Papa ran a car repair business, but as far as I could tell, this just meant he was out all night and slept through the morning most days, our only contact during the couple of hours it took him to get ready to go out again. He was friendly sometimes and even invited me to hang around with his drinking buddies, but I never took him up on it and he didn’t insist. “You are your grandmother’s true child,” he said, and I heard resentment in his voice I couldn’t decipher. I might have gone with him had I known I would grow up to be the kind of man he was, but I felt different even then, and not just because I was white. I was afraid Papa would realize this the more time we spent together.

I did look forward to school, at a Catholic academy called Notre Dame that was run by nuns, not like the Montessori school I went to for kindergarten. I found it amusing that students called one another by their last names, less amusing that we had to form strict lines to go anywhere—from morning prayer to class, at recess and at lunch. Though I did enjoy being just one of the kids, not singled out at first, and when teachers did notice me, it was because they noted how quickly I understood lessons, how often I got perfect scores on assignments. The homework was tedious, since those nuns emphasized rote repetition, so I waded through many pages of pointless drills on subjects I’d already memorized in class, like the different farm animals in science or the concept of the Holy Trinity in religion. Thankfully, it was work that was easy enough to get through in front of the TV.

Inside that electric box, I finally found an American boy to be like, shortly after I started first grade. A program called Silver Spoons started to come on a few times a week, and I tried to catch as many repeat airings as I could even though I didn’t totally understand what was going on. Thankfully, I was with Tita Jackie one of the first times I saw the show, and she filled in the gaps as we sat in front of the TV in Talacsan, where I continued to spend weekends even while I was living in Manila. The show was about a boy named Ricky, who showed up one day at the grand home of his rich father, Edward, to introduce himself as Edward’s son. Tita Jackie also taught me the meaning of the show’s title, that to be born with a “silver spoon” in your mouth meant you were really rich.

“Silver is quite expensive,” she explained, “so only rich people could afford it.”

“We don’t even use spoons,” I replied. “If there was a show about us, it would be called Hand Spoons.”