I grew up in London with a Filipina woman called Juning, who had four children of her own living on a small island in the Philippines 7,000 miles away. Juning’s husband left when their children were young, and all financial responsibility for the family fell to her. For several years Juning worked as a nanny in the capital, Manila, but in 1974, knowing that a local income could not cover her children’s school fees, Juning decided to look for work abroad. Her youngest child was two years old when she left for Hong Kong.
In 1976 my parents and brother, then a year old, moved from London to Hong Kong for my father’s work. My mother soon became pregnant with me, and in the spring of 1977, a few weeks before I was born, she advertised for a ‘mother’s help’ at the local Waitrose. Juning was one of four women who responded to the post.
Two years later, we moved back to London, and Juning came with us. She continued to live with my family for twenty-two years, until 1999 when she remarried and moved to the neighbouring street. In 2007 she retired to her island.
Every day, 5,000 Filipinos leave their country in search of work abroad. For decades this movement has been female dominated: more than 70% of Filipino emigrants are currently women. There isn’t a figure for how many are mothers leaving children behind – it must be thousands every day. As adult and a mother myself now, and having spent nearly two decades working as a photographer covering stories about migration and displacement, the notion that Juning lived apart from her children for three decades became painful to imagine and I couldn’t shake off a feeling of strangeness that their lives and mine had carried on in parallel for all those years, mine with their mother, theirs without. We are all part of the same curious equation, and after decades of living in tandem but remotely, I wanted to try to understand how this all happened and what the effect on the people involved had been.
I made three journeys to Bantayan, the island of Juning’s birth (which she has now returned to) and spent time with both Juning and her now grownup children. On the most recent visit, I took my own young children with me. The resulting story, ‘Someone Else’s Mother’, published by Schilt in 2020, interweaves interviews I recorded with Juning’s children with my own recollections of a childhood spent with their mother, and photographs I made on my old Rolleiflex with images from Juning and my father’s albums.
Someone Else’s Mother is widely available in bookstores and online: https://www.schiltpublishing.com/shop/books/new-releases/someone-elses-mother/
