Is America Heaven?

I Prayed to Come Here—Now I’m Not So Sure.

Mar 07, 2025

By Hannah Keziah Agustin, writer and poet from Manila, Philippines.

It was early August in Chicago, and the dregs of summer were in the air. Outside the window, the lake’s breeze rustled the pristine leaves on the trees and teemed with green on the branches, wherein thrush, blackbirds, and robins perch. On the sidewalk, people in shorts and tank tops were walking their dogs, pushing their babies on strollers, and relishing the midwestern warmth that only appeared three months out of the year. The sky was as blue as it was in an evanescent dream. It was my fifth summer in this country, and by that time, this scene was familiar to me.

I never thought I would feel this sense of knowing a place after immigrating from the Philippines in 2019. I have five years of living here, breathing here, and even praying here. It is strange that although I do not call myself “American,” I now know the American desire to chase the July sun that sets at 9:00 p.m. This was unlike my instinct to stay in the shade back home so as not to burn under the tropical heat. America remains a land foreign to me even when I have been entrenched in its ways. Along with this foreignness comes grief, and along with this grief comes the longing to return home. This is not where the place I thought God would bring me to, after all.

During those years in the Philippines, my family and I prayed for our immigration papers. We wouldn’t tell God to do anything specific about them, and our prayers would go along the lines of, “Lord, do with it what you will.” “Lord, you know what is best for us.”

We have made our requests known to God, and here we are. Here is the answer to our prayers—living in Wisconsin where once my white neighbor called the cops on my dad because he was walking outside our house for “too long,” where once my white friend from the campus ministry I went to said she wanted to “adopt kids from the Philippines,” where someone asked my mother at work while she was typing if there were computers where she was from. We do not have much in this country, but I carry this history—all the good and bad of it.

The good is: I have family here, and I have made friends here, including Tita Aymi, who set down plates of rice and adobo before sitting across from me at the dining table. I met her a week ago for the first time, and I was in her living room, eating dinner with her because I was friends with her daughter. This year, she would have been here for a decade, and the joy she carries is so evident even in the way she smiles while feeding the cat and walks with a certain kind of levity around the apartment. So badly, I wanted that joy for myself, too—the joy that doesn’t feel normal to this land. I blame it on her being Filipino. Back home, life was marked by daily hardship and suffering, yet life continues.

All these years in this country, I wondered what kept her joy. What did she learn, if anything? Her words cut through the silence of that late afternoon, “America is not heaven.”

Tita Aymi took another bite.

She talked about how, growing up in the Philippines, she was conditioned to believe that this land was one of opportunity. It was a green pasture on the other side of the Pacific where people went to have better lives, escaping the difficulty of life back in the motherland. Then she got here, and the fantasy of this place disappeared; she was left with the reality that this couldn’t be the place that filled our deepest longings.

I sat there sobered. Have I placed this country on a pedestal, as the well from which I drew my joy?

I do not think my sister thinks that America is heaven, although she longs to come back because our family is here. She moved back home to pursue medicine because we couldn’t afford to send her here. She would have been in debt the rest of her life had she stayed. Because of the distance and the fact that we have to make do with only seeing each other two weeks out of a year, my mother tries to comfort herself with the possibility that this distance won’t remain forever. Longing is the price we pay daily.

I thought I was used to her not being in my life. I lived without our afternoon drives to the coffee shop downtown and evening bike rides in humid summers when the sun set at 9:00 p.m. I lived without the clothes and skincare in her drawer, which I would borrow without her knowledge. I lived without confiding in her when my mother and I would fight about how sad I was in America, and although I cried alone many times, I lived. Her absence felt like a part of my life, like I have always lived without her.

But then, the last time she was in Wisconsin, I cried at the shoe store while our mom was buying her shoes before she left for Manila. Like true Americans, we coped with our sadness by consuming. We were at the dingy strip mall near our house, with the pale fluorescent lights and the tiled floors from the 80s. My mom kept asking the salesman for different sizes of sneakers. Kesha’s Tik Tok blasted on the mall speakers, and I sat on the steel bench where customers would sit to try on their rubber shoes, just watching her, trying to memorize how she moved before I lost her. Again, her absence gaped before us. Again, the chasm.

At O’Hare, my mother cries while hugging my sister one last time. I cried with them. Our limbs wrapped for a small eternity.

I do not think my mother thinks that America is heaven, although she has prayed to be here for over 20 years. It began before I was born. I saw pictures of her smiling in Central Park with her teased hair and oversized sweater. Once, her company sent her to a conference in New Jersey, and that was the first time she had come to America. She flew into Newark with the warmest clothes she had. To this day, she remembers starving because the hotel did not serve rice. Despite that, I imagine she must have seen these American comforts. In 2005, she took the NCLEX, the licensure exam for nurses in the US.

My mother passed, but because of the recession, it took 12 years for our visas to get approved. She is a Filipino nurse, which is to say her story isn’t new. Over 150,000 Filipino nurses have immigrated to America since 1960, which was when Ferdinand Marcos Sr. legislated the Labor Export Policy. This has irreversibly changed the story of my family’s life, not just because my mom is a nurse but also because my extended family has been pulled to this country by its demands for labor. My aunt migrated in 1987 to work as a nurse in Hawai’i, and my cousin migrated in 2023 to work as a nurse in Illinois. After all, this was the country of opportunity, a land of promise.

In exchange, migrant workers—the Philippines’ greatest capital and America’s greatest need—give over their lives. My mother worked in a nursing home in 2020, during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, when an entire floor of her elderly patients died. It is a miracle that she is alive. It is an even greater miracle that she does not resent this country, which has caused her pain. Around the same time, she would cry in the bathroom of the facility because of a verbally abusive coworker. Then, at home, still dressed in her scrubs, with tear-stained hands, she would cry to God. Although America was in many ways an answer to her prayer, there was still pain. And here, there was no one to wipe her eyes but herself.

I wonder if my grandmother thinks America is heaven because American dollars bought the recliner where she sleeps comfortably. During sunny afternoons, the fan would blow her platinum hair while she rested there with her head leaned back.

I was eighteen when I kissed her goodbye at the airport before she forgot who I was or what my voice sounded like, or why we left her in the first place to build a life elsewhere. I did not shed a tear because we would come back soon. I promised her. I promised my aunts and my cousins. I even promised my dog, who climbed into my suitcase. My grandmother cried as she hugged and kissed me. Her arms held me tight as she wailed, and I just smiled in response. I told her it would be okay. There was no reason to be sad. Our departure was not final. We were coming back soon.

It took five years for me to return to the Philippines. I admit it felt longer because my grandmother’s health continued to decline. During video calls from Wisconsin, my mother and I would say “Hello” and “I love you,” to which my grandmother would respond in silence. I cried when I saw her again. She’s 95 now, and because her dementia has progressed to the point where she doesn’t even remember her name, I have become a stranger sitting next to her recliner, reaching for her hand.

Even in her unknowing, my grandmother would smile at me. I wonder why that joy remains, although she has lost a lot in this life: her husband to kidney failure, her nephews to alcoholism, her sister to Covid. She has lost her daughter, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters to America, as if America had become a kind of heaven—a place out of reach.

I remember the benevolent American missionaries in my grade school history books, holding basketballs and teaching in schools. They were posed as the good ones, the ones who brought Protestant Christianity to our shores, a faith that didn’t rely on works, unlike the Catholicism of the Spanish conquistadors where friars asked for indulgences. For the longest time, I didn’t know that I inherited a whitewashed history.

A few miles from where I first met Tita Aymi, I remember a different kind of violence when I met a Filipino family at an ice cream shop. One of the Titas told me I spoke good English, unlike those “fresh off the boat Filipinos,” even though I hadn’t been in America for that long. She told me about one of her granddaughters in Manila who only speaks English, and how that was a good thing so that she could go anywhere. She asked me what my parents did, and I said my mom was a nurse, and my dad worked at the university. She wondered if he was a professor, and I said yes, lying through my teeth. Back in Madison, my father cleaned the dorm rooms of college students as a custodian, and although I have never felt ashamed of this, at that moment, I felt that the only correct response was, “Yes, he taught at the university.”

We parted ways, and to this day, I exist in that tita’s imagination as a poster child of American success, with my nurse mom, professor dad, and perfect English. I imagine that the violence of this narrative started before this tita got here.

Growing up meant unlearning the world I was enfolded into. I had to learn that to be in this country is to reckon with its violence. A part of the longing to return home is to seek reprieve away from this country’s violence. But then I remembered that to return home is to simply face it again, just from a different vantage point. My taxes fund the genocide in Palestine and militarize the shores of Cagayan, my province, which my mother called home. To be an immigrant here is to accept that I can never take back the years of my youth that I have spent inside this settler colonial project—which takes land from indigenous tribes, surveils my home country, and “takes over” Gaza. It’s been six years since I left the motherland, and I sometimes wonder if the God I worship has been fashioned after the image of America. We are changed when we tithe with our American dollars, worship in our American churches, and ask for God’s favor as we pursue our American dreams. I fear the ways I am discipled by this, and often, I wonder at what cost my family and I must endure to have this life here.

However, in my discontent, I also realize I am changed for the better by knowing that this country can never quench me of my longings. It is a gift to desire the homeland, to be dissatisfied enough that I could long for something better than a facade of freedom. Each day, I have to remind myself that I can want heaven, and that there is liberation in that wanting. This is because to treat America as heaven is to settle for a lesser heaven where the blood-soaked land cries out.

I didn’t realize it until I sat across from Tita Aymi in her apartment in Chicago. To say that America is not heaven means remembering that this place is not and will never be our final destination. It cannot be the source of our ultimate joy.

That conversation reoriented my gaze toward eternity, to something better than this place, where neither moth nor rust corrupts. Therefore, we can rejoice in hope, and see the dawn from on high already breaking upon us.

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