STARTING A NEW LIFE
Documentary My First 150 Days explores the dynamics of a family reuniting in Canada,
After a nine-year wait for her family to join her in Canada from the Philippines, Melona Banico was anxious to get to the airport to greet her three children and her grandson on a chilly winter day in early 2016.
“I’m so excited because for that long that I am waiting,” says Melona, who worked as many as three jobs at once to save money for legal fees, plane tickets and a Toronto apartment suitable for a family of five. That hard work and sacrifice was about securing better economic and educational opportunities for herself and generations to come.
But after the teary airport hellos, the presentation of warm winter coats and the fun of arriving at an apartment freshly stocked with their favourite ice cream, the Banico clan was confronted with an aspect of adjusting to their lives in Canada that they hadn’t expected — trouble getting along as a newly reunited family.
“We struggled a lot for the first couple of months to adjust to each other,” Melona says. “Because for that long, we don’t know each other anymore. They grow up without me.”
That difficult, but poorly understood part of the immigrant experience is the subject of a new documentary film. My First 150 Days airing on TVO April 12, tied to Canada’s 150th anniversary. Directed by Diana Dai, the film explores the tremendous cost many new Canadians bear as a result of long separations when one parent goes ahead to establish a life here.
The film follows the family as the adult children, Judelyn, 26, and Jade, 24, hunt for jobs, youngest daughter Jaeh Mae, 14, and grandson Clyde, 10, (Judelyn’s son) start new schools, and all four work to learn both the language and the Toronto transit system.
But none of those things was as complicated as the family dynamics, says Dai, who chronicled the ups and downs of their early days for the film.
“When people talk about immigrants, people always talk about job issues, or language issues or loneliness,” says Dai, who in 1996 also immigrated to Canada from China after a brief period in the U.K. “But I think people often ignore one fact — that there’s lots of conflict within the immigrants’ own families.”
A long separation made those early months really hard for Melona’s family, says Dai. “They basically were strangers to each other.”
Melona’s expectation was that her kids would display the deference to a parent’s authority that’s expected even of adult children in her home country, she explains, along with a healthy dose of appreciation for the scrimping, saving and labouring involved in getting them to Canada.
Instead what she got was “lots of mouths to feed” and a gaggle of culture-shocked youngsters who found comfort turning to the familiar — each other, not Mom — as well as to their shiny new cellphones.
“Back home they don’t have Wi-Fi or any signal at all unless they’re going to the mall,” says Melona in an interview with the Star. “I bought cellphones for them for the purpose of looking for jobs, or if they get lost then they can call me. But then they go crazy on playing games because it’s new to them and Facebook and the Internet.”
The film shows Melona’s frustration coming home after a long day during that period when she was the only one working. “I went to work and when I come home I’m the only one who does the housework.”
At times both heartbreaking and heartwarming, the film offers an intimate glimpse into the shaky re-entry period experienced by families newly reunited in Canada — the teary kitchen chats, the small victories, the setbacks and the bigger victories, like when (spoiler alert!) Judelyn and Jade get jobs.
After focusing for years on the day when they will be reunited and the long wait will be over, you can see how there’s a good measure of letdown for new arrivals who confront challenges such as language barriers and difficult job searches while working out such complex relationship dynamics.
It’s something Melona’s eldest daughter, Judelyn, says has taken a bit of work.
“We have to learn to gain some relationship here,” she says, and to overcome feelings of abandonment from those years apart — a separation she says she wouldn’t be willing to go through with her own child. “Feelings are going to hurt. Deep inside it’s hurt. I feel it with my mother.”
But about a year after arriving in Canada, with new friendships from her job at McDonald’s, a better relationship with her mom, and her little sister and son thriving in school, things have turned a corner. “I came here just for my son, for his future,” she says. “l am thankful especially to God that, even though it’s hard, at least we survive.” Brandie Weikle is a parenting expert and the host of The New Family Podcast and editor of thenewfamily.com.