their hearts ensconced in the familiar sights, tastes and sounds of a distant home—in short, nostalgia, or as novelist Milan Kundera aptly writes, the unappeased yearning to return.

Later on, with my daughter in a stroller, I ride a rapid bus to Joyce Station. The sakura trees on Austrey Avenue are starting to bloom, followed shortly by the bright pink pompoms on Spencer Street. It was Spring, too, when I became an immigrant. After a decade of separation, Nanay finally managed to sponsor me and my sister to Vancouver. Tatay and my eldest sister stayed in the Philippines. As a young boy in Manila, I remember Tatay piously forcing me to go to church. He would hand me twenty pesos for the donation basket and some strings of sampaguita to decorate our sorry altar that housed a small wooden figure of the Santo Nino, which never failed to scare me with its missing hand. I usually spent some of the money on various grilled and fried street food peddled outside the church. Perhaps, this migrant nostalgia was one of the reasons why as a non-religious eighteen-year-old, one of the places that I wanted to visit was St. Mary’s Church on Joyce Street. I knew that Filipinos congregated there and good food were sold nearby.

I no longer consider myself a Catholic. Yet, on my bookshelf, there is still a King James bible, protected by a zippered black, leather case. In my early twenties, I often attended the early morning Mass at St. Mary’s after working a graveyard shift as a housekeeper in a local hospital. I enjoyed talking with the priest in the confession booth. We rarely discussed my sins. I could whisper them directly to an omnipresent god, I thought. He was patient enough to ignore my angsty rhetoric which perhaps sufficed to get me excommunicated. In hindsight, I treated him as a sort of life counsellor. I was adrift, lonely, and isolated in a strange world far different than the one I grew up in. I showed up, and he listened. One morning, after feeding me the body of Christ, he asked to meet me by the vestibule where he usually greeted the parishioners after the service. When the space cleared up and quieted down, he handed me the heavy, brand new bible. Though I read parts of the book, awed by the poetic prose in Ecclesiastes and the radical adventures of Jesus, I gradually stopped going to church.

Near the church, there used to be another Filipino restaurant at the same spot where Pampanga’s Cuisine now stands. It made good business and opened branches in other parts of Metro Vancouver. However, they all closed down. Local news outlets reported that seven former employees made a Request of Payment complaint at the BC Employment Standards Branch, which then ordered the restaurant to pay owed wages and an administrative penalty. The food sold in both the defunct Filipino restaurant and Pampanga Cuisine taste quite similar, I think. They both serve delicious kaldereta, kare-kare, and sinigang. I am not a fan, however, of their sisig.

My favourite food, sisig, the pork hash that late comrade Anthony Bourdain adored so much, originated from the margins, quite literally, of empire. Apparently, sisig derives from an old Tagalog word that refers to a citrusy salad of fruits and vegetables. In contrast, the food invented in the peripheries of US military bases in the Philippines is a dish composed of diced pig’s head mixed with chilies, onion and other spices. The Americans only consumed the meaty portions of the animal. In other words, they extracted the good stuff and discarded those they deemed without value. Filipino restaurants that catered to the vices of imperialists scavenged and cooked them. They then served the dish on a sizzling iron plate and matched it with a bottle of cold beer.

Two stores down Pampanga’s Cuisine is Kay Market. Kuya J. used to work there. I call him older brother although we are not biologically related. He is a family friend. When I was new to Vancouver and finding it difficult to earn a living, he got me a minimum wage job at a printing press in East Vancouver. I worked night shifts, slipping flyers in fresh newspaper pages before bundling them to be delivered the next morning. Ate E., also not blood related, still works at the grocery store. We worked together as hospital housekeepers for at least four years. There is another worker at the store whose name I cannot quite recall. She often appears to be in high spirit. Before the advent of online international e-transfer, I would drop by at the market before special occasions or during emergencies—birthdays, holidays, beginning of school year, funerals and so on—to Western Union money to my relatives. She almost always processed the transaction. “Is it for Carmela?” she would sometimes say, referring to my eldest sister. In 2020, despite massive and widespread job losses due to the worldwide public health and economic crises, Filipinos in Canada sent $1.079 billion to the Philippines. Without remittances from abroad, the worst performing economy in Asia will definitely collapse.

My daughter and I enter Kay Market, past a stand with Filipino newspapers and flyers. It is early spring yet the stacked boxes on both sides of the narrow aisle are filled with fruits and vegetables from the tropics—mangoes, bananas, among others. I habitually peer at their prices and, each time, act surprise at how expensive they are. I have never, in fact, bought calamansi, a tiny citrus fruit, anywhere in Vancouver. I find it unreasonably overpriced, especially when I remember plucking them from their branches for free or purchasing a bunch for a few pesos.

Inside the store, I approach the side of a wooden shelf covered with rooming ads and dated posters of community events, including past concerts of visiting celebrities and television personalities from the Philippines. Above the counter props a television showing a Tagalog variety show. The shelves behind the counter are lined with orange papaya skin-whitening soaps and other beauty products. I reach for a bag of pandesal, grab a bag of frozen tocino and longganisa, and pay with cash. I squeeze through the center aisle to the back door, where someone seems to be perpetually flattening an endless pile of cardboard boxes.

In her book, Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov, anthropologist Kirin Narayan discusses Anton Chekhov’s journey to Sakhalin, the island penitentiary east of Siberia and north of Japan, and illustrates how his travel documentations amount to an ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, his incisive observations make it seem as though he put the landscape, people and their culture under a microscope. Chekhov is definitely a man of science. He is also a great storyteller. It is a natural progression therefore that the data he had collected made its way into the verisimilitude of his fiction. An obvious example is his short story “In Exile,” which tells the tragedy of an exiled aristocrat, Vassily, who, time and again, refuses to be defeated by carceral violence and, despite all, persists in his pursuit of domestic happiness—the epitome, as Cornel West would say, of a Chekhovian bluesman.

I have read the story a number of times in English. A few years ago, Fidel Rillo, a Filipino writer, gave me a collection of seven short stories by Anton Chekhov, which he had translated to Filipino. The book includes “In Exile.” He titled it “Destiyero,” the Filipinized form of the Spanish word for exile. Reading the story in my mother tongue is an entirely new experience. The words evoke fresh images, conjuring a pathos similar to thumbing sepia coloured photographs of childhood. The images, accordingly, present familiar cultural and emotional associations that allow me to unearth new meanings and understandings.

In “Destiyero,” for example, Fidel translates one of the character’s moniker, The Explainer, to Tagapaliwanag, with liwanag or light, as its root word, thereby weaving the name with the flailing flames of bonfire and bright stars that provide warmth and comfort to the exiles. It further harkens back, as if naturally, to the famed Illustrados, or enlightened ones, the highly educated Filipinos who initiated the propaganda movement against the Spanish colonizers. Moreover, the use of the word kubo, instead of hut, elicits memories of the joyful melodies of Tagalog nursery rhymes, alluding to a romantic landscape of coconut groves and gardens overgrown with vegetables. Furthermore, in Filipino, Old Simeon’s lectures reverberate like the fatalistic Sunday Mass sermons that instilled fear of saints and demons in my boyhood daydreams.

These significations are otherwise absent in the English version. The story, in other words, has ceased to be a distant testimony mediated by an imperial language, because my own cultural, historical, and personal subjectivities manifest in the text. In my imagination, at least, the “nativized” setting resemble not the frigid Sakhalin but the equatorial open-air prison of Iwahig. I wonder if the Filipino stores and restaurants—indeed, the mangoes, bananas and calamansi at Kay Market—function in the same way. Do they, that is, transform an impersonal, foreign, and lonely space into an affective image of home?

Nanay plays with my daughter in the living room. I sit alone in the kitchen, eating my pandesal with soft scrambled eggs. On my phone I visit the virtual Open House for the proposed high-rise building. The city’s webpage features an interactive 3D walkthrough, something Nanay, I suspect, would have difficulty figuring out to navigate. I skip it and watch the video instead. It shows the same neighborhood that I have been frequenting for more than fifteen years. Yet, I do not recognize it. A phallic tower stands erect in an area surrounded by white structures. Place names, signs, and textures vanish from the streets and facades. As though terra nullius, the landscape appears depopulated, ahistorical. This kind of cartographical erasure is a common feature of colonial occupation and settlement. I no longer see myself in the place. None of my memories exist in the space. Is there a pixelized person walking a digital mongrel?

For years, I lived in the basement suite of a Vancouver Special in Joyce-Collingwood. With my wife and our newborn baby, I reluctantly relocated to another barely affordable neighbourhood. It is also in close proximity to a slew of Filipino stores and restaurants. Like many places in this city, however, it also languishes under the gentrifying assaults of corporate capital. I am, perhaps, moving again soon.