The Beginning of Leaving

<p>Elsa Valmidiano's<em> The Beginning of Leaving</em> 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. </p>