I also loved insects—spiders I fought on bamboo sticks with other kids, beetles whose legs I attached to a string and flew like a kite—though ants were by far my favorite. I set aside small pieces of dried fish on the windowsill by our kitchen and watched them carry the food inch by arduous inch, until the ants took the fish down the wide bamboo pole that ran from our window casing to the ground. I loved the way those ants worked together, each a seamless part of their collective, no single one distinguishable from another.

My grandmother wanted me to play with other children and often went with me down the hill to the neighbors next door, who had a covered porch where kids played games like jacks and pickup sticks. I was lousy at first, but I spent hours playing those games on my own, until I could catch the ball without even looking and pick up all the sticks in a single turn. But there were games I could never be good at, like jump rope or kick the can, and especially hide-and-seek, where the other children let me be a hider but never a seeker because the game took much too long. Invariably, these children would get bored and run into the field to play tag, or go to the woods to climb trees, and I wasn’t allowed to join in because I was accident-prone, and my skin burned in the sun.

“It’s all right,” my grandmother said. “Those other kids aren’t white like you.” And when she said white, “puti,” I could tell she also meant beautiful, intelligent, better, more special. If I couldn’t have that sense of being like everyone else, that feeling of shared destiny like those ants or those kids, then I could at least find a way to feel good about standing apart from them.

I was proud to have gone to school for two years in Manila, when the kids my age in our town hadn’t even started yet, and many of the older ones didn’t know things I’d already learned, like the English alphabet or the nine planets of the solar system. Many of them couldn’t even read properly, while I always had a stack of books ready for when I was left alone, my favorite ones the picture books with nursery rhymes, which Mama’s father, Lolo Bert, had sent from America, with their sturdy cardboard pages and vibrant drawings. Mama didn’t have the patience to read to me, and Nanay Coro had never learned English properly—she only finished sixth grade before she worked on the farm all year—so I mostly read to myself and tried to learn words I didn’t know from television or asked one of my aunts when I couldn’t figure something out.