The Occasion
In the summer of 2017, a magazine story circulated about a Filipino family and the katulong who had lived and worked with them for fifty-six years. She had started as a young child, gone to the United States with the family, cared for their home and their children. She never married. Never had children of her own. And she was never paid wages.
When the story came out, I remember feeling a lot of things at once. Many of them contradictory. People had strong opinions. And many of them were right. They framed the situation through justice, care, and concern. I felt the weight of those arguments, and I couldn’t deny their truth. But something in me hesitated. Not in disagreement, but in recognition. The story opened something in me. A seed I didn’t yet know how to put into words.
Now, in 2026, that seed has pushed through. And with it came memories from my own formative years in the Philippines.
I’m not here to litigate. I need to say that from the start. I’m here because that story made something in me stir, and I can no longer ignore what has taken root and grown into.
The Compound
I didn’t grow up in a simple household of mother, father, and child. I grew up in The Compound. My mother’s parents lived in one house. My grandmother’s older sister and her family lived to the left. Her older brother and his family lived to the right. A cluster of homes, enclosed by a high concrete wall, cemented with ground glass, and fortified with heavy metal gates. You needed a ladder to see beyond them. Privacy was a class marker. So was the fact that entry was selective.
The driveway was lined with trees my grandparents planted. Ilang-ilang, macopa, mabolo, and my favorites: santol, bayabas, mangga, chico. On some nights, the air was thick with the scent of blooms promising fruit.
Near the gate stood the old patisan, where my grandfather once made patis. My mother and her siblings used to wash the bottles before they filled it with the amber fish sauce and sold the patis at market. By my time, the patisan was no longer in use. Behind our house was the dirty kitchen, the labanderia, the gatong. And the small structure where my yaya and our katulong slept.
Their quarters had unadorned stone walls, a single overhead lamp that cast a dim light, a papag for each. They each had a dresser for their clothes and personal things. Their room almost felt like a cave. My grandparents slept on a papag, too. My mother, siblings, and I preferred mattresses, but the papag was cooler, more practical in the tropical heat. During the summers, we’d often set one out near the dirty kitchen, just to rest outside in the shade.
This was the architecture of my childhood. And my family’s class.
My Lola
I don’t remember much of my grandmother’s daily life, but certain things stayed. Her last years as an elementary school teacher. Her commuting by jeepney. The one time I went with her.
Later, I learned she hadn’t chosen teaching. Her father had chosen it for her. Apparently, it was a common thing back then.
I also learned the story of how she and my Lolo married. She was a dutiful daughter and became a schoolteacher because it was an appropriate thing for a respectable young woman to do. Back then, it was also appropriate for a father to set things in motion so a respectable match could be made for his children. This happened for my Lola’s siblings.
But Lola fell in love with a much younger man from the neighborhood, the man who would become my Lolo. Lola’s father didn’t approve, but love wants what love wants. Lola and Lolo ended up eloping, much to the dismay of Lola’s parents. My grandmother came from a landed family. They had farmlands, orchards, and fisheries. My grandfather was younger and his family had no equivalent wealth. What my grandfather did have was wit and charm, an understanding of social graces, and the workings of status. Eventually, through dedication and devotion, he earned my great-grandfather’s respect and good opinion.
These stories lived quietly in the background of the ordinariness of my childhood. Duty, love, class, and the negotiations between them.
She Read the Pictures
One of my earliest memories is reading komiks with our katulong. I no longer remember specifics in great detail, like her name. But I do remember the romance stories, the panels I didn’t understand, the words I puzzled over. I’d ask her, my Ate, what was happening, and she would explain.
One day, as I grew better at reading, I realized her explanations didn’t match the words. She was reading the pictures, not the text. I was five. She was likely not much older than a girl herself. My parents hadn’t yet left for America. I remember being puzzled by this. When I was much older, I realized what this meant.
The shape of the love I learned always included a yaya, a katulong. I called them all Ate. I knew they weren’t kin. I knew their place in the household. But I loved them anyway. I remember being held, comforted, soothed, always by the young woman serving our family at the time. Though their names and their faces now escape me, I know who they were, who held me, who they were to me, and what place they occupied in our home.
My mother left for America when I was around seven years old. She and my father were just two among thousands who did. That leaving was its own kind of love. Sacrificial and very costly. But a child’s body doesn’t understand sacrifice. The body just knows who was there.
This kind of bond wasn’t extraordinary. My mother grew up with a yaya, too. So did my friends and their parents. Class and love coexisted in many Filipino homes, braided tightly together.
Ate Josie
I was older when Ate Josie and her sister, Ate Tessie, lived with us. Ate Tessie tried to teach me to braid my own hair. She was really good at it. I wasn’t and I never learned. Ate Tessie usually ended up doing it for me most of the time because we needed to get to school. Ay naku.
Later I learned that Ate Josie had been attending college while working for us. Nanay—what I called my Lola–had helped pay her tuition. Or at least part of it. I didn’t know this until my teens. I didn’t think about this memory until recently, while preparing to write this piece. I talked to my mother about it. She told me Nanay had done the same for another yaya whose name I no longer remember.
Ate Josie has since retired from school-teaching. I know because she and I have recently become Facebook friends and would sometimes text each other
These details surfaced slowly, like little growths of green rising from silt. They made me realize how much more there was to my family than I had understood.
Love, class, and oppression were always intertwined. The texture of it is difficult to describe, sometimes even to understand. All I have are feelings, jumbled together. The memories are dear and precious, but they carry the shades of injustice, asymmetry, and perhaps even exploitation. All of it is true at once.
Shame and Hiya
What does it mean to claim these memories? The judgments are neither clean nor easy. Much of what can be said lies outside my hands. So who can play the judge?
What I do know is this: I feel shame when I say these memories are precious to me. They carry tenderness I later understood to be built on class privilege and social hierarchy. But there was also love. Patronage. Generosity. Hope for a better future.
I rarely speak of these things because I fear the judgment that I know isn’t far away, just waiting for its moment. The care I received was made possible by injustice. My family and I didn’t have uncomplicated, clean hands. Clean hands, I know, would cost me the origins of my own formation. It would cost my mother hers. As it would my family’s and all our kith and kin.
So I stayed silent. Until now.
Ate Gina’s Hands
Ate Gina is a cousin, the daughter of Tia Tindeng, a cousin of Nanay’s. Ate Gina would come during the summer months. I was about eleven or twelve at the time. I always looked forward to her visits, along with her sisters Ate Ida and Ate Grace. They visited from the province of Quezon. I had to ask my mom for details, but I think Grace was only slightly older than me. Their visits were fun and very entertaining.
She and her sisters brought stories that landed differently on my sheltered ears. Katarungan, the New People’s Army, work, equality. My understanding was superficial, shaped by the news in the papers and on television from Quezon City and Manila, things I hardly understood but needed to know for school. Laban. Ninoy Aquino’s expected return. The tension over what might happen if he ever decided to come back to the Philippines.
One afternoon, she placed her palms against mine. Ate Gina, showing me her palms, asking me to feel them. They were thick. She turned mine over, asked me to feel mine, and asked if I noticed a difference between our hands. Mine felt soft and pliant compared to hers.
I remember her saying simply, “I work.” At some level, I remember not really understanding what she meant. Yet I felt a rush of heat traveling up my neck to my cheeks. I didn’t understand the feeling of shame I experienced.
Through the years, I’d touch my palms and think of Ate Gina and her hands. Mine are still soft. I still wonder when they will gain the thickness of hers.
That moment planted another seed, one that later echoed in the books and rhetoric of social justice, the ones I encountered in college and graduate school. Many of my peers learned these values by theory, through intellectual abstraction. I learned them through living and growing up, the everyday contrasts of middle‑class life in the Philippines, the Dominican sisters who ran my private school, the shantytowns beside the high walls that sealed off lush gardens behind metal gates.
Return
Though I hardly speak of them, I return to these memories often. I turn them over, trying to understand what they still teach me. Their meaning continues to unfold.
My many yaya, Ate Josie, Ate Gina. They planted things in me that took years to take root. Their gifts were small moments, gestures, touches, words. But they all grew. They shaped my sense of justice, my understanding of care, my capacity for tenderness.
This is the garden of my formation.
Utang sa Loob
Writing this is the debt made spoken. Not a debt owed outward, but the one held inside. The debt of becoming. What their presence made of me. What their labor, affection, and time spent planted in my life. The debt is paid forward as ethic. It’s paid backward, at the very least, as remembrance.
I honor these women. I honor the tenderness that held me, even as I now understand the structures that shaped it, made it possible. I honor the contradictions: love threaded through asymmetry, care made possible by class, the softness that grew in the shadow of walls and gates.
The memories are imperfect. They are also precious. They are the ground I grew from.
And I am no longer afraid to say they are mine.
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