I left America to save my daughter and myself at 56
When people picture expats in the Philippines, they usually imagine a Western man: silver-haired, sunburned, a San Miguel sweating beside him. His story is always familiar: a new romance, a fresh start, a cheaper life under the sun.
What you don’t often see is someone like me: a 56-year-old American woman, single mother, moving halfway across the world not for a man or a fantasy but for peace of mind.
I arrived in the Philippines in February with my daughter. My mother’s from here, which technically makes this a return, though it rarely feels that simple. Coming back for a visit is one thing; rebuilding a life is another.
When the country I loved began to feel unsafe for women and children, I followed a deeper instinct: one carried through generations of women who knew when to leave. What I found in my mother’s homeland wasn’t escape. It was endurance.
I once wanted my own version of the retirement dream. But in America, where I was considered brown and an “ethnic” woman who worked quietly from home, this made more sense. I wanted my daughter to grow up with values, with connection, with something larger than Wi-Fi and survival mode.
Grief has a way of changing what “home” means.
My half-siblings, all full Filipino, are gone now. They carried pieces of my mother’s world that I’ll never recover: her humor, her language, her contradictions. My mother herself drifts deeper into dementia. What remains of that lineage now lives in me and my 11-year-old daughter. We are the last two left in a story that began on this soil.
So I came back, not to escape but to hold on to what might still be saved.
And then, paradoxically, I arrived and became white. In the US, I was “ethnic.” Here, I am foreign. It is an inversion I still have not made peace with.
The irony runs deep. In America, I am considered Asian; here, I am just another Western woman, even though I am mestiza. And there is an older injustice behind it. Under the 1935 Constitution, only the children of Filipino fathers were recognized as citizens before 1973. Children of Filipino mothers were excluded unless they were illegitimate. That law still echoes, quietly punishing generations of daughters like me, born to Filipino mothers who married foreign men. To be both native and alien at once is a peculiar kind of exile.
I also didn’t want my daughter growing up in the current American climate, where empathy is mocked, education is politicized, and cruelty has become currency. In a way, we became Trump refugees, not fleeing a nation but the atmosphere it created.
Maybe that instinct runs in my blood. My mother was born a year before the bombing of Manila. She spent her infancy hiding from the Japanese while the city burned, and by 23, she had found her way to America with nothing but a passport and a dream.
One of my ex-husbands escaped the Iranian revolution, crossing mountain ranges on the back of camels before finally reaching safety in Canada. In my 20s, I spent years doing outreach with Holocaust survivors in Los Angeles synagogues. I listened to people who knew the price of waiting too long.
So yes, I am primed for escape. Not because I am paranoid, but because I recognize patterns. I know what it costs to ignore them.
I didn’t leave America in protest. I left because history taught me what happens to those who stay when the warning signs are clear. I wanted my daughter to grow up somewhere I don’t have to explain mass shootings in schools, or why compassion is now seen as weakness, or why truth itself is up for debate.
Now, I live quietly in Cavite, in a rented house with geckos in the corners and laundry swaying in the heat. Life here is slower but sharper. Every small victory—fixing a leak, getting a fair tricycle fare, finding the right market for fruit—feels like a small act of arrival.
Every few weeks, I sit in the Bureau of Immigration in Intramuros, surrounded by older white men with young Filipino wives or girlfriends. It feels like a Social Security office relocated to the tropics. And there I am, one of the only Western women in the room, holding my daughter’s paperwork and wondering why no one has ever told this version of the story.
Because this country can be good for women, too. You just don’t hear about it.
There is a quiet dignity in starting over at midlife. The world loves to celebrate men who “reinvent themselves,” but when women do it, we are called reckless or delusional. I disagree. Reinvention is a skill most mothers already master, whether we want to or not.
The Philippines, in all its contradictions, has taught me something the West has forgotten: resilience doesn’t have to be loud. It lives in the woman who sweeps her yard before sunrise, in the neighbor who sells bananacue to put her child through school, in a middle-aged expat quietly building a second act under the Cavite sun.
This isn’t a story about starting over. It’s a story about continuing anyway.
Maybe that’s what this country has always offered: not escape, but endurance.