We were also there so that Ralph could be the best man for his good friend Alex Bird, someone he’d known since they were students at Westminster, the boarding school attached to the abbey. So there was a whole slew of events for that occasion, receptions and lunches where I met various friends and old relatives, before the ceremony itself, where Ralph wore a tuxedo with a pink vest—or a waistcoat, as the English called it—while I wore dark gray tails and an ascot, his choice of color and my neckwear our own signals that we were different from the other men around.

I was just “American” to these people in polite British society, my origins invisible. The huge store of literature and movies in my head had no template for “Filipino immigrant in England” but was full of examples of Americans abroad, from Henry James to An American in Paris, and it was from that collection that I procured pointers about how to behave. Ralph sometimes pointed out that I was from the Philippines, and someone would talk about a nurse or maid, marveling how “they” were so sweet or helpful, as people assumed my parents were Americans who had been stationed in that country, despite my partner’s careful explanations. This was more alienating than being assumed American, how they separated me from my own people while talking to me about them, unable to see this blond Harvard graduate and professor’s partner as someone who could be from the same world as the people who tidied their house or cleaned their bedpans.

At the rehearsal dinner, a cousin of Alex’s, a woman with frosted-blond hair who was just shy of beautiful, just shy of young, talked to me at length about her indispensable Filipino live-in nanny. “She speaks such wonderful English and is so dedicated to my baby,” she said. “I don’t know what my family would do without her.” I wanted to reply, How do you think her own family does without her?, but didn’t because I somehow became unfailingly polite among these fancy English people, domesticated in my own way. At least I had a camera with me and took photographs of her and other people I met in those rooms, tried to capture the absurdity of their mild pomp on film.