ABSTRACT
I consider different ways that Filipino-Canadian immigrant youths and their mothers tell their stories of their transnational experiences. Second-generation youths tell of coming into Filipino identity in their teens and developing a strong sense of transnational identification. Filipino youths who have migrated recently to Canada through their mothers’ involvement in the Live-in Caregiver Program provide a less fulsome picture of their transnational experiences. I puzzle over why this is so, reasoning that their experiences are more difficult to talk about because they involve revealing intimate details of family life, and because children often have little agency or information about family migration plans. Beyond this, there is the possibility that I simply failed to hear what they were saying because of the manner in which it was said. They do not construct their experiences in narrative form. Instead they tell of their experience in fragments, in what I call – following Berlant, spaces of ordinariness. I consider the practical and political implications of listening for different forms of agency and subjecthood.
