written by Angel Bella
When my great aunt, Lola Didi, passed away in May 2024–towards the end of the first year of my master’s degree–I was convinced my research project was doomed. Her hollow voice left tinny by morphine and my phone’s speaker rang with tender fragility the days before her death: Love you, Neng. Because this is how she always knew me, Neng: maker of troubles; declarer of harsh words; groomer of fingernails; recipient of care. The proposal for my Master’s Thesis–which I had just submitted to my Committee the month before–was entitled “Pagkaing Pampamilya: Cultivating Embodied Intimacy Post-Reunification Through Traditional Food-Making.” When reflecting on what could animate me to research for two years in graduate school, I pondered what moved me most. Not much else struck me as saliently as watching Lola Di’s health deteriorate throughout the 2020s, the absence of her care slowly revealing itself through each corner of my childhood home which ailed without her. After 30 years as the cleanest person of the household, it pained me to witness her room collect dust as her hands lost the ability to grip her vacuum.
Most starkly, her arthritic legs could not hold her familiar post in the kitchen. With my Lola Didi, I learned to cook, eat, and argue over the counters’ level of cleanliness in our Toronto home. In all of these moments, at times frustrated and others humorous, I felt most at peace with our complicated relationship. Political differences and intergenerational tensions silenced over food, particularly the cuisine of home: the Philippines. And so, I set out to explore how sharing and eating traditional food might impact solidarity-building within multigenerational members of migrant families. At the outset, the process seemed simple enough: I would interview folks as we cooked and ate together, and perhaps, I would come to find that I resonated with some folks’ accounts. Perhaps, I could share the findings with my Lola Di, and she would too. Her passing right before I started this endeavour was not part of the plan.
The summer months of 2024–meant to be filled with fieldwork–turned into a season of occupying myself away from my thesis to chill the sear of mourning. Thus, I only began attempting to connect with participants in the fall, just as I began my role on the teaching team for ACAM320J: Asian Canadian Community-Engaged Research. Here, I felt the daunting tasks of mourning Lola Di and learning to be a researcher converge. I was invigorated by the thread of care woven through these two key aspects of my life now coming together to a head in a classroom and in diasporic Pilipinx-Canadian kitchens. Sharing space in the course offered me an unanticipated opportunity to explore how care manifests in research, and lies at the core of it.
My notes from class discussions describe relationships, trust and power and their roles in research extensively. Of these themes, I found it most important to realize weekly what the emotional labour of research entails, practically and in the quotidian. This meant fostering humility and gauging folks’ willingness to participate in my project in emergence. Furthermore, this included the mundane tasks of commuting to far and wide sites in Metro Vancouver to meet research participants where they are. Finally, I learned to honour participants’ time, efforts, and energies by recognizing that their stories may not align with mine and Lola Didi’s of multigenerational Pilipinxness. This was welcome and challenged me in ways that impacted my grieving whether I liked it or not. I wanted to feel Lola Didi in spaces she had never stepped foot in, and I had to learn that her memory would materialize in this newness, nevertheless. I simply needed to allow the new to speak as she peeked through the palimpsest.
During one of the first classes of the term, one student asked me about my personal experiences being a Pilipinx person researching communities of Pilipinx migrants who I identify with in some way. If not as someone who grew up in Vancouver, someone who exists as a diasporic Pilipinx person with an immediate and extended family of migrants alike. I began speaking about the difficulties I had as a Pilipinx migrant who also embodied the privileged role of researcher funded by an academic institution, such as UBC. Inevitably, I started crying as these words spilled from my mouth. Truthfully, I had never done something so difficult before as to ask community I had slowly spent the last year of my life building in Vancouver–circles of Pilipinx folks I knew who were organizers, owners of restaurants, and friends of friends–for support by participating in this project. I felt like a sell-out. In addition, I felt my motivation to see the project through drain painfully as the grief I had spent the entire summer avoiding slowly crept in. I felt rejected by my own Pilipinxness–the very experience of which once set me ablaze to start a Thesis project in the first place. I couldn’t find participants for my project and I had no Lola to connect with and show the outcomes of this work to anyway. I lost sight of what purpose could be left.
Looking back, this was a self-defeating and needlessly scrutinous examination of myself and the work I wanted to do. The complicated connection I had with my Lola would never be justified by a research project whose conclusions all pointed to our relationship’s validity because this validity existed by virtue of my curiosity of other migrants’ relationships with each other through food. Our truths didn’t lie in sameness, but the ways in which each participant’s stories and hands together shared food and stories which challenged my conceptions of the Pilipinx-Canadian multigenerational relationship based on my connections with family loved, and lost. Thus, my purpose, it turns out, was never to match my research findings from other migrant stories with tenets of my relationship with Lola Di, but to delve into all the ways I could meet folks where they were in their conceptualization of the role food could play in their familial solidarities. As I travelled from UBC to Surrey, Delta, Richmond, and East Vancouver to meet participants’ in their neighbourhoods and was generously welcomed into the intimacy of their personal kitchen spaces, I came to know landscapes completely unfamiliar. The classic Asian grocery store in Etobicoke I used to run amok in while Lola Di searched for Mama Sita’s seasoning was absent, and mountains took their place in this landscape.
As I incrementally recruited participants through the support of community ties and began interviews, I thought back to our class discussions on the care researchers must show themselves. Through the process of acquiring Ethics approval, and accounting for every precaution possible to ensure safety and care for participants, I overlooked the care necessary to ensure researchers are doing their best to share care and sustain themselves in the process. Of course, I was in pain; I couldn’t help but mention Lola Di while ensuring storytelling space was prioritized for participants. Ultimately, it was in the ACAM320J classroom that the notions of care and expertise as living phenomena in research transmuted together for me. My great aunt was an expert in care whose legacy inflected my movements during my fieldwork and gave me the fluency to conduct my research as horizontally as I could. And, it was in the classroom that I had the space to express vulnerability when I felt my care-full expertise could only go so far, and I needed community to continue.