By Holly Peralta-Howe
These high heel shoes were strapped to my mother’s feet the first time she stepped onto American soil. They are neutral colored with dark brown leathery toe and ankle straps, light tan soles, and polished-wood three-inch heels. The brand is now worn off and illegible, but mom claims they were an expensive designer pair – unavailable in America. This pair of shoes was the first of my mom’s possessions to touch America, and the last of her possessions to touch the Philippines, her country of origin. The heels resemble the Philippines islands with their bamboo-themed coloring, delicate shape, and tropically appropriate fit; the thick strap that holds the toes has a criss-cross weaved design that echoes the awnings of old-fashioned Filipino homes (a style adopted during the Spanish colonization of the islands). I do not know what size they would be in the Philippines, but in America the heels are a size 6; I know this because they fit my feet perfectly.
Mom arrived in 1980, she was twenty-three years old, a chemical engineering graduate of the University of the Philippines, and her father’s “flagship.” These age-appropriate heels were one of her favorite pairs and she continued to wear them during her life in America until a sufficiently-paying career at Raychem Corporation enabled her to purchase more shoes. However, she preserved this pair because she knew the sentimental value of the heels which click-clacked her through customs and escorted her into the United States.
I endowed these heels with much sentimental value and respect when I came across them while searching through my mom’s closet for a pair of heels to match my senior prom dress. I was seventeen when I remembered the story behind the shoes. My mom first showed them to me when I was about ten years old; I was still very young and did not understand the hardships of immigration, and fathoming that my mother came from a different world than the one I was growing up in was beyond my preteen mentality. In the years between that moment and the moment when I was standing on a chair in my mom’s closet (holding the shoebox I had plucked from the top shelf, looking down at the cradled tan wooden heels nestled in white tissue), I had been educated about immigration. I was old enough to imagine the hardships and attempt to understand others’ points of view. I had witnessed two of my mom’s siblings and their families immigrate and pursue the American dream. As I thought about the significant moment these heels exemplified, I just had to try them on! I pushed my toes into the awning-like band and buckled the straps around my ankles. I proceeded to walk around in them, feeling the comparison between the shape of my feet and the mold of my mother’s twenty-three-year-old feet. Despite my inexperience wearing high heels, and the wobbly awkwardness of walking with them on carpet – they fit perfectly. The shoes symbolized the world my mom came from; furthermore, they represented he woman she was when she arrived here.
The American dream of working in a profession, owning property, and establishing roots was the young woman’s goal. She pursued graduate studies at San Jose State University, but did not complete her master’s degree because during the program she became pregnant with me. However, she has moved up in the same company for over twenty years, owns a home of her own, has established roots, and even helped her successive siblings start their lives in America. All of this is easily known, but grasping the feelingof immigrating is essential to connecting with the experience of it. Immigration begins many stages before the airplane touches down; she never explicitly said so, but I am aware that the experience is significant in my mom’s life, and has everything to do with my own.
It is difficult to see the world through anyone else’s eyes but our own because the only way we’ve experienced the world is through ourselves. It was an amazing feeling to literally and figuratively be in my mother’s shoes. I left the shoes on for a while and sat down on the chair I was standing on when I discovered them. I imagined her saying good-bye to everyone and everything she knew before she stepped on the plane. I imagined that during the long trip she removed the heels for comfort, but they stayed by her side the entire fifteen-hour journey over the Pacific Ocean, and sometime before landing she placed them back on. I got goose bumps as I felt the apprehension, homesickness, and determination she must have felt on her way here. I imagine the woman she was before she had me – a young adult Filipina immigrant, educated, and ready to work hard. As I envisioned her toes anxiously pressing against the floor of the descending aircraft, I thought I could feel the anticipations of immigration sedimented into the soles of these shoes. This tangible evidence of my mother’s immigration made her experience real for me, and I gained appreciation for the decisions she made which led to my life.
I am now twenty-two years old, almost the same age as my mom when she immigrated. I am not going through the same experiences, but when I look at the heels or try them on, I feel a strong connection between who I am now and who she was then. We are both educated, young, Filipina women, apprehensive about our ambitions in this country. As the first American-born child in my family, it is my turn to be the “flagship.” It is difficult to see our parents as the people they were before us, but these heels gave me a new perspective on my mother that I may not have been able to obtain through photographs or other media. When I place them on and I imagine that I am her walking into this country, I feel my origin in the shoes. The heels had no part in my mom’s decision to come to America, but they are a relic of her journey and epitomize the experience of my mom’s immigration. These heels provide a medium for me to connect with a previous generation and experiences I may never have first-hand; when I channel the twenty-three-year-old woman my mother was when she entered this country, I can feel how these shoes broughtme here too. Whether it was at the level of chromosomes or the higher powers of destiny, I was a piece of my mom at the time of her immigration that she brought here and rooted in American soil. Just like the stages of immigration begin long before the plane lands, my life began many stages before I was born. The heels not only connect me to my mom’s experience, they illuminate my own existence.
