Thanksgiving, Mother of Exiles, and the Statue of Liberty.

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 23 NOV 2016. WED. N3.
Thanksgiving, Mother of Exiles, and the Statue of Liberty.

ELLIS ISLAND in the Hudson River is an enchanting place for me. Years ago, for a number of nights,

When I did an intensive training for a job on language testing, I would take the train from White Plains an hour away, and get off at the Central Station to find my way to that harbor closest to the island.

In the early evening hours, one would see the silhouette of that iconic articulation of a history that is now beyond the imagination and consciousness of triumphalist children and grandchildren of immigrants, many of them now holding positions of incalculable power, a power that is beyond the reach of ordinary immigrants like me.

I would sit there in the dark, and allow people to pass me by, and watch the tourists take a picture of that landmark in the middle of a vast body of water that leads to a vaster one, to the Atlantic.

In my mind is the theatre of immigrant life, the step-by-step procedure to finally calling it quits with one's homeland that could not offer anything but a dehumanized life.

How many of these made it here, and partook of the promises of the Golden Bull by the Wall Street, I do not know.

Once, an aunt who has lived most of her professional life in New Jersey offered me and my sister to bring me around by riding on those double-decked tourist buses that circled New York City and got past the Hudson to get to the other side where we had another view of this 'altar' of immigrant life.

Almost always, Emma Lazarus' words would ring in my ear, each syllable in the poem a syllable in my soul:

"Give me your tired, your poor,/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore./ Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/ I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Mr Donald Trump must remember these words again.

He must remember too that he came immigrant ancestors.

WPH/