Yet that home had become distant too, even for my own relatives in the Philippines, abandoned in favor of a house that mimicked the West with its marble floors, its chintzy chandeliers, its beds. It was at this house that the van stopped, and where my grandmother led me to my old corner room overlooking the poultry farm, the mango orchard, and the rest of our land, invisible at night, as I settled for staring at the blank ceiling until sleep began to take over, only for my eyes to pop awake with the realization that in that memory of my early childhood, I’d forgotten that my skin was white.

—

One of my aunts invited me to visit her at her new house in the Cainta district of Manila, three hours away at the eastern edge of the sprawling, badly planned metropolis. Nanay Coro and I made the trip together a few days after I arrived. The two of us had gotten more used to each other by then, though she had a lot more to adjust to, since she was the same doting woman who favored me over everyone else, just sadder because her beloved husband was dead.

Whereas I must have been alien to my grandmother, as I paraded around in my linen pants and designer sunglasses, an impeccable New-England-by-way-of-Hollywood accent to match. This was typical of immigrants returning home, showing off prosperous lives while hiding the effort and sacrifice, making ourselves appear more moneyed, more accomplished than we actually were. Except I actually was moneyed and accomplished, my bank account full of my partner’s inherited wealth, my Harvard degree an unquestionable reality, though there were times when the memory of that experience didn’t feel real even to me.

Nanay Coro couldn’t help but treat me like the child she remembered, maybe because she couldn’t understand the person I had actually become. My grandmother humored childhood whims I no longer had, like my dislike of both vegetables and soup, so all my meals were a spoiled Filipino brat’s fantasy—fried chicken, fried pork, fried beef—cured or seasoned with salt and served alongside rice and ketchup. I indulged her by not mentioning that the adult me preferred more complicated dishes, but I was indulging myself too by recalling the simplicity of my life before I was wrested from my grandmother. That simplicity itself was a luxury I no longer had, as someone who had to flit back and forth between vastly different realities of being, a Filipino who was also American, brown inside but white outside, deeply in love with a man I hadn’t managed to tell my Philippine family about. I had asked Ralph to stay behind at the last minute because it felt too overwhelming to come out to my family and bring a white man home at the same time.