I left my bed and crossed our empty common room to look at myself in the bathroom mirror. But my face was too hard, the fluorescent light too harsh up close. So I took a step back, and then another, and then a few more, until I only saw my face as a sketch whose details my imagination could fill. The colors were more pronounced than I was used to, my eyes and lips outlined in smoke and red. I noticed the pleasant semicircle of my dress’s neckline against my chest and imagined graceful clavicles I couldn’t see. Though I did see that my neck was thin and long, something I’d never paid attention to before. All evening, people had told me I looked like a real girl, and those anonymous men had given me proof, but it was only then, in that bathroom mirror, that I perceived a glimmer of what they saw.

From afar, I felt like a girl to myself, even a beautiful girl. I gazed at that reflection and imagined my face as a woman’s face, holding features in my mind that others had told me were feminine—my high cheekbones, pouty lips, small nose. I grinned to myself at the thought of my nose, which I’d pulled on since childhood, hoping it would grow, since Filipinos preferred sharp, protruding noses. But I realized that my nose was dainty on a white woman’s face, as I also became conscious that of course it was a white woman’s face I imagined in that reflection, one of those vivacious ballerinas who thrilled audiences night after night, or the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel.

Though as I began to walk toward my reflection, more and more of my masculine features came into focus, my broad shoulders and strong jaw, my prominent brow and high hairline, receding slightly at the corners. By the time my hands touched the sink’s cold porcelain again, I couldn’t help but perceive myself as a man dressed as a woman, a fool who would have been laughed at and beaten up had those men looked at me close in the light and found out the truth. I felt the immediate urge to rub off the makeup, but something stopped me, and instead, I leaned even closer toward my reflection. I suddenly remembered that I didn’t always think of my face as a white person’s face, how it took years to convince myself that I was not the aberration other people wanted me to be, but was instead practically the same as the Americans I watched on TV. I also recalled how this was not the first time I’d seen a reflection and imagined myself as a white woman with golden hair.

PART ONE

SUN CHILD

1980–1990

1.