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Life.Culture.Discovery.

The Filipino immigrant experience in the US – author gives voice to an educated woman’s sacrifice, and recounts her own childhood

  • Grace Talusan has written about her own experiences growing up Filipino in the US, and about the sacrifice of Filipinos forced to work overseas to support their families.

Reading Time:7 minutes
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Writer Grace Talusan. Photo: Alonso Nichols

Marybelle is a Filipino domestic helper who lives with Lincoln Chow, a Chinese-American professor, and Jing, a Hong Kong-born homemaker who yearns for a child she is not able to have. Marybelle earns money not only from the Chows, but also from weekends spent cleaning the rooms of local students. Her hard-earned dollars transform into large remittances home to her mother and daughter in Manila.

In turn, her mother mails Marybelle photos of the sprawling family’s newborn babies and of relatives at funerals – a token connection to family milestones that happen while she toils, several continents and oceans away.

Marybelle keeps all of these photographic moments in a scrapbook she’s named “The Book of Life and Death”. The pages are filled with “snapshots of those who have just taken their first breath and those who have taken their last”, the halves of the book separated by a ribbon. The live-in domestic helper has been working overseas for so long that her mother used to physically post her the photos.

Before the smartphone era, she says, “I would receive a thick envelope from the Philippines, the coarse, mustard-yellow paper still infused with the very odour of home. I’d hold it to my cheek, remembering the warmth of my mother’s skin. I felt loved, and remembering this love is how I survive without the company of the most important people to me.”

Author Grace Talusan captures the soul of Marybelle the domestic worker in The Book of Life and Death. The story takes place in Boston, in the United States, and not in Hong Kong, as readers might have presumed.
Twelve-year-old Grace Talusan (centre), with her older sister and younger brother, celebrates Thanksgiving at the family home in the suburbs of Boston. Photo: courtesy of Grace Talusan
Twelve-year-old Grace Talusan (centre), with her older sister and younger brother, celebrates Thanksgiving at the family home in the suburbs of Boston. Photo: courtesy of Grace Talusan

The short story featured this past autumn as the Boston Book Festival’s “One City One Story: Read. Think. Share” offering, with copies distributed to 20,000 readers across the city, and thousands more reading it online. But the Philippines-born, New England-raised writing professor – Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University, near Boston – never set out to write about a domestic helper.

Alison Singh Gee is a Los Angeles-based journalist and author. Her Hong Kong-India memoir, Where the Peacocks Sing: A Palace, a Prince and the Search for Home (2013), about her comic and complex relationship with her husband's 19th-century Indian palace, was a National Geographic Traveler book of the month. She was a features writer for People magazine, and has written for Vanity Fair, InStyle, Marie Claire, the International Herald Tribune and The Wall Street Journal. In the 1990s, she was a features writer for the South China Morning Post Sunday magazine. She is presently working on her second memoir, Cooking for the Maharani: Four Continents, Six Iconic Chefs and One Tall Glass of Revenge. Picture: Larsen&Talbert
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