How can people connect with their culture oceans away from their home country? This is one of the questions writer and advocate Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio seeks to answer in her novel about Filipino-Canadian experiences, Reuniting with Strangers.

When five-year-old Monolith arrives from the Philippines to join his mother in Canada he lashes out, attacking her and destroying his new home in the linked short story collection Reuniting with Strangers. The characters in Reuniting with Strangers are all dealing with feelings of displacement and estrangement caused as a result of migrating to Canada seeking opportunity.

Austria-Bonifacio is a Filipina-Canadian author, speaker and school board consultant who builds bridges between educators and Filipino families. She was on the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize longlist. Reuniting with Strangers was on the longlist for Canada Reads 2024.

Austria-Bonifacio spoke with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan about representing the Filipino diaspora in fiction.

[His mother] leaves Monolith with her sister in the Philippines and she goes abroad for work. When the day arrives that they reunite, Monolith is full of rage. Tell me about that. What makes him so angry?

Let me tell you about why the book exists first and then I'll tell you about monoliths. So the book happened because I do something called "Filipino Talks." I go around to different schools and I teach teachers how to teach Filipinos better and when you do that kind of work, it's emotional — it's a lot of hard labour on your heart. I went to a school once when I was a settlement worker and the teacher said, "Oh, it's so sad that you're here now because we needed you last month."

There was a little boy and he was nonverbal, just reunited with his mom who was a caregiver and he kept hitting her. He was getting very violent at night time especially so she would call people to come and straight jacket him to calm him down so he could go to bed. For years I thought about this. Why is he so mad? There are a lot of reasons that you could be upset. Who is his mom, does he even know who she is? Does he speak English and is anyone speaking to him in Tagalog? This is like a completely different planet for him and a lot to handle when you're just a little boy. So I took that idea of all the anger that is inside this little boy and I thought, this story is going to help me tell the stories of other people throughout the diaspora as well and we're going to use monoliths throughout their stories.

That is the quote that is tattooed on the hearts of Filipinos, not even just in Canada, but all over. For generations now in the Philippines, we've had something called labour export policy. We export people, that is our biggest export. Can you imagine? It's not mangoes or rice, although we have amazing mangoes, it's people. When you think about quotes like that it's the fact that in so many Filipino families if you stay behind in the Philippines to raise your child, people consider it to be selfish.

This is a song that is a love story to the Philippines and is also used in protest as well. It's a song of revolution. If you want to take something very patriotic but also very revolutionary and put it in a song, that is what Bayan ko is. Bayan ko means "my country" and it's the song that brings tears to the eyes of Filipinos. Sometimes when you're at events, they'll play the national anthem and then they play that afterwards and that's the one that gets them.

The main character of this chapter is famous for singing kundiman and he worries that the music is becoming a lost art. Is he right to worry about that?

Yeah, for sure. I think that with kundiman, it's such an interesting way to tell a story. I was taught that these on the surface are love songs but they're actually love songs to a country. It was a way for people to express their love of a country when we were under Spanish rule; a way to get these dissident messages through, but in a very coded way.

So much. Not even just immigration, but colonization, right? Colonization is the whole colonial mentality that everything that we have is not as good as what somebody else brought to us and then later you leave the country and then that gets compounded. I'm not going to say that I don't love the current Filipino pop songs, because I do, but I feel like sometimes with the newer generations we're losing a lot of this history. The best time I think to be Filipino is right now because there's so many ways to find out about your culture online. You don't have to be in the Philippines to do it anymore. You don't have to go and get a history degree at the University of the Philippines. You can do it and learn on your own phone in your bedroom. How powerful is that?

So there are two things. One is I wanted Filipinos to feel represented in this [because] I am writing it for them. The other side of it is I wanted non-Filipinos to feel a lot of empathy for this community. I feel like it was my responsibility to kind of hold this door open and show you – this is what's in our text messages, this is what our emails look like, this is what it looks like on Saturdays when we're not with you and this is what it looks like back home in the Philippines. I wanted people to get that deep dive into the culture in a way that they haven't seen before.