I LEFT AMERICA TO SAVE MY DAUGHTER AND MYSELF AT 56

When people picture expats in the Philippines, they usually imagine a Western man: silver-haired, sunburned, a San Miguel sweating beside him. His story is always familiar: a new romance, a fresh start, a cheaper life under the sun.

- By JESS ANDERSON

What you don't often see is someone like me: a 56-year-old American woman, single mother, moving halfway across the world not for a man or a fantasy but for peace of mind.

When the country I loved began to feel unsafe for women and children, I followed a deeper instinct: one carried through generations of women who knew when to leave. What I found in my mother's homeland wasn't escape. It was endurance.

I arrived in the Philippines in February with my daughter. My mother's from here, which technically makes this a return, though it rarely feels that simple. Coming back for a visit is one thing; rebuilding a life is another.

I once wanted my own version of the retirement dream. But in America, where I was considered brown and an "ethnic" woman who worked quietly from home, this made more sense. I wanted my daughter to grow up with values, with connection, with something larger than WiFi and survival mode.

Grief has a way of changing what “home” means.

My half-siblings, all full Filipino, are gone now. They carried pieces of my mother’s world that I'll never recover: her humor, her language, her contradictions. My mother herself drifts deeper into dementia. What remains of that lineage now lives in me and my 11-year-old daughter. We are the last two left in a story that began on this soil.

So I came back, not to escape but to hold on to what might still be saved.