Everything seemed easier in America—easier to live, easier to travel. As I gazed across the river, I recognized that even though I loved it here, there was another part of me that was so curious about elsewhere, and I would always have to pick between my riverbank or the other, home or away from home, the Philippines or America. The thought of it left me with a sadness I’d never felt before.

Though I grew happy again when I registered the long stretch of fields that led to our village, as the jeepney’s motor emitted a soft roar on its way up the long hill, our family house near the top, a wooden structure raised on a foundation of stones. I was home.

I ran up the stairs and told my younger aunt Tita Nanette, a plump girl only three years older than me, that Nanay Coro got me Lea Salonga’s cassette. My grandmother took out a portable tape player from inside a dresser, as the three of us sat on the wooden bench in our common room and listened to the tape for the first time. I was unprepared for the beauty of Lea Salonga’s voice—clear and resonant as a church bell—so it took me some moments to notice that she sang in English, and I didn’t fully understand her. But once I did recognize the language her songs were in, I sensed that Lea didn’t sing in English like other Filipino singers I’d heard on the radio, because she sounded actually American, in a way I couldn’t describe.

My grandmother and aunt left me to prepare dinner, but I stayed on that bench and listened to the entire album, then listened to it again, and so many more times over the following days and weeks that my family teased me about having a crush on Lea. I’d been exposed to English through TV shows and American pop music on the radio, but when I listened to that girl, I felt an urge to learn the language like her, so I could sing her songs as well as she did. I tried to copy her pronunciation, and over time, I too became aware of v’s and th’s that didn’t exist in Tagalog, and that my tongue needed to relax so I could pronounce English’s softer sounds. If a Filipino girl like Lea could develop the ability to perfect her English and sound American, then I became hopeful I could someday learn English so well that everyone would just think of me as an American boy, that no one would ever know where I actually came from.