I looked forward to living in Talacsan again, where no one found me strange. We eventually got to the bus station in Baliwag, the closest city to our municipality, where Nanay and I walked to the jeepney stand for our town. There were no jeepneys when we got there, which meant that it would be at least a thirty-minute wait, so Nanay Coro decided to stop by the dry market to get some supplies. On our way, we passed by a store that sold cassettes, and I asked my grandmother if she would buy me one. Papa owned cassettes back in Manila, but I’d never had one of my own.

We came in from the afternoon light, and I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the darkness of that tiny stall, where a woman sat over a glass cabinet filled with cassettes. We were in a hurry, so Nanay Coro asked the store owner to suggest a tape for me to buy. The woman contemplated for a moment, then opened the cabinet to pull out a cassette titled “Small Voice,” with a picture of a girl in pigtails named Lea Salonga.

“She’s not as white as you but her voice is beautiful,” the woman said.

The vehicle was nearly full when we returned to the stand, but people made room. The jeepney had padded seats and open windows on two sides. In the middle were various goods obtained from Baliwag—fruits and vegetables, sacks of rice, even an actual chicken in a wire cage. There were murmurs once we got on, and I sat on Nanay Coro’s lap.

“Your skin is so white!” the woman next to me exclaimed as she touched my arm. The jeepney rumbled then began to move, and I looked out the window to observe the path to my village.

We turned onto a dirt road that led to our municipality, San Rafael, Bulacan, and drove through a succession of villages—Caingin, Pantubig, Poblacion—groups of mostly wooden houses with thatch roofs, the larger ones raised one story high to protect them from floods, with a few newer ones made of concrete blocks piled on top of one another, filled with cement, then painted in bright, pastel colors. Our route took us by the vast Angat River, visible down a slope, past trees and rows of raised wooden houses near its bank. I craned my neck to see the other side of the river as the jeepney passed, just a flurry of green and brown patches, and I asked Nanay Coro whether there were boats that traveled across the water.

“Sometimes,” she replied. “But most people just go by land.”

“They could build a bridge.”

“The river is too wide here,” she replied. “They can only do that in America.”