During my first Thanksgiving away from home since I had moved to San Diego for graduate school, my mother, Lita, called me after she and my stepdad, Mike, returned home from the family Thanksgiving dinner. The dinner was hosted by Annie and Steve, my pseudoparents, and it turned out that year, 2019, was one of the smallest gatherings that they had hosted in more than ten years, considering this was prepandemic. Sixteen people. Annie and Steve enjoy hosting dinner parties, which regularly consist of friends they have known for longer than I’ve been alive, along with the occasional neighbor, and the children of their friends’ children. My mother didn’t mention any newcomers, the ones who would inevitably ask, with genuine curiosity, about my relationship to Annie and Steve. Had they adopted me?

My mother and I were usually the only people at these gatherings who weren’t white—so I could trace the root of their question. If they had not met my mother first, it could easily appear as if I might be Annie and Steve’s adopted daughter. This wouldn’t be a problematic line of thought, considering there are many Asian girls adopted into white American families. I know a few. And in response to the question, I’d typically say, “It’s complicated” and that we were good friends who were like family. On the off chance that they’d heard my mother and me call Annie and Steve “Mom” and “Dad,” however, I’d offer a more nuanced history.

It was around this time that I’d first read Cathy J. Cohen’s article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” It was also the first time I began to think about how kinship could be queer. And if nuclear family units were, for the most part, characteristically heteronormative, then what was I to make of my own family? Expanding her analysis of queer subjectivity, vis-a-vis heteronormativity, to “straight queers,” such as the three titular figures, Cohen articulates what I had yet to be able to put in my own words. As deviant or aberrant sisters, outsiders, they illumine “an understanding of the ways in which heteronormativity works to support and reinforce institutional racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation,” right down to the family unit. What, then, could I glean from understanding my and my mother’s places in—and outside of—our family?¹

In 1990, my mother left the Philippines to find domestic work abroad, like many other Filipino women at the time, like many who still leave their homes to seek domestic work across the Global South today. But unlike many other Filipina domestic helpers, she was employed by two white expatriates from Minnesota who moved to Hong Kong and then to the US South for work. Annie and Steve met my mother shortly after their family had relocated to Hong Kong for Steve’s ups job. With Max, Sam, and Josephine, their three children ranging in age from one to five years old, Annie and Steve hired my mother as their domestic helper. While she was technically a live-in domestic worker, my mother tells me that Annie never expected, much less allowed, her to do more work, more housekeeping or child-minding, than Annie herself felt she could do. This way, and rather quickly, the whole of the family fell into a dynamic wherein my mother wasn’t just a nanny, but, in time, family. After all, she did move in with them the day they met, and they’re the reason she came to the States when she did. And where they went, she went, even when they found out my mother was pregnant with me. I grew up knowing Annie and Steve, and I lived with them in their four-story Atlanta townhouse during the last leg of undergrad and the whole of my master’s degree.

I listened to my mother give me the run-down of what I’d missed at Thanksgiving, imagining that I was there, too. Hors d’oeuvres, a smaller ham than usual, and, unfortunately, store-bought desserts rather than homemade ones. Nothing much seemed to have changed from her perspective besides my not being there. When I lived with Annie and Steve, I’d help set the table while they cooked. I’d spread the table with vibrant yellows and reds, with their accompanying crystal, china, and napkin holders. The guests would trickle in around four, and we’d eat at about five. Before then, I’d head to my room upstairs to freshen up, change, and prepare what felt like my spiel to the one or two friends of friends who’d be spending the holiday with us for the first time. That year, though, as Annie set the table, I was in my bedroom in San Diego.

Schmoozing with guests felt a lot like coming out and would begin with the quick disclaimer that my mother and I are not, in fact, sisters, but that when Annie and Steve practically adopted my mother into their family while in Hong Kong, they asked that she not address them as “Ma’am” and “Sir.” Led by Max’s example, my mother called them “Mom” and “Dad” the same way Max didn’t say my mom or my dad. They never corrected her for it, even though she was twenty-seven at the time, only five years younger than Annie. I’d tell the friends how I also call Annie and Steve “Mom” and “Dad” because, to some degree, I’ve come to mirror my mother, who in some ways acted like a big sister to their children, the siblings to whom I’ve been the baby. But I’ve never called my mother “Mom” before. No one has corrected me for it, although these days I wish someone had.

What I avoid telling the guests is that gatherings such as those had allowed me to see myself outside of myself as I’d grown older. Getting up from the table, clearing my plate and theirs—a byproduct of having been a server and the muscle memory of the ideal instilled in me that those who don’t cook dinner, clean—I could notice guests notice me. I’d feel them acknowledge me the same way they’d acknowledge my mother, who’d be up doing the same. When she’d wash the dishes, me drying them, I’d sense that they not only had stopped seeing us as sisters, but also had stopped seeing us as family to our white counterparts. I couldn’t fault them, though. We were the only people up, and my mother used to work for the family who remained sitting.

I’ve felt shame or confusion at times from feeling like a guest in my own family, even when I might have been too young to describe the feeling as such before. When I feel that Annie and Steve’s friends fail to see my mother and me as family, and quite frankly, as some derivative of “the help,” our cleaning reprieves make clear how my mother’s past shapes her present and mine.

When my mother told me about the meal that I’d missed, I asked her, already knowing the answer: Who cleaned tonight? She answered, “Me, I did.” She cleans because she wants to clean; Annie and Steve prepared on the front end, and cleaning is her way of lending a helping hand at any party, for anyone. Yet, without me there, my mother was the only person of color at Annie and Steve’s gathering, and I resent myself for noticing this and reducing her to the color of her skin. She doesn’t work for Annie and Steve anymore, and she hasn’t my entire life. The people at the table are decent people. And yet, when I imagine her at the kitchen counter with a pile of Annie and Steve’s finest silverware, loading what need not be hand-washed into their dishwasher, I feel the immediacy of my mother’s past employment emerge more quickly than the half-beat that it takes other guests to offer their help in drying or putting away the pots and pans that earlier were filled with the food that brought everyone together.

I am the daughter of adopted white privilege, and my mother used to work for a couple that we long have identified as our parents. At the peak of my adolescence, I was legally adopted by my stepfather, and my biological father is a man I’d never spoken to until a couple of weeks after that Thanksgiving phone call with my mother. When I think of the word adoption, I try to imagine a family that participates in a process that results in the taking in of another person, usually a minor, as their own. And I try to imagine an adoptee who is inculcated into the family’s culture, situated as an equal within the family, despite potential ethnic or racial incongruities. Above all, I try to imagine that the adoptee is recognized as family. Only, this recognition is not always notarized by documents that validate the relationship. Sometimes adoption is queer. Or maybe that’s all the time.

My adoption narrative, which begins with my mother’s, fluctuates between recognized and unrecognized, and I nest my understanding between an adopting of customs, beliefs, norms, and even names, as well as the reconciliation of pasts that inevitably shape our present perspectives and future positionalities. Adoption, in this sense, is synonymous with a palimpsestic process of acquiring, of coupling and decoupling. It is adapting at its heart. I speculate about the differences between legal processes of adoption and the conscious (as well as, at times, unconscious) practices of adopting because such practices shape our lives and become the narratives that articulate our stories and, sometimes, unwittingly, the fictions of our lives. And narratives that begin with a need to adapt, that are sustained by decisive ultimatums, create their own unique limitations.

My mother, though, believes in the “American Dream” and all its acquired privileges, even if they are conditional and are not guaranteed. In her words, she’s the one of her nine siblings who “made it” and who lives this dream as if it weren’t some farfetched, geographically bound, sociopolitical point of contention.

Lita grew up in Luzon, the largest island of the Philippines, an archipelago that has been and continues to be seen by the “West” as one of many small island states and territories of the Pacific: places that are ostensibly much too small, all too poorly endowed with resources, and too isolated from the centers of economic growth for their inhabitants to be able to rise above their present condition of dependence on the largesse of wealthy nations. It is where she and her siblings tended to their family farm in the San Vicente barrio of the Pampanga province, about two hours from Manila. Most of our extended family still reside there today, only there’s less farm and more home.²

My mother is not a nostalgic woman, and she frequently advises me not to dwell on the past. In 2009, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and since then she has lived up to the oath she took. Annie calls Lita a “survivor,” and she is. She’s been marked by the many self-revolutions one undergoes through necessity. Perhaps this is what draws the line between my internalized shame and my mother’s inability to be self-dismissive. Lita doesn’t give two shits about guests around a table who might patronize her because of the belief that life experiences in themselves validate one’s visibility, and consequently, positionality. More than myself, my mother is uncompromising because she values the living of a story over the compulsion to tell it. Sometimes I wish that I’d adopted her lack of sentimentality.

In a recent Facetime conversation, I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to recollect a teen horror movie that left quite an impression on my mother. She insisted it wasn’t Twilight, though the protagonist was a handsome young white man who “did have blood or something around his mouth.” Apparently, I had avidly recommended the film to her when I was in college. The movie was Warm Bodies, which I found with determination and a Google search of “teen zombie movie 2013.” She was fixated on the film because, somehow, it was directly related to the topic of conversation minutes before. R, the main character, is a zombie whose heart begins beating with life at the sight of a still-alive woman named Julie. The frame zooms into the inner workings of the heart come to life. My mother was captivated by this and segued into a memory of when she worked for her great-aunt, Tita Milagros, in San Vicente. She was ten years old. She worked for her great-aunt until she was twenty-seven, and at one time during those seventeen years, a young man had written her a love letter in hopes to court her. The letter she found, thrown over Tita Milagros’s backyard fence, had read, “Whenever I look at you, my heart bursts.” Recalling this story, my mother says, “Can you believe that? I thought, What makes you think I’m doing that to you?”

The letter never resulted in a courtship, let alone a date, with the young man. My mother was resolved not to romantically involve herself, because she had plans to go abroad one day. And as much as we both guffawed at her exasperated response, I wasn’t surprised by it. This was coming from the same woman who told me time and time again, “You’ll be just fine,” when I’d say something along the lines of What would I do without you? Lita is a pragmatic woman, I would even argue utilitarian. To love me was to teach me how to take care of myself. It is a love ethic borne not from the sensational or sentimental, and it is not invested in warming the heart for affective measure. For her to have thought What makes you think I’m doing that to you? was to speculate Who am I to you?or Who do you think I am to you?

My mother has always been active in the construction of her own narrative and has a discerning eye for reading the optics of her rhetorical position, so it makes sense that in the ways mothers and live-in caregivers aren’t unequivocally afforded, she belongs to no one if belonging means becoming an effigy of herself in someone else’s story. The Warm Bodies scene, my mother’s fondness of it, and the memory it recalled, show the affective and discursive promises of stories that touch the heart and wrench it.

Like my mother, I consider what these stories become to their audience, specifically how the subjectivity of domestic workers becomes an “object of other people’s actions.” This line of inquiry follows the work of Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, where “the ‘vulnerability’ of Filipina domestic helpers is premised precisely on their construction as objects of other people’s actions. This is the truth contained in the expression ‘warm-body export’: domestic helpers’ bodies are commodities, corporeal objects for the use of others.” The phrase warm-body export notes how the subjectivity of the Filipina domestic helper is surplus. Where her labor is a necessary commodity, her personhood is excess, so much so that in some cases the title “Mom” becomes out of reach. How and to what degree stories like my mother’s warm the hearts of others can be a litmus test for understanding an audience’s sensibilities and investments in stories that make the heart wrench.³

As a child, I accompanied my mother as she cleaned homes in suburban Georgia. I learned how to dust baseboards in sweeping strokes, how to properly clean a leather couch, and how to crush half a lemon down the garbage disposal to make a sink smell fresh. I learned to notice the degrees that could separate what hospitality looks like and smells like from what hostility feels like while living and working in the US South. And with the two of us having also lived with Mom and Dad for some portion of our lives, I learned what queer kinship looks like and feels like, when it is irreducible to a nuclear family, and how to navigate a history of coextensive labor and love.

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Joanmarie Bañez is a PhD candidate in literature with a focus on critical gender studies at the University of California San Diego. Her research interests include nineteenth-century racial formation and twentieth-century and contemporary multiethnic literatures of the United States. Specifically, her work examines Asian American diasporas in the US South, transracial adoption narratives, queer kinship, domestic labor, and carework.

Header image: Left to right: Annie, Sam, Max, Steve, Josephine, and Lita. All photos courtesy of the author.

NOTES

1. Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ 3 (1997).
2. Naoki Sakai, “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos,” Postcolonial Studies 13, no. 4 (2010); Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (1994).
3. Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order(Hong Kong University Press / Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004).