He became depressed, even suicidal, once standing on the edge of a bridge, ready to jump. He dropped out of school in grade eleven, and with some Filipino friends formed the gang Flip Mode. They spent their days drinking and doing acid in the basements of their absentee parents’ homes, and dealt marijuana to support themselves.
Of all immigrant children in Canada, Filipinos seem to have a particularly tough time. One of Pratt’s studies shows that in BC a quarter of Filipino girls and more than a third of Filipino boys entering grade eight in the late ’90s had not graduated by 2003. Roderick Carreon, another modern-day barrel kid and a former head of Kuatro Kantos, one of Montreal’s fiercest Filipino gangs, estimates that half of the city’s Filipino youths — most of them the offspring of nannies — are in gangs.
After Nillas moved out, crashing at a series of dives with up to ten other boys, he and Lyn saw each other sporadically, usually over a dinner of pancit noodles or some such specialty at her apartment. “I’d hear the refrigerator whir, the clock ticking, and then, whoom, my mom would lay into me to go back to school,” he says. “She’d say she made so many sacrifices, so for me to end up a failure was the worst of tragedies.”
Lyn first left her three-month-old son with his grandmother in 1984, to take a position as a nanny in Hong Kong. She never married, and even with a business degree she couldn’t find stable employment in the Philippines. She finished that assignment five years later and had two weeks at home, leaving Ian’s bed in the middle of the night to catch her flight to Toronto. Mother and son never said goodbye.
“These moms come to Canada really believing in their heart of hearts that they’re going to give their children better lives,” says Pratt. “But what ends up happening is that the kids have less education and fewer job skills than their mothers.” Eventually, Nillas found work in factories, stuffing bags of peanuts into boxes and stripping fat from chicken carcasses. When a back injury forced him into a job cleaning toilets at a banquet hall, he says it finally hit home: “I am cleaning other people’s **censored**.”
Two days later, he was back in high school, at age twenty. He soon transferred to the University of Toronto’s bridging program and, as an undergraduate, joined the Filipino-Canadian Youth Alliance. At one of its conferences, he met Carreon, who had by then founded Kabataang Montreal, a non-profit that provides support to Filipino kids. “Roderick talked about how the Philippines’ traditional family and Catholic society have been transformed by women’s migration,” Nillas says. “The Philippines is now a country without moms, and places like Canada don’t seem to care.”
He plans to devote himself to changing that after he graduates next year. In the meantime, he’s enjoying the turn his life has taken. At the twenty- fifth birthday party his mother threw for him at a banquet hall in east Toronto, he sang Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” dedicating it to Lyn. “We’re solid now,” he says. “She knows everything about me, and I know everything about her. But it took us a long time to get to this point — too many painful years to put behind us.”
