ABSTRACT
For many domestic workers, watching audiences in Vancouver had prompted the desire to tell their stories of life in Canada differently to those they care most about: their families whom they had left behind in the Philippines. Taking Nanay to Manila brings a more nuanced, troubled impression of Canada to the Philippines. The original script of Nanay was vulnerable to the criticisms, and taking the play to the Philippines was an opportunity to broaden the frame of analysis. In the Philippines, most everyone possesses an intimate personal connection to migration. Rather than a lack of feeling and visibility, migration is hypervisible in the Philippines, and the story is, if ever changing, well worn, even hackneyed. Closer to the institutional homes as academics, travelling with these stories to the Philippines speaks to and works against what have been identified as failures within Asian American, migration and transnational studies that follow from an exclusive focus on the so-called receiving country.
