A foot in several worlds: Two journal articles on the literary production of Filipino third culture kids

• Main Author: Manaois, Amberdawn Aeris R.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2018
• Subjects: Third-culture children; Children of immigrants; Comparative Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/2948
• Institution: De La Salle University

Children of global Filipino migration construct their notions of home not through fixed and secured place-identification but through a volatile process of uprooting/regrounding marked by issues of displacement, assimilation and belonging in their narratives. This paper examines the varying discourses on home among three figures of children of global migration in the Philippines - the left behind children, second generation immigrant youth and third culture kids - through an analysis of Carla Pacis' O.C.W. : a young boy's search for his mother (2001), Brian Ascalon Roley's American son : A novel (2001) and VJ Campilan's All my lonely islands (2017). These novels dramatize the effects of global Filipino diaspora by shifting its lens away from Filipino im/migrants parents and instead focusing on their children to illustrate the traumatic fragmentation and dynamic reconfiguration of home, identity and belonging. By studying how Carla Pacis reconfigures the left-behind child's notion of displacement as an aversion to changing familial (and gender) structures in global migration how Brian Ascalon Roley redefines the second-generation im/mmigrant youth's desire to assmilate as a desperate escape from an inherent ethnic shame and how VJ Campilan reiterates the third culture kid's venture towards cosmpolitan belonging as an acknowledgement of the complete eradication of fixed perceptions of self and home, this paper hopes to provide a preliminary reflection on the poetics of home in the diasporic coming of age narratives of Filipino im/migrant children. By comparing and contrasting the individual experiences of migrant children, this paper thus seeks to answer questions on identity and belonging especially relevant in fragmentary postmodernism and postcolonialism today.