“You need to learn how to live with your mama and papa,” she continued. “You won’t have me when you go to America.”

It was only then that I absorbed how my grandmother would not be coming with us, to that wondrous life I’d been promised half a world away, a place full of people like me. It confused me to know that I would someday belong with strangers just because we had the same skin, when I felt so close to my grandmother, and couldn’t imagine being closer to anyone else. But my family’s insistence convinced me there was something better than my grandmother’s love out in the world, and it was a future I had no choice but to accept.

—

My grandfather Tatay Gaudencio came home one afternoon carrying a large cardboard box from Lolo Bert, my other grandfather in America. He took a small knife and leaned over to slash against the many layers of packing tape, then stood up when he was done.

“It’s for you,” he said as he stepped out of the way.

My entire family surrounded me while I opened the box, which reached above my waist. A wondrous smell wafted out even before I looked inside. The scent was clean and fragrant, free from the odor of animals and sweat I’d grown used to in our village. I forgot where I was, lost in the smell of America, dreaming of giant houses and endless toys. When I came back to myself and realized I was still in a small village in the Philippines, my first thought was that I wanted to be wherever that smell came from.

My family helped me take out what was inside. There were several bottles of shampoo, which up to then I’d only seen in plastic sachets. There was soap in bright boxes, and many pieces of colorful clothes—shorts and collared shirts with an animal on the front that Tita Jackie, the elder of my two aunts, told me was a crocodile, which meant that the shirt was expensive. But I was less interested in those clothes than the heavy presents at the bottom, which I took out one by one.