Saturday, January 07, 2023

My tough years in Denmark

I've gotten into an email conversation that means a lot to me, because it is with an actor in a movie from long ago, a movie which is one of my guilty pleasures to this day. 

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He wrote: You write compellingly of the experience of the Ukrainian immigrants you teach.  Was that also your own experience when you moved from the Philippines to Denmark?

I replied: I don’t know where to begin. The move from the Philippines to Denmark was …complicated, and was carried out over several years, as I travelled back and forth between both countries, trying to figure out whether I wanted to be married to a Dane or not. In the beginning there was the usual euphoria of being in a new place – the romance of perfect Scandinavia. (Incidentally, the first European country I ever visited, in 2001, was Finland, and it was then that I fell in love with the whole Nordic shebang)

I was free and independent. Then came the realization that, with the move to Denmark, I had lost everything. Friends, network, career, a job, all my languages. Unless they are lucky enough to have found employment in a Danish company (in which case they can speak English to their heart's content) new immigrants must go through public Danish-language education, and it’s here that the breaking-in, or breaking-down, begins. My situation was complicated in that I was in Denmark on account of marriage (so the permanent resident requirements were harder to meet), and I am a youthful-looking Asian woman. So in 2008 I went from being journalist with a career and “one of the best Filipina writers of her generation” to being the Asian wife of an older man, categorized alongside “mail order bride,” “au pair” and “Bangkok prostitute.” I was the Asian woman no one would talk to at parties because maybe she didn’t even understand what was going on and it wasn’t worth the effort spelling things out to her.  

In time I learned to manipulate that “youthful-looking Asian woman” thing – but it was haaard.

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I re-read what I'd written and wondered if I sounded angry. I hadn't meant to. Had I given away too much of myself? I don't think so. There is nothing here that I hadn't articulated to my friends (very often after a few sips of wine), and I do recall saying something very similar to this to the wife of a friend from way back (she a producer, he a filmmaker) when we met in Manila in 2022. With the few fellow writers and creatives that I've met in Europe, the sentiments are the same. Some have worse stories to tell.

The only difference is that I don't put this out on Facebook.  For many of us, Facebook is the place to curate the brighter side of life -- not that the life we put out on Facebook is a lie, but it's what we have after we've managed to cut away the unpleasantness (that all of us go through anyway). For some, Facebook is a place to bitch and trigger people. Not for me.

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I continued: 

I’ve been writing “fan fiction” for myself (Note: Over the 2022 holidays). For the pure enjoyment of it. And certainly for the practice … when I haven’t written in a long time the words don’t flow as they should, and the writing becomes self-conscious. It helps me in my writing practice because I don’t have to worry about creating new characters nor scenarios (since these are alternate perspectives on earlier ones I created) and enables me to focus on the act, the art and the pleasure of putting my fantasies into words.  ...


I’ve been trying to write a book about the experience of migrating to Denmark for years and years. Most often a certain anger boils up and I have to put the task away. By practicing the craft of writing I hope to find the right balance between passion and distance. At some point in 2023, I’ll put aside the blog (A blog on the boys of Il Vespaio that I am slowly building) and find my way back to this book. I wrote a short novel for young people early in 2022, so I've gotten some recent practice already.

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Now that these thoughts have been put into words, they are less frightening. 

And it's somehow easier to proceed with writing about the immigration experience to Denmark. I don't mean to be disloyal -- I am a dual citizen after all. But it speaks of how deeply we "newcomers in Denmark"  have been conditioned to believe that we are eternal guests in this country and must behave and smile and say thanks, that more than 19 years after I first set foot here, after 15 years of marriage and of being a dutiful and law-abiding citizen, I still worry about being labelled ungrateful and -- being a second-class citizen -- unworthy of speaking out.

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