My brother, Ramon Antonio Talusan Jr., was born on September 21, 1982, three months after I started first grade, brown and dark-haired like a Filipino child was supposed to be. My father gave him his own name, and I disliked my brother immediately, jealous of the attention he received from my parents, especially Papa, so I mostly ignored him and kept to TV and books, while Mama played the role of doting mother. I looked forward to being back in Talacsan and away from my brother for the summer, in Nanay Coro’s arms and her undiluted love.

But Mama decided that I would spend the summer in Manila instead, and when I protested that she wouldn’t have enough time for me, she said that I could come with her to her clerk job at a printing press called Philippine Graphic Arts. Her office—a room with about a half dozen other clerks—was too crowded and noisy for me to read in, so I explored various parts of that complex where thousands of books got made every day. I watched production artists cut large sheets of film and assemble them into templates for book pages and learned to love the sweet and rusty smell of ink when I walked through the printing facility, with gargantuan presses in a vast room that ran through rolls and rolls of paper to make books. The room’s high ceilings reminded me of a sparse church, where the miracle of bookmaking was performed every day.

I eventually settled in the press sample room with its raw wood floors, gray walls, and fluorescent lights. It was an unremarkable place except for its numerous stacks of books on metal shelves that surrounded the room, which was usually quiet since hardly anyone went inside. The press mostly produced English-language books, many of them for children, but I found myself drawn to the books for adults. One afternoon, I found a book on a low shelf called The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism, its cover red, white, and blue, though the American flag was made to look like a building with smoke coming out of it, and the smoke was in the familiar shape of our country, groups of islands that reminded me of a kneeling woman. I opened it to find dense masses of words I couldn’t parse into sentences, along with graphs I didn’t understand, something about the U.S. having so much more money than the Philippines. I kept the book to read when I got older, curious about the relationship between my current and future homes.