My migration story begins at the young age of four. Like many new immigrants to Canada, my family and I moved to an apartment in Scarborough when we first arrived from the Philippines. As of the latest census, more than half of Scarborough’s residents were born outside of the country with visible minorities making up 76.6% of the population.

After a few years, we moved to a bigger home in Markham, a suburb outside of Toronto that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in this city and spent the majority of my life there. 

I’ve always felt immensely fortunate to have grown up in such culturally rich communities with friends who were born elsewhere or whose parents’ or grandparents’ were born elsewhere. After-school hangouts at their homes always made for a delicious time with diverse dinners and exposed me to a beautiful medley of accents from around the globe. I credit my early upbringing with much of the work that I do now with Living Hyphen.

But somewhere along the way, I got lost in a sea of whiteness.

When I lived in the Philippines for the first four years of my life, my parents insisted that we speak English at home. They wanted me to learn the lingua franca and knew it would be essential for my success in a globalized and westernized world.

Then when we moved to Canada, my parents insisted that we only speak Tagalog at home. They would refuse to speak to me if I spoke or replied to them in English. My parents were wise and knew that I would easily lose my native tongue in the face of an almost exclusively English-speaking environment.

I grew up in Markham, a suburb just outside of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in a culturally rich community where the “visible minorities” were, in fact, the majority of my daily life.

There was a sizeable population of Filipinos in my high school, many of whom were newcomers to the country. They stuck together and often congregated on a small bridge on the second floor of our high school. And because of that, the bridge was dubbed “The F.O.B. Bridge”, meaning the “Fresh Off the Boat Bridge”.

The students in my high school looked down on those Filipino newcomers, criticizing them for only hanging out with each other and for always speaking Tagalog. “Don’t they know they’re in Canada now?” “How are they going to learn English if they only talk to each other?” I can still hear the murmurs. I can still see the eye rolls.