“My mom left the Philippines when I was five years old. My sisters and I were very young at the time. We basically raised ourselves because my dad doesn’t talk much. It must have been hard on my mother. She wasn’t able to come back because of her visa status, and we didn’t have the money to visit. We talked on the phone about once a month. She’d send us letters, and clothes, and toys. It took ten years of working and saving for her to finally bring us over. I think the reunion was much different than she imagined. She probably expected us to be grateful, but all of us were teenagers by then. We weren’t used to being told what to do. So we were pretty awful to her. And my father divorced her soon after we arrived in America. But her sacrifice paid off. We all graduated college and have good jobs. But it wasn’t until I became an adult that I realized how lonely those ten years must have been.”