The overseas student survivor’s complex
There are several things I wish I had known before studying in the UK: the summers are way colder than you think, they weren’t lying about the taste(lessness) of the food, and there’s a special kind of anger inherent to being a Filipino international student.
After spending 15 months in a small university in Oxford—a cozy college town in southern Britain—I was determined to discover Manila during the three months of summer I would spend at home, the first time I’ve returned since leaving in January 2023. Oxford was a world away from sizzling urban Manila, where my family moved the year I left. Before and during the pandemic, I was never really given an opportunity to venture out of my routine of heading to school and then home again, so I made it a promise to catch up with my friends who’ve made Manila their stomping grounds.
The Philippines and its problems are the heritage I choose: something indescribably broken but indescribably mine.
Here are the things I learned during the summer: commuting isn’t as scary as burgis parents make it out to be, queer Manila is very small and you’ll probably see the same people across three different events, and the problems I thought I left behind are still thriving. The distance just acted like a veil that weakened my memory and made looking away easier.
I told myself I wouldn’t forget what it was like living in the Philippines. It was not only important to my studies since I was taking a double major in political science and mass communication, but also to myself. This country and its problems are the heritage I choose; something indescribably broken but indescribably mine. I took all precautions not to forget: I talked politics with my family and friends back home. I kept an eye on the news. I even organized a screening of a martial law documentary at my university and posted a flier for it in St. Edmund Hall, the college the sitting president failed to graduate from. And yet, my homecoming was like being thrown in an ice bath, shocking me awake, because knowing is never the same as experiencing.
As it was, the struggle many Filipinos continuously face as their everyday reality remained a ghostly layer under the screen of comfort that was Oxford. Having two countries as case studies, I could draw lines as to the failing of one and the benefits of the other, crisscrossing anecdotes into an unpleasant tapestry. I hated the imperial machine that gutted mine and many of my friends’ homes. I hated our government for not doing right by their people. I hated myself for living a life of privilege when so many people—“deserving” or not—can’t. There are so many things in the world that, for some reason, we in the Philippines do not have and we are told we can (and should) live without. A life of dignity and ease should never have been reserved for people of a certain tax bracket or country. Dignity—much less joy—should not have a price tag or nationality.
When I got home, these feelings calcified into something harsher as the abstract turned tangible, as I remembered living under the weight of inequality, corruption, and bigotry after 15 months of being shielded from these things. But this post-colonial survivor’s complex does nothing but give you a worried glance from psychiatrists.
The image of a Filipino abroad is, largely, a worker. Either suited in the scrubs of a nurse, the uniform of a live-in maid, or the jumpsuit of a seaman. For the working class, “abroad” is the promise of financial opportunity. For the burgis, “abroad” is “escape.” We’re told that we have to escape from the Philippines and its trappings of corruption, low wages, and lack of opportunity. This is said because there is an underlying belief that things will never get better.
Why are staying and leaving the only two options we’re given, and must they be so definite?
If I hadn’t left, would I have been able to play spot-the-difference between home and the Great Abroad? Would I have been infected with another form of blindness, a different form of complacency where my outrage at the failings of our country gets worn down like a stone? If I didn’t know the face of easy, self-asserted privilege resting on a throne of inequality, would I want change as much as I do now?
Oxford wasn’t all that bad. I loved its spires and the promise that life was not set in stone. It was a place where 21-year-olds took their master’s and 35-year-olds took their bachelor’s; where refugees remade their lives from the ground up; where people with disabilities were able to live independent, wholesome, and enjoyable lives. It was intoxicating to believe that life was whatever I could make it out to be and that present circumstances don’t have to define us forever.
Most importantly, I got to talk to people who came from countries like ours. Reporters from Southeast Asia, activists from South Asia, and humanitarian campaigners from the Caribbean. They visit European countries to study or work, either to bring their skills back home or to find ways to help their communities from afar. They do the work they do—questioning the limits set by society, demanding reparations, seeking justice for the subaltern—because who else is going to do it? Who else if not the people who know what it is like and who truly know the stakes?
What guilt I have means nothing without action. The privilege I and many people have is wasted on us if we underutilize it, or worse, don’t realize the power we have been given alongside it.
When I’d describe the Philippines to foreigners who’ve never been, they ask me why I want to go back if it’s so—to put their comments lightly —undemocratic and inconvenient. For one thing, they’ve never tried a good, honest-to-god mango before. And secondly, my home is not so irredeemable that I am willing to fully turn away.