Among my people, it is a widely held belief that an infant would become whatever its mother had craved—sugar and a child would turn out sweet, for instance, or plantains and the baby would grow sturdy. Pregnant women were therefore advised not to spend too much time in the sun and certainly not to stare at it directly, for fear that their baby would be born anak araw, a sun child, the strangest creature whose skin was so pale it glowed, and who couldn’t open its eyes except to squint, destined to be nearly blind, an affront against nature.

Yet on the long bus ride from my parents’ house in Manila to my hometown of Talacsan in the province of Bulacan, my grandmother Nanay Coro told me that as soon as she held me in her arms, she was sure I was a blessing. She refused to allow anyone to talk about me any other way, especially because I was destined to live in America, the richest of countries, where Mama’s father, Lolo Bert, had settled, full of people who looked like me. And anyway, I wasn’t like other anak araw. My mother stayed away from the sun when she was pregnant but craved sweet corn, and so that was how I must have ended up with corn silk hair and fair skin. Though I did burn in the sun, I wasn’t near blind like I was supposed to be, only nearsighted, which was lucky since I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself if I couldn’t read. As our bus sped across the highway through an endless series of rice paddies, which I perceived as patches of yellowish brown since it was April and the fields had been harvested, my grandmother assured me that I was meant for a better future than her and our ancestors, farmers who had tilled soil in the fields surrounding our village for generations.

“This is because you are fair and beautiful,” she said, “not dark and ugly like me.”

I learned not to protest because I’d heard similar words many times before, not just from her but from other relatives and neighbors in Talacsan, where I lived until I was three. I’d spent the last two years going to school in Manila and only making weekend visits back to the place I still considered home, but after my grandmother discovered that Mama had been locking me in my bedroom to go out after I fell asleep, and having learned that a distant cousin had died in a fire in the middle of the night, she insisted that I return to Talacsan and wait another year to start first grade with other kids my age.

“There are people in Manila who think I look abnormal,” I said.

“They’re just jealous they don’t have a child like you.”