July 1, 2025 — Vancouver opera singer Renee Fajardo has a “love letter” for Filipinos.
It’s in the form of a four-part multimedia song cycle, a collaboration of mostly Filipino talents based in Canada.
Titled Liham: A Digital Song Cycle, the work produced, commissioned and performed by Fajardo blends contemporary classical music, storytelling, poetry, and film.
Pronounced lee-hum, liham is a Tagalog word meaning “letter” in English.
Liham went live June 12, 2025, when Filipinos worldwide marked the 127th anniversary of Philippine independence from Spanish colonial rule. June is also Filipino heritage month in Canada.
In a post on social media on that day, Fajardo wrote that Liham “doubles as a deeply personal memoir and a resonant love letter to the Filipino spirit”.
Liham seeks to present the rich tapestry of Filipino migration to Canada.
“It challenges prevailing narratives by affirming the validity of diverse Filipino experiences—whether born in Canada, newly arrived, or long-settled—without reducing them to stereotypes or trauma,” states a media release for the work.
The mezzo-soprano expounded on this theme in an interview with podcast Inside Vancouver Opera.
“It started from when I moved abroad, which was almost eight years ago. I'd grown up and lived in the Philippines all my life. But then moving abroad, I quickly found out that there's only a specific set of stories that get represented about Filipino people who are within the diaspora,” reads the transcript published by the show on its Substack platform.
“I always found it quite limiting because it's all it's usually to do with folks on the health care industry or child care industry. And those stories felt quite limited to me because I feel like Filipinos are everywhere. We do almost everything, if not everything. And so the idea to do a song cycle or any creative work really that told a broader story of what being Filipino means when you're abroad really appealed to me.”
“And so when I joined the digital version of the Banff Opera and during the pandemic time, there was an opportunity there with the mentors to kind of delve deep in stories and things that really resonated or were important to us,” Fajardo related.
Liham also features stories from four Filipino Canadians, showcasing the varied experiences of Filipinos.
They are Bennet Miemban-Ganata, owner of Plato Filipino restaurant in Vancouver; Nigel Elivera, owner of Pro-Tech Auto Repair in Burnaby; Carolyn Fe, an actress, playwright, singer and songwriter based in Toronto and Montreal; and Bert Monterona, a visual artist and cultural worker and Bahay Migrante stalwart in Vancouver.
The music was composed by Juro Kim Feliz, with poetry by Riley Palanca, also known as Revan Badingham.
In addition to Fajardo, Liham also features performances by Danlie Acebuque (baritone) and Vivian Kwok (piano).
Other members of the team include, among others, Solara Thanh-Bình Đặng, film director and producer, Rachel Chen, director of photography and associate producer; Josh Aries, editor; Joey Laguio, digital designer; and João Homem, colourist.
In the media release, Fajardo talked about one of the motivations behind Liham.
‘’It was important to us to work with folks within our community here, and I wanted the project to tell their—our—stories, wherever that took us,’’ Fajardo stated.
‘’This is a love letter to those of us who, for one reason or another, know what it’s like to have a heart constantly between identities, between oceans.’’
In the interview, Ashley Daniel Foot with Inside Vancouver Opera noted that each of the four songs in Liham starts with a tanaga, a short Filipino poem consisting of four lines.
“It's always extremely liberating to be able to speak your first language,” Fajardo noted.
While most Filipinos are able to speak English, Fajardo said that “there's a different viscerality when one is able to express their thoughts and even poetry in their own language”.
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