The Beginning of Leaving

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Elsa Valmidiano's The Beginning of Leaving is a hybrid collection of journalistic prose and lyrical essays, weaving a personal examination of how leaving not only reflects a picture of immigration and the diaspora, but how migration through generations compels any individual to honor the Motherland we left behind, and acknowledge whose land we now inhabit and have adopted as our own. In these essays, leaving is not simply a finite act but a process of resistance, reconciliation, and release-from a Motherland, a childhood, War, a body, a mindset, a painful past, or shame. Within this collection is a reflective and immersive travelogue as well as bildungsroman of a woman who is the daughter of Filipino immigrants. As she travels from her ancestral barrios in the Philippines, to the suburbs of LA, to the High Desert of California, and finally to the Australian Outback in Murujuga, themes of heartbreak, family, trauma, and race are intimately interwoven inside discussions surrounding gender expectations, as well as Motherland values versus adopted homeland values.