Sitting in a hotel in Hong Kong, I wait to call my former yaya—the one who took care of me from the time I was born, and who moved with us across continents. For a generation, different members of her family have worked for different members of mine, and it feels as though I have always known her, though in reality I sadly know so little about her.
When we moved to the US when I was fifteen, my yaya could only obtain a one-year visa, after which she left us to move to Hong Kong where she would begin working for a family friend of ours. At that point, when she left our employment, the children she had spent her adult life raising as if they were her own had grown, and had not grown up to be her sons and daughter. She never had children of her own, moving around with us so much, but she had become the primary supporter of her extended family in Bacolod.
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