The other problem though was that everyone else had parents and relatives who looked more or less like them, other children they could bond with and emulate. I had no one. From my earliest memories, Nanay Coro told me I wouldn’t grow up like her or any member of our family or community, because I was white and would someday live in America. But without anyone to model after, I often asked myself what my future would be like, how I would live as an adult.

I’d never met any other anak araw, nor did I come into contact with any actual Americans. The only anak araw I was even aware of was Redford White, a comedian who was often a guest on variety shows and always seemed clueless about what was going on, because people said he came from a backward part of the country and being anak araw made him defective, almost retarded. I cringed when I watched Redford on TV and wondered whether this was what people thought about me behind my back, resolved to study as hard as I could so that no one would ever think I was retarded just because I was anak araw.

My grandmother sensed my loneliness, and we grew inseparable. The two of us took the jeepney to Baliwag once a week, where she went shopping for food and supplies and I got sweet treats like yema or polvoron. She taught me to ride a water buffalo during her trips to supervise the fields that she began to hire other people from our village to farm. She brought me to the mango orchard behind our house where we picked fruit together, as she climbed the trees and dropped the fruit on the soft ground for me to pick up. But the times I enjoyed most were when she attended to my daily needs, because that was when I felt the deepest connection between us, like I was any other grandchild instead of being who I was, someone who could never feel truly one with her, because I was born fair and she dark, in a world where that difference seemed to matter so much. But when Nanay Coro cleaned my ears with a cotton bud or pulled my fingers and toes one by one until the knuckles cracked, that was when I felt most like the child I would have been had I not been born anak araw, something I found so hard to admit to myself I wanted, because my mind refused to dwell in the impossible and preferred instead to be so good at being the person I was fated to be that no one could ever guess I was unhappy with myself. I was so convincing that even I often forgot I wanted to be brown like everyone else, an admission I only recalled as bursts of feeling, instantly dismissed.