Finding Identity Between 2 Flags 🇵🇭🇨🇦

I grew up between two flags and never fully belonged to either one.

The first thing I remember is cold.

Not Canadian cold. Mountain cold. The particular kind that settles into a farm town in the Cordillera region of northern Philippines before dawn, when the air sits heavy and still and the only sounds are the ones you make yourself. I was born in a place called Sayangan, at an altitude where cabbages, potatoes, carrots, and radishes grow slowly and nobody rushes anything, because the mountain has already decided the pace and arguing with it is a waste of energy better spent on the rows.

My Lolo and Lola's farm did not ask what you wanted to do with your day. It told you. Up at five, dressed in the dark, out the door before the sun had made any commitment to showing up. An hour and a half of work alongside hired hands who had become so familiar they were less employees and more extended family, which in Sayangan was not a metaphor so much as a description of how that town actually functioned. Nobody locked their doors. Nobody needed to. Crime in Sayangan was mostly someone's cow grazing on someone else's grass, and even that got resolved over food.

By the time I was four my parents had moved us to La Trinidad, closer to the city of Baguio, where life had more structure and fewer cows making unauthorized decisions. But every summer without fail I was shipped back to my Lola's farm like a package that needed to be reminded where it came from.

I did not understand at the time that this was intentional. That my Lola, who expressed most of what she knew through action rather than explanation, was teaching me something my parents were too busy surviving to put into words. That a child who learns to earn the morning before the reward of breakfast arrives will carry something into adulthood that cannot be taught in a classroom or purchased later when you realize you need it.

She was right. She usually was. I just needed thirty years, four countries, and a near-death experience with a Spanish menu to fully confirm it.

I did not plan Canada. My mother planned Canada.

She is the kind of woman who treats bureaucracy the way a farmer treats bad soil. Not as a reason to stop, but as a problem to work around with enough patience and creative interpretation of the available options.

For five years she filed paperwork, knocked on doors that other people would not have considered knocking on, navigated shady meetings that occasionally required greasing palms, and built side hustles that deserve their own dedicated post, all while holding the vision of a better future for her children with the kind of quiet certainty that does not require anyone else's validation to keep going. She saw a door that most people in her position would not have even looked for. She figured out which forms to file, which people to talk to, and how to walk her family through before anyone could tell her it was too complicated.

We landed in Ottawa in May 2009. I was twenty-one years old and standing on a sidewalk in the capital of Canada thinking the whole city looked exactly like a film set. The streets were wide and aggressively clean, the kind of clean that feels almost suspicious when you have grown up somewhere with more character and less municipal maintenance. The air smelled cold and fresh even in spring. People spoke English with an accent I had only ever encountered in movies and on the news, which gave the whole experience a slightly surreal quality, like being an extra in someone else's production who had not yet been handed a script.

I did not feel intimidated by any of it. What I felt was hungry. Not the biological kind, though Ottawa in spring is cold enough to generate that too. The kind of hunger that is really just curiosity deciding it has waited long enough and it is time to move.

I had one advantage most immigrants arriving in a new country do not get, which was that English was already fully in my mouth. Raised in a household that understood early that language was infrastructure, I could communicate clearly from day one in a way that opened doors that stay closed for people spending their first year just trying to be understood.

I used that advantage without apology. Within three days of landing I was moving through Ottawa neighborhoods on foot, handing out resumes by hand to anyone who would take one. Within a week I had my first job doing door to door sales, which is either the best or worst possible introduction to Canadian culture depending entirely on how you feel about being rejected, occasionally cursed at in languages you have never encountered before, in temperatures that make the inside of your own coat feel like a fundamental human right.

Over the next six years I worked more than ten different jobs, each one teaching me something the previous one had not. Construction work under the table, where I learned what it means to build something physical with your hands in weather that has no interest in your comfort. The Rogers call center, where I learned that most people calling a phone company are not calling because things are going well. Chipping ice on the Rideau Canal during an Ottawa winter so relentlessly cold that the city felt like it was conducting a personal audit of whether you actually deserved to be there.

Eventually a role at Apple, where I discovered that selling premium products to people who already want them is a dramatically different education than selling anything to people standing in their doorway wondering why you knocked. Then paralegal school, which I finished at the top of my class as valedictorian. A farm kid from Sayangan, raised on mountain vegetables and pre-dawn work schedules, standing at the front of a Canadian legal program receiving an award for academic excellence. The contrast is too honest and too good to leave on the floor.

I bought my first car during those years. My first motorcycle. I hosted the Philippine Independence Day festivities for a community I had helped build from the inside. And I found the BIBAK community, people from the same Cordillera mountain region I had come from, who handed me back pieces of my culture I had not realized I was quietly misplacing in the process of becoming someone legible to a new country.

We spoke in Kankana-ey and Ilocano. We ate familiar food together in apartments that smelled like home. Something unknotted in my chest at those gatherings that I could not name precisely but recognized immediately as the particular relief of not having to translate yourself for a few hours, of being in a room where your full self was already understood before you opened your mouth.

None of this was the plan. There was no plan. There was a direction, a mother who made the first move possible, and the rest sorted itself out in ways I could not have designed if I had spent a year trying.

The hardest part of Ottawa was never the workload or the cold itself. It was what winter did to the light.

I am someone who needs sun the way the cabbages in Sayangan needed altitude, as a fundamental condition for functioning properly rather than just a preference. Half the year in Ottawa I felt like I was operating at a reduced version of myself. Present, capable, getting things done, but running at maybe seventy percent of whatever full capacity actually felt like, waiting for May to arrive the way you wait for a debt to be repaid.

During those years I also built a relationship carefully and completely with a French Canadian woman who eventually proposed to me in the middle of downtown Ottawa. I said yes. We became a unit inside a community that knew us as a pair, which meant that when things eventually came apart, the unraveling happened in full view of everyone who had watched us build it. There is a specific kind of exposure in that. The loss is not just private. It belongs to the whole room.

When the relationship ended it took more than twenty pounds off me in two weeks. I stopped returning calls. I stopped talking to people I had been talking to every day. I went somewhere interior and genuinely dark that I had not visited before and did not immediately know how to navigate out of.

It was not simply the loss of a person, though that was real enough. It was the loss of an entire version of myself that I had assembled carefully across a decade in a city that was not originally mine, held together partly by that relationship and the community around it. The city was fine. I was the one quietly filing for some kind of internal bankruptcy.

In 2017 I bought a one-way ticket to Colombia.

The reason, if I am going to be completely honest about it, was Narcos. I had watched the show, and somewhere in the particular irrational logic of a person who has stopped eating properly and stopped returning calls and stopped being able to locate a reason to stay where he was, I decided that going somewhere with a genuine reputation for danger was either going to fix what was broken or finish the job.
I bought a one-way ticket because returning felt dishonest about my actual intentions, which is either very dark or very brave depending on which version of this story you need it to be.

Probably both.

What actually happened in Medellin was that within a few days of arriving I could not speak Spanish, could not read a menu, could not ask for directions to anywhere, could not perform any basic function that required language, which turned out to include most things a person needs to do to get through a day.

My depression, which had been sitting on my chest for months like an uninvited houseguest who had long since stopped pretending to look for their own apartment, was abruptly and completely replaced by something far more immediate and biological.

Actual hunger. The kind that does not negotiate with mood or circumstance. The type that makes you point at things on a menu and use your hands and figure it out because the alternative is simply not eating, and the body has opinions about that which override everything else.

Another surprise was meeting men in Medellin that shared my troubles and woes. Men that were still haunted by troubled romances, broken hearted from previous partners, all seeking something to fill the gap of what's been lost. I found company in them and still have some as close friends to this day. That moment, I felt I had company in my sorrow and was not alone.

The farm kid from Sayangan, the one who had learned to earn the morning before sunrise and had apparently been buried under a decade of accumulated identity and constructed self, surfaced in about seventy-two hours. He just needed a sufficient reason. It turned out the reason was a menu he could not read in a country he had chosen based on a Netflix show about a cocaine empire. Nobody plans their breakthrough. They follow a feeling, pay attention to what shows up, and recognize the door when it opens even if it looks nothing like what they were expecting.

Colombia became the beginning of a decade of building life on different terms. Remote work before it had a respectable name or an established culture around it. Countries as chapters rather than destinations, each one teaching something the previous could not. Nicaragua, Guatemala, back through Colombia multiple times, deeper into Mexico. I was no longer a travel virgin or a person being saved by biological hunger in a foreign city. I was someone building something deliberately, even when the shape of it was not yet fully clear.

I came back to Canada often during those years.

For my parents and my little sister in Ottawa. For my brother and his family in Calgary. For the friendships that deserved more than a voice note every three months. And six years ago I made a seven-day cross-country drive during Covid, west from Ottawa all the way to Victoria, for reasons that made complete sense at the time, but for some reason I had a feeling that something special would take place. When I examine them now, that decision led me to a roommate in Victoria who introduced me to a woman named Jasmin, a Vancouver Island born friend of his that also recently came back from Colombia.

I might have had a failed attempt at mending my broken heart in Colombia, but its interesting that it's also the same reason I met the woman I eventually married and expecting to be the mother of my child/ren.

The rest of that story is still being written.

Which brings me to April. And to Mexico. And to the part of this story that requires a brief pause to appreciate how completely it refuses to follow a sensible narrative arc.

My daughter will be born Mexican. 🇲🇽

Not because we planned it that way, but because Jasmin and I came down to Playa del Carmen to stay mobile during the pregnancy, found genuinely good medical care here, and then looked seriously at the residency and citizenship benefits available to a child born in Mexico.

The practical math made sense. The weather was considerably more hospitable than Ottawa. And somewhere in the quieter part of my mind, the person who once bought a one-way ticket to Colombia with no return plans felt the particular satisfaction of watching a circle close in a way that could not have been scripted.

She will be Mexican by birth, Filipino Canadian by blood, and raised by two people who stopped waiting for life to arrange itself into something sensible before they moved through it.

My Lola would have found this genuinely funny, the kind of laugh that comes from deep recognition rather than surprise. My Lolo would have nodded slowly, nodded in a way confirming something that was meant to happen but did not have to be said. My mother would have already researched the immigration implications across three countries and started collecting the relevant documents before anyone thought to ask her.

The pattern I keep returning to when I look at my own life honestly is this.

The best things that happened did not happen because I planned them carefully. They happened because I moved when something felt true, stayed aware enough to notice what arrived, and recognized the moment when it was in front of me instead of waiting for it to announce itself more clearly.

The Narcos ticket. The BIBAK community in Ottawa. Jasmin. Mexico. Every significant thing came sideways, through a door I was not expecting, in a place I had arrived at for a completely different reason.

Most people are waiting for the right conditions before they commit to moving. I understand that instinct deeply, because I had it too and I know how reasonable it feels from the inside. A plan feels like safety. Certainty feels like wisdom. But safety and genuine growth almost never occupy the same room at the same time, and the people who keep refining their conditions before they begin are usually the ones that life happens to, rather than the ones doing the happening.

A farm in Sayangan does not wait for the right conditions. It just requires that you show up before the sun does, do the work the day requires, and trust that the harvest comes to those who tend the rows consistently rather than the ones who planned the most elaborate garden.

My daughter will grow up between flags in her own particular and spectacular way.

Mexican by birth. Filipino Canadian by blood. Raised by a father who left a mountain farm in the Cordillera, chipped ice in Ottawa, flew to Medellin on a Narcos impulse, drove across Canada during a global pandemic, and somehow ended up writing this on a laptop in Playa del Carmen while his wife grows a human being in the next room.

I want her to know the real inheritance. Not a passport. Not a flag or a national anthem or a hyphenated identity she will spend years learning to carry comfortably.

Her Great Lola who knew things without needing to explain them, who showed up before sunrise and let the example do the work. Her Great Lolo who confirmed things with a slow nod and never wasted words on what action could demonstrate more clearly. Her grandmother who solved her way into a country on behalf of her children through five years of paperwork and determination and meetings that definitely did not go in the official record. Her father who kept following feelings that made no obvious logical sense and found, every single time, that those feelings knew something the plan did not.

This blog is where I work out what to pass forward.

Heritage, building, fatherhood. Three topics that are really one question underneath all of them.

How do you create a meaningful life for yourself.

The first part of the answer is in a field in Sayangan, before the sun came up, next to my Lolo, in the cold.

The latest part is in Playa del Carmen, waiting for April.

I am still working out everything in between.