by Luz Rimban

	[photos by Luis Liwanag]

EACH TIME I open a balikbayan box, the first thing that always strikes me is a fragrance whose source I still have to figure out up to now. Is it the Ivory soap or the Finesse shampoo? Maybe it's the Jergens lotion? Could it be the whiff of clean American air that somehow gets trapped in that huge box? Or is it a blend of all of the above? I really don't know. All know is that for some strange reason, the scent sticks to everything made in America — the T-shirts, the jeans, the towels, and even the sneakers — that the sender carefully labels, packs, and ships back home. The smell would surely have seeped into the Goober Grape peanut butter if not for the thick glass bottle it comes in. Actually, the Hershey's Kisses sometimes do taste odd.

I have been a recipient of 'Stateside" goods since my childhood in the 1960s when my aunt, a nurse who had joined the wave of migrants to the United States a decade earlier, was sending stuff home to the Philippines. Back then, there was no such thing as a balikbayan box yet, and door-to-door cargo had still to reach these shores. But I had no interest in finding out just how the items got to our home, so long as the toys and other knick-knacks didn't lose their way coming from my aunt's house and into my eager little hands. I've since been told my aunt sent many other things, from bed sheets to towels to Hills Bros coffee, usually through returning fellow Filipinos. At one point, my grandmother even started making smooth fluffy pancakes that could not have possibly risen out of her favorite old kawali but had to be the result of being cooked in the amazing new Teflon pan sent over from San Diego, California.

Like many others who came ahead of her and after, my aunt sought out well-paying nursing jobs in the United States, starting around New Jersey in the East Coast before marrying a fellow Filipino and ending up on the opposite side of the continent. In the early years, when she sent parcels or brought her young family home to Manila, she talked about the questions her baffled children asked that provided clues to what she and other Filipinos were sending home: "Don't they have sausage in the Philippines? Do Filipinos brush their teeth? Don't they have toothpaste there?"

But the packages were never really about their contents. The gifts, whatever they were, were a way of reassuring folks back home that relationships remained intact despite the distance, that they had not been forgotten and were wished well. At the time, probably no one foresaw that in just two decades, that practice would spawn a multibillion-peso industry.

By the 1970S and 80S, other members of our clan had migrated to America, among them a sister-in-law who left Manila to be a nurse in Florida, on the crest of another wave of migrations. By then, things had changed. There was more frequency and regularitY to the arrival of packages that came mostly hand-carried by friends and co-workers of those abroad. As more nurses left, more were also returning for annual vacations, moving then President Ferdinand Marcos to coin a special term for them, balikbayan, even giving them their own special queue at the immigration counters.

It was these balikbayan nurses who came home with the inevitable pasalubong (homecoming gifts) squeezed inside bags bursting at the seams. While many of the gifts were for their own expectant relatives, a good number were also for those of their Filipino friends in the States. They didn't have to deliver the gifts personally; instead, the intended recipients would show up and claim them. My family, for instance, would get a phone call, which would soon have us headed for the Metro Manila address of a balikbayan-friend of a US-based relative. Once we got there, all we had to do was to present ID cards as proof we were who we were supposed to be so that our pasalubong would be given to us. When it was our relative's turn to come home for a vacation, she would be sought out as well by the beneficiaries of her friends' own generosity.

AT THE START, we would look for addresses that often turned out to be small apartments in seedy, crowded neighborhoods in Malibay, Pasay, or Sampaloc. But soon, many balikbayan families were invading suburbia and holing up in middle-class villages with names like Susana Heights or Don Antonio Heights, aptly signaling their climb up the socio-economic ladder and away from the maddening masa.

These days, however, I need not leave the house in search of some balikbayan's new abode to claim the gifts or pasalubong from relatives in America. Neither to do I have to wait for the yearly or once-in-two-years' homecoming of family members lugging the two balikbayan boxes per person that Philippine Airlines allows. All I have to do is hang around the house on the day the delivery man is supposed to show up at our doorstep, ask for ID, and dump in our living room a huge 20 x 20 x 20 balikbayan box, the one that took all of three weeks to cross the Pacific Ocean from California to Manila.

Cargo forwarding is the way Filipinos go global these days, thanks to the unabated exodus of Filipinos to America and other parts of the world — which can no longer be called waves but rather tsunamis of migration — and their need to send pasalubong home to family. There are dozens of cargo forwarders in the United States alone catering to the three million or so Filipinos there. For years now, these companies have specialized in the door-to-door delivery that allows Filipinos to send bits and pieces of the United States back home in a box, in between actual homecomings. Since shipping charges are estimated by size and not by weight, senders can fill every available space with goods of all shapes and sizes, light or heavy, as long as these do not include firearms and explosives, perishables, drugs, or jewelry. Money in a balikbayan box is also a no-no, since there are safer and speedier ways of sending cash across the seas.

Not everyone with kin in the United States gets a visit from the door-to-door delivery van, of course. The clientele of the cargo business in America actually fits a certain profile. Forwarders and local handlers say that the Filipino who sends home balikbayan boxes is usually either of two types. One is the elderly, usually retirees or parents of immigrants with other (grown-up) children left in the Philippines. This type has the time to comb the malls or stake out Wal-Mart and Costco for items like chocolates, toiletries, canned goods, and clothes on sale — and then wrap the items up, tack names of intended recipients on them individually, and "consolidate" the goods in a balikbayan box.

The other type is the newly arrived worker, such as the recently hired nurse who is just starting out in the States. Long-time California resident Dan Concepion describes this type of balikbayan-box sender as "still attached" to the homeland, and more likely to succumb to that Filipino trait of indiscriminate gift giving. "Pag-alis ang dala pangako, pagdating ang dala pasalubong (They leave promising all sorts of things, and once they arrive here they have to send those back as gifts)," says Concepcion.