That room where I was supposed to choose a man reminded me of the open pen at the farm where we kept all the pigs. One of the walls only went up a few inches above my waist, as a dozen young men sat on the other side, nearly close enough to touch. Many of them perked up with open smiles, convincing enough under dim fluorescent light. Maybe I was the best they could expect—a young, slim American.

I scanned the room for a face I would like, some clear way to distinguish these young men from one another, all with the same build and around the same height, their skin different variations of brown. A couple had mustaches, a few had curly hair, but no one stood out at first glance until I noticed him in the corner, dark and shy, maybe new, not as confident as the others, in a country where dark people were meant to be ugly, a city where people from the province were made fun of. I pointed at him, and the man in charge asked if I was sure; I nodded yes.

I paid the man two hundred pesos, half the amount it said online; the other half I’d give to the shy guy once we were done, for a total of about ten dollars.

“Boy,” he said in a near-whisper when I asked for his name.

I decided to be American that night, no Tagalog, maybe because I thought of this, the buying of a body, as something only my American self would consider. I also wanted to feel like myself, and I didn’t know how to do that as a Filipino person who left an anak araw and came back as simply American. No one even recognized me from my TV actor days, and I found myself unable to undo whatever American body language I’d learned that made me invisible as Filipino. If I did speak Tagalog, then I would have to explain myself at length, so it was better just to be American and nothing else.

After a twenty-minute cab ride from the Malate red-light district to my hotel in Makati, Boy and I found ourselves in my room on an upper floor, a narrow window overlooking the street our only sign of the outside world. It was a hotel one could find in any developing country, designed to look fancy even though everything was fake, from the faux-leather headboard to the Formica tabletops.

“Very nice,” Boy said, wide-eyed, when I turned on a lamp. This confirmed my suspicion he was either new or didn’t get picked that often.