Sending love in a box

Last November, the Priority Mail box of fruit that my Filipina American mom tried to send me from northern California ended up spoiled and rotting, splitting at the seams. I’m guessing the guavas may have been too ripe, or the persimmons were starting to bruise, or mold—maybe both. After numerous tracking errors and alerts and several phone calls to our post office in Washington state, my partner and I couldn’t find the box. It eventually traveled back to California, where my mom had to retrieve it from the post office. “Well,” she said on the phone, somewhat embarrassed and rueful. “I guess I can’t send you fruit through the mail anymore.” 

I was at home in Tacoma when she called. Our 1940s house has a small mail slot, metal outside the house, wooden on the inside, that’s far too small for most packages. I was standing in our dining room, looking out the window onto our porch. No more fruit boxes. A seismic shift in our own little private balikbayan connection. I was looking at signs of our California roots next to our kitchen: the dish towel with a Berkeley map hanging on our kitchen door next to our cookbooks, a vintage map of San Francisco mounted on the wall. 

Over the 26 years that I’ve lived in the Northwest, my mom has sent me boxes stuffed with seasonal California fruit: pineapple guavas, mandarin oranges, persimmons. The packaging is all Mom packaging: thrifted dishcloths, sometimes a diffident layer or two of bubble wrap, and white Priority Mail boxes that she tapes with several layers of clear packing tape to make it near-impossible to open without scissors or a sharp knife. 

I was mad at the postal service for making my mom feel ashamed. And I was feeling some unexpected grief, too, that my mom wouldn’t be sending any more boxes. Where would I be—and who would I be—without those boxes from home?

There are many visible ways that I’m the child of my Japanese American father, even though he died nearly 40 years ago. He was a librarian and aspiring writer, a Nisei who made his way in Northern California after his wartime incarceration. I took up his life in words and books and became an English major, then an English professor, a writer, and a public historian. Because he died when I was young, I have chased a lifelong conversation and connection with Japanese American culture and history, in an effort to keep him close.

By contrast, my mother’s connection to her homeland—and thus, my connection to it—is much more tenuous. She grew up in the Philippines in the 1940s and ‘50s and immigrated to the United States when she was only 10 years old. She’s never returned. The longing for the foods of her childhood, including the fruit, has created an enormous sense of unsatisfied psychic hunger. Those years in the Philippines were difficult in many ways: marked by familial abuse, an adoption secret that would not break for decades, and frequent movement between Manila and the surrounding countryside. After the family moved to the United States, my grandmother discouraged my mother from speaking Tagalog at home, so that now she can understand it but struggles visibly if she’s asked to speak it. When I grew up we occasionally went to Filipino parties, including Nochebuena festivities, but we rarely went to any festivals.

I’m not ashamed of being Filipina, but if I’m being honest, there are many ways that I am less connected to it than my Japanese heritage. None of my three names show any hint of my Filipina heritage. But if I’m my father’s daughter through words, I’ve realized that I am my mother’s daughter through fruit.

But if I’m my father’s daughter through words, I’ve realized that I am my mother’s daughter through fruit.

My mother’s love is all about abundance, generous as a public library. If you tell her you love M&M’s, she may surprise you with a five-pound bag. My partner loves to talk about the time he told her he loved garbanzo beans. She bought him a restaurant-quantity can, a whopping 108 ounces. If my mom loves you, expect a Costco-size serving of foods that you love. That generosity extends into other areas of her life.

Growing up near Sacramento and California’s Central Valley meant glorious amounts of fresh fruit, and my mother made sure that our family could revel in that glory. When I was a child in the 1970s, long before farmers markets were “in,” we would walk to Denio’s Auction in Roseville every weekend. I grew up going to roadside stands for fruit. My oldest auntie lived just blocks from the packing shed in Loomis where she used to work. My mother and my younger sister used to polish off most of a watermelon together in summer, sipping the juice contentedly through a straw, or eating slices cold from the refrigerator. Summer in our house meant lunch bags full of fresh white peaches and flats of grapes and strawberries. Winter meant boxes of mandarin oranges from our family friends. Our front yard had a whole row of pineapple guava bushes, a navel orange tree, and two persimmon trees, all tended carefully by my mom.

My mom hates seeing fruit go to waste. A refrain from my childhood was, “There’s a ____ tree” (your fruit of choice, fill in the blank)—“and it’s loaded!” She used to embarrass me and my sister regularly by knocking on strangers’ doors. “Can I harvest your fruit tree?,” she’d ask. If the property owner allowed her, she would not only clean out the tree, she’d give some to the owner, tell them how to eat the fruit, maybe even give them some recipes, and then she’d return home gleefully with heavy grocery bags. My mom filled our childhoods with the sights of strawberry crimson, with the thumps of testing a good melon, with the sniffing and very gentle squeezing of nectarines to tell their ripeness.

Once my sister and I grew up and ended up living in Washington state, we kept trying to find the Filipino foods that would satisfy our mother’s yearning. I scour the posts of Filipino groups on social media, searching for restaurants and markets that might possibly fit our mother’s cravings. The majority of places that we’ve taken her to are not quite right; like many Filipinx people, our mother craves the foods that she grew up with, prepared the way her mother prepared it. Once my grandmother passed away in 1998, my mother could never have the sinigang, the adobo, or the kare-kare that she knew so well. And so far, the produce sections in Asian and Filipino markets that we’ve found in Washington are pale stand-ins for the orchards she remembers from her childhood. We know that we’ll never quite satisfy that particular longing.

Now, on social media, my mother and I send each other pictures of the fruit that we harvest from our backyards. Two years ago I sent her a picture of my Asian pear tree, which was so loaded that one of the branches nearly broke off. She sent me a picture of a colander with a handful of calamansi, tiny citrus fruits beloved in the Philippines; when I was little, she would make calamansi lemonade for me when I was sick.

All of this is to say, I was really looking forward to that fruit box. The Pacific Northwest is justifiably known for its apples and pears, but other kinds of fruit—especially citrus and tropical fruit—can be expensive, or harder to find.

In January, Mom was wistful again. “I wish I could send you some lemons,” she said on the phone. “I’ve got some Meyer lemons that my neighbor shared with me, and I traded some persimmons for them.” She knows that Meyer lemons are some of my favorites. She’d had people harvest more than 17 boxes of persimmons from her trees this year. She gave them away to as many people and friends of people as would take them. “Well, maybe you can still send the lemons?” I pleaded. “They’re not as fragile as the guavas or the persimmons. Just…maybe pack them really well, so they can’t move around in the box.” The lemons arrived safely a few weeks later, safe and golden and ever so slightly sweet. 

 What my mother remembers, what she longs for constantly, is the fruit that she grew up with. I thought I knew how she would answer, but I asked her recently on a message app about those fruits. Sets of ellipses appeared and disappeared several times, as if she was thinking and remembering. Finally the text balloon appeared: “Coconuts, mangoes, star apples, pineapples, lanzones, duhat, camachile, atis, lanzones.” I had never heard of the last three fruits before and had to look them up. Tastes that were so distant for my mother, yet still so potent in her palate’s memory. 

I realize now that our shared love for fresh fruit is a shared longing, a form of connection to a place, and each other. For me, really good fresh fruit is my childhood; it is abundance, it is my mother’s love. For my mother, fresh fruit represents the insistent pull of the homeland for the immigrant, the nostalgia and the insatiable longing of the diaspora. I didn’t quite know what those boxes of fruit meant until it seemed like I would never get them anymore. 

I know that when my mother sends me fruit, it is her way of sending me home.