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Ferdie's full house Longtime suburban resident supports struggling Philippine relatives
Stories by Mike Comerford
He points to a young mother fanning herself on the front porch, his niece, Nadia Tiong. "She's the comedian in the family," he says. She takes that as her comic cue, as well as an opportunity to sum up the mood of the house's inhabitants. "Do you want to come live with us - you will laugh all day long," she says. "We are never serious in this place. That's why we look so young." But she's puzzled. What's so interesting about Uncle Ferdie? He's just a typical Filipino. He immigrated to the American suburb, Elk Grove Village. He sent money home to his family. And now that earning money isn't a problem for him anymore, he has retired in the Philippines. He's just doing what any good Filipino boy does, she reasons. "He had love for his family even when his life … was difficult," she says. "He never neglected us." Sending cash Working abroad and sending money home is one of the most common experiences in Philippine life. Aguilar says he's been sending about $300 a month for more than 20 years. In 2004, a record crop of about 1 million Filipinos left their native islands to work abroad, according to the Philippine government.
About a tenth of the population of the Philippines works overseas, sending back what amounts to as much as one-third of the economy's gross domestic product, according to the Asian Development Bank. The Philippines appears to surpass Mexico in the number of people going abroad to work. And with $14 billion to $21 billion in remittances annually, Filipinos also seem to be sending more money back home. Thirty-five relatives now live in the home Aguilar grew up in along Azucena Street. The house more than doubled in size since he was a boy to seven bedrooms inside and a six-bedroom, attached addition in the back. Aguilar paid for the expansion years ago because "they wouldn't be able to afford to pay rent anywhere else." As he walks through the house, children come running up to him, bowing and guiding the back of his right hand to their foreheads like a backhanded kiss, a child's traditional gesture of respect for an elder called "mano po," in Tagalog. Next door, he sees his childhood friend Antonio "Toto" Hormilloso sitting outside his home. Growing up, Hormilloso was the best basketball player on the block; he had springs, they say. Aguilar played point guard. They'd play late into the night with a light shining on the basketball hoop just a few feet from Aguilar's front door. The court was the side street Aguilar lived on so the game got interrupted by passing single-piston tricycles, a kind of motorcycle taxi with a sidecar. As Aguilar and Hormilloso talk, the old weathered hoop is just the distance of a three-point shot behind them. Hormilloso never left the street; he now owns a small mom and pop store. Just behind the hoop, he's raising fighting cocks. He calls one the "Chicago cock," in honor of his old teammate, Aguilar, the one who made it in America. A long journey home Aguilar left this place of his childhood about four decades ago and now is living the life of a balikbayan, a returnee. As a young man, he worked hard to get into engineering college, and when he got out, he went to work on ships at Subic Bay Naval Base, the U.S. base north of Manila. On Subic, America didn't seem that far away anymore. He knew people who made the transition. With their encouragement, he immigrated in 1970 with $50 in his pocket.
But the trained engineer who had worked for the U.S. Navy couldn't find anything but manual labor in America. He bounced around between a few jobs on the West Coast before landing in Chicago, where he hid the fact that he was an engineer and got a job in a mailroom. Eventually, he would get a job with Allmetal Inc., an Itasca-based component manufacturer. He moved his family to Elk Grove Village. Outside his home in the suburbs, he put up his own basketball hoop, sometimes jokingly called the "Filipino national flag" because so many Filipinos have hoops outside their homes. Immigration cycle What is in short supply in this house on Azucena Street is men. Women and children dominate the house. Husbands are working in Japan, Saudi Arabia and America. Tiong's husband is working in Japan, but she says she never wants to work abroad. "When I was younger I wanted to live in America but now I have my daughter," she says in a rare serious moment and then lightens up. "And she's pretty, just like her mother." Immigration and remittances are core features of the Philippine experience. The government does its best to make immigration easy and even has a Web page explaining the best ways to send money back home. Immigration is widely seen as a way of relieving the population boom in the Philippines. Still, critics say the country is depleting itself of the doctors, nurses, engineers and skilled craftsmen needed to pull it out of poverty. The cycle starts something like this. An American family member becomes financially secure and begins supporting multiple members in the Philippines, sometimes through college or medical school. And when the schooling is finished, they help relatives with immigration and their first home, sometimes nearby their own. It is so common, some Filipinos jokingly refer to themselves not as expats, as in expatriates, but as "remittance pats." 'It's different now' At 62, Aguilar is a retired mechanical engineer and financial officer who held a variety of management posts. His last assignment was in Germany, where the divorced Aguilar went on the Internet looking for love. Now, he's engaged to Ana Suan and living in Davao City on the southern island of Mindanao. He visits his mother and family in Caloocan about once a month. Once or twice a year, he visits his home in Elk Grove Village, where his son, Jonathan, and his family reside. Some trips he stays in Schaumburg with his other son, Jerry. He supports three different homes, but the childhood home on Azucena Street is centrifugal, though time has changed the neighborhood. "Everyone in the neighborhood was welcomed here," he says. "It's different now. We used to know everybody. All these buildings weren't here. Now, everyone is on top of each other and I don't know everyone." Aguilar moves over to his 85- year-old mother, Arsenia, and puts his hand on her shoulder. In a purple smock, she's white haired with an elegantly lined face.
She reaches up and touches her son's hand and the memories come back. His mother nods as he recalls the old Azucena Street, less a crowded urban back street and more a jungle road. "We had a lot of gang fights outside this house," Aguilar says. "People would try to kill each other. She'd go out and stop them. She was a real peacemaker." A burden to some Many families - and Aguilar's is no different - come to depend on the income from relatives in America. "Most of them don't work (steadily)," he said. "Sometimes they only eat rice once or twice a day. They don't care. They're happy." Some "remittance pats" resent the burden. They say they have worked for their money while their relatives are goofing off. They are embarrassed by the poverty of their relatives and by the dysfunctional Philippine economy. But that isn't Aguilar's view. He is passing down the importance of remittances to his suburban sons. "They said, 'Dad, how come we send money over there,'" Aguilar says. "Then I brought them over here (as teenagers) and they could see why. When they started to work, they started sending money to their cousins too."
IN PART 5:
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| © 2005 Daily Herald, Paddock Publications, Inc. |