But one day, I lay in our common room as I often did on idle afternoons, the breeze from under the spaces between the floor’s bamboo slats my relief from the summer heat. I looked up at our high ceiling and observed the holes in the thatch, from maya birds who took the pieces of dry grass to build their own nests. My grandmother would bring workers over to patch up the holes before the rainy season began, but I would be in Manila by then and wouldn’t experience that feeling of new protection from the coming monsoons. The TV was on in the background, a show that played songs from America.

I vaguely registered that a new song began, its first chords somehow familiar, though not familiar enough to stir me from my rest. But when the first lyrics came on—“I’m nothing special. In fact I’m a bit of a bore”—I sat up because I recognized that this must be the original singer of “Thank You for the Music.”

I was halfway across the room, so the images were just blurs to me, until I crawled closer and got to my usual spot a couple of feet away from the screen. The singer was part of a band that performed in front of a crowd of young people. Her hair was the same color as mine, her skin light and cheeks rosy like other Americans I’d seen on TV. The way the crowd adored that singer, reaching out their hands to touch her, they must have found her beautiful too, the way people around me thought I was beautiful.

“I’ve been so lucky,” she sang. “I am the girl with golden hair.” I suddenly realized what she meant, that the hair I’d compared to corn was actually much more valuable, like the gold chain and cross pendant that hung from my grandmother’s neck, her most valued possession. I imagined myself as that performer, a golden-haired American woman singing in front of thousands of other Americans, who lived in a mansion like in Dallas or Knots Landing. But by the time she sang, “What a joy! What a life! What a chance!” a few moments later, I had already returned to my own body, the body of a boy in the Philippines who just happened to have her hair. My future may hold riches, but I would not live it as a beautiful woman.

Still, I felt more special after that, more able to withstand the loneliness of being the only one of my kind. Even if I didn’t belong with my family, my village, or my country, at least I was lucky to have a future in America where I would lead a wonderful life, because my hair was gold, my skin fair. I never skipped “Thank You for the Music” after that, except I sang “boy with golden hair” instead of “girl,” because I was a boy.

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