Hay naku.
It is one of those things I say before I even realise I have switched languages. When the train is delayed, when something at work goes wrong, when someone I love is being ridiculous, or when I open another letter from the government and have to figure out what they want from me this time.
Sometimes it means I am annoyed. Sometimes it means I am tired. Sometimes it means, what can you do? And sometimes it means nothing at all, just a breath leaving the body after carrying something for a little too long.
I have tried translating it before.
Good grief. Oh naur. For goodness’ sake. Here we go again. I can’t with you.
They all work, and none of them do. Maybe that is why I have kept hay naku with me. Of all the things you leave behind when you migrate, language is one of the few things that can fit inside your mouth. You bring it without declaring it at customs. You carry words your new country does not quite know what to do with, and eventually you discover that you do not quite know what to do with some of them either.
Migration turns ordinary life into an exercise in translation. At first, the translations are practical. You learn what things are called here. You learn that the same English word can sound different depending on which side of the world is saying it. You learn new slang, new pronunciations, new ways of asking for things politely. You learn the vocabulary of rent, visas, tax, superannuation, Medicare, inspections, applications, bank statements and proof of address. You become fluent in explaining yourself. Why are you here? How long have you been here? What visa are you on? Where did you live before? Do you intend to stay? Sometimes I think migrants spend an extraordinary amount of time proving that our lives are real.
Then there are the harder translations. How do you translate home when you have more than one? How do you answer “where are you from?” when the truthful answer gets longer every year? How do you explain that you can miss a place while being grateful you left it, or love where you are now without feeling like you betrayed where you came from? There are no tidy English words for these either. So maybe it makes sense that I keep returning to Filipino.
We have tampo. People often translate it as sulking, but sulking feels harsher somehow. Tampo is hurt with the door still slightly open. It is withdrawing from someone while secretly hoping they notice you have withdrawn. It is saying, I am upset with you, without entirely wanting to leave. And usually, somewhere near tampo, there is suyo: to make things right, to soften someone, to coax them back toward you.
Then there is lambing. Affection, technically, but affection does not quite explain it. Lambing can be tenderness, closeness, sweetness, the way you ask for affection while giving affection at the same time. You can hear it in a voice. You can feel it in the way someone says your name. There is gigil, when emotion becomes so intense that the body needs somewhere to put it. There is kilig, that little electric feeling English usually reduces to butterflies. There is sayang: what a waste, what a shame, almost, if only, so close. A whole family of regret packed inside two syllables.
Maybe that is what interests me most about Filipino. So many of our words seem concerned not only with what a person feels, but with what exists between people: the distance, the obligation, the tenderness, the awkwardness, the thing left unsaid. And perhaps that becomes more visible when you become an immigrant, because migration puts you between things. Between languages, between time zones, between families, between the place where your memories happened and the place where your life is happening now.
You start collecting strange combinations. You eat food from home with ingredients bought somewhere else. You celebrate birthdays with half the people you love appearing on a phone screen. You talk to your family in one language and conduct most of your adult life in another. You build new rituals around old ones. You find yourself saying Filipino words inside English sentences because sometimes that is the only arrangement that feels accurate. And eventually, you stop trying to make everything fit neatly into one place.
For a long time, I thought being between homes meant you had not fully arrived anywhere. That was something temporary about it, like a waiting room between the place you came from and the place you were trying to belong to. But I am starting to think that is the wrong way to see it. There is a strange beauty in living between places.
You notice things other people may not have to notice. You learn that home can be reconstructed in a meal, in a smell, in the way somebody talks to you, in a group of people gathered around a table thousands of kilometres away from where the recipe started. You become good at carrying pieces. A little Cavite here. A little Baguio there. A little Sydney somewhere else. Some memories you preserve exactly. Others change in the retelling. Eventually you create something that could not have existed if you had stayed entirely in one place. Not half of one thing and half of another, but something whole made from both.
Maybe language works the same way. There is a temptation to call words like tampo, lambing and hay naku untranslatable. But of course they can be translated. You just need more words. And perhaps that is the point. Translation is not always about finding an equivalent. Sometimes it is about explaining enough of one world that someone standing in another can see it.
Immigrants do this constantly. With language, with food, with traditions, with ourselves. We explain where we came from while learning where we are. And somewhere along the way, the things we once thought belonged to only one place begin travelling with us. They change. We change. But they remain recognisable.
These days, hay naku comes out of me in Australia as naturally as it ever did in the Philippines, usually when something mildly disastrous happens: a bill, a broken appliance, a difficult week, some new adult problem nobody warned me about. Hay naku. And strangely, I like that it has survived. Two little words that have crossed countries with me. A sigh from one home, spoken inside another.
Maybe there is no perfect English translation because there does not need to be one. Not everything we bring with us has to become something else in order to belong here. Some things are allowed to remain themselves. And maybe we are too.
Hay naku. A little bit of home leaving the body as breath, and then somehow, you carry on.