Though I did not anticipate how much the world had gotten smaller. Even though Talacsan did not have internet, the adjacent city of Baliwag did, and one of Nanay Coro’s neighbors apparently frequented an internet café where he periodically looked me up online. That was where he discovered that I had changed my name and photograph on my MIT web site. I found this out on one of my visits to New York, where my father told me that my grandmother had been waiting at my aunt’s house to speak to me on the phone.

“I do not understand,” Nanay Coro said when I heard her frail, distressed voice on the line. “Why can’t you just dress like a girl sometimes? Why do you have to change your name?”

I tried to explain that bakla did not exist in America, that it was a lot harder to just dress in women’s clothes and wear makeup on the street, or to be feminine like my cousin Jembong or the hairdressers at the salon. In America, doing that would get you beaten up or even killed. In America, I had to become a woman.

“I loved you so much,” she said in English as she cried, and I wondered if I had misheard. But she said it again, “I loved you so much,” her tense unmistakable. My grandmother only used English when she tried to span the gap from her world to mine, like when she told me to bring Ralph to the Philippines to demonstrate her support. Now the woman who promised me she would always love me was talking about that love as though it were in the past. The rejection rippled through me, and I had to get off the phone for fear that she would say something else we would both regret.

Though once I had time to think, I refused to believe that Nanay Coro no longer loved me. What she actually wanted to say was that she no longer recognized me, and I understood how she couldn’t feel love for someone she did not comprehend. I determined that she would love me again someday once she came to know the woman I would become.

Another person I didn’t entirely account for was Tony, who called me from California one afternoon in March 2002, after I’d scheduled my reassignment surgery for that June, to tell me that he’d decided to go back to the Philippines and live there.

“Here I’m only your shadow,” he said. “Back home I can be myself.”

“Are you sure you wanna leave? You’ll be the eldest son in three months,” I joked.

“You really doing that? Papa’s okay with it?”

“He’s thinking of going with me to Thailand for the surgery.”

“You can do whatever you want.”