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until he was gone. My own lolo, Grapes, had been always too remote, the way grandfathers often are, to make up for my father’s death. He was hardly more than a ghostly silhouette I’d glimpse through the glass doors of his home office, writing letters at his desk or reading ribbons of paper from his telex until mealtime, when he’d come to the table and kid with me. The jokes had always seemed forced, and I laughed because I yearned for a connection. I keep telling myself nobody’s to blame. They’d already raised their children. By some accounts, they failed even in that. And suddenly they have six more. New orphans from Manila, shipped wholesale to Vancouver, disrupting my grandparents’ premature retirement—an exile which they had just learned to love.
    Maybe the Filipino sounds in our English phrases, or the different ways we each looked like my father, reminded my grandparents too much of the life they had before the institution of martial law that drove Grapes from politics at the height of his career, that deprived Granma of her mahjong parties and battalion of maids, that turned them both into just another couple of doddering slant-eyed fools moving too slowly in the soup-cereal-baking aisle of Safeway. I had just turned five when we six arrived. My grandparents tried their best, gave up the small home they had built, moved into an ugly McMansion, hired a nanny to help with us. Grapes and Granma were intent on Canadianizing us, to prepare us for the melting pot into which we’d been thrown, and they prohibited us from speaking Tagalog lest we never master English. Even they cast off their traditional names, adopting my little brother’s mangling of “gramps” and “grandmom”: the man we knew as Lolo in the Philippines became Grapes (“sour,” he liked to say); Lola became Granma (“Like the boat that ferried Castro’s rebels”). As we all came to discover the limitations of assimilation, we grew closer as a family. I remember one time, after school, Granma and I stopped at St. Thomas’s to light a candle, as she did daily, for all souls gone and present and notyet born. A man sat up suddenly in a pew and started shouting at us. “Go back home, you gooks!” He must have been drunk or crazy, though at the time I didn’t know such distinctions. “We’re not gooks” was all my grandmother could say. “We’re Filipinos.” On the drive back to our house, Granma was quiet, ignoring my questions, as if I’d done something wrong.
    I also remember, years later, us six kids with our grandparents in front of the TV. Dinner on the table had long gone cold as we watched images of Edsa Boulevard thronged with people in yellow T-shirts, praying and singing, nuns linking arms to stop armored personnel carriers, a young girl placing a flower in the rifle barrel of a soldier who was struggling not to smile. The CBS anchorman was saying: “This could be as close as the twentieth century has come to the storming of the Bastille. But what’s remarkable is how little violence there has been.” A small woman in glasses was shown talking to the people. “That’s Cory Aquino,” Grapes explained to us. The anchorman continued: “We Americans like to think we taught the Filipinos democracy. Well, tonight, they’re teaching the world.” Helicopters land and soldiers join the singing masses, everyone smiling. Then Granma said, tears in her eyes: “We can go home.”
    I’ve been old enough for a long time, but only now do I begin to understand. Around me on the plane, I hear what she meant: the singsong of Ilonggo from the aisle seat nearby, the molasses accent reminding me of the way my grandmother said things. From farther down comes the clunking consonance of Ilocano by the lavatories, Bicolano by the bulkhead. A stewardess is speaking Tagalog to an elderly fellow, a man the age of my own grandfather, telling him all the places she’s been to. He nods at each, as if he’s been there, too. Maybe these