One early Sunday morning, while Nanay Coro was in the kitchen preparing breakfast and the rest of our family was still asleep, I sneaked out of bed to the far side of the house, through a curtain, to the only private room that had a mirror, which was attached to a carved wooden dresser. In that mirror, I practiced the gestures I’d observed from Ricky the night before, the way he put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, how he made an angelic expression with a slight smile that emphasized his ruddy cheeks, then blinked several times. Once I was done, I stood at the back of the room, so that I couldn’t see the details of my face, only saw a boy with blond hair and fair skin, which made it so much easier to imagine myself as an American boy who shrugged and cocked my head exactly like Ricky. I continued to do this over the following months, and then years, until I’d absorbed many of that blond American boy’s mannerisms unconsciously.

America began to form itself on the other side of my mirror with a version of me inside it. I began to see a white American boy in my reflection, even as I was a Filipino anak araw in my daily life. Seeing that American boy, I also began to see my future in America so much more vividly: adventures in the snow, Santa Claus at Christmas, arcade games, a giant bedroom of my own, a mansion made of stone. The mirror became a bridge toward the wondrous place I was destined to inhabit, a fantasy that my white skin made real.

—

I returned to Harvard to speak at a panel in March 2018. Though I’d spoken at a number of universities, it did feel significant, but also amusing, that my alma mater had finally invited me back. I was such a troublemaker in college, a self-branded queer radical who got removed from protests and threatened with arrest for public indecency.

I decided to come to Harvard Yard a few hours before my talk, not quite spring, too cold to walk around without a coat, the trees still barren. I came through the side entrance facing Massachusetts Hall, on a Friday afternoon in the middle of the semester, and encountered the usual sprinkling of human figures, a couple of students with expressions of grave attention, tourists taking pictures in front of the bronze John Harvard statue. I had the overwhelming feeling of being out of place as I passed that monument and came to the other side of the Yard, the part I had traversed hundreds, maybe even thousands of times before, from my dorm at Wigglesworth in the very corner of that vast lawn, toward my various classes where I also felt out of place.