I also brought my own books into that room and sat on the floor with my back against one of the shelves. I pored through the book of children’s stories Lolo Bert had sent from America, hardbound in a mottled sea green. It contained all sorts of tales, though I found myself less drawn to stories of princesses in castles, which felt alien to anything resembling my life or the future I envisioned for myself. I liked the stories involving animals better, like the Aesop fable about the dog who got too greedy and mistook his own reflection in a pond for another dog, so ended up dropping his own bone into its depths. It reminded me of our own folktales, like the one about the girl who turned into a pineapple—a fruit with many eyes—because she refused to obey her mother who told her not to sew at night.

Though among all the stories in that book, the one I kept going back to was “The Velveteen Rabbit.” It was about a stuffed animal who wanted to be real, and other rabbits made fun of him because he was just made of cloth and sawdust, not fur and flesh. And even though my brother was only crawling then, I knew that he was real in a way I could never be, that he belonged with everyone else around him in a way I didn’t. It struck me how there were plenty of real rabbits in the story but only one velveteen rabbit, so maybe that was why he was lonely, not because he wasn’t real but because there was only one of him.

I got used to getting out of Mama’s way, though I still held out hope that our relationship would improve. So it made me happy when she came home one day with a bright expression on her face and called me over to tell me that a friend of hers had heard about a TV show starring Redford White, and that they were looking for a kid to play his son. She wanted to take me to audition.

Maybe I should have been more excited over the prospect of playing Redford’s child, but the idea seemed far-fetched, and I wasn’t even sure Mama would follow up on it. But when Saturday morning came, Mama and I boarded a jeepney to a complex called Broadcast City in the Diliman area of Metro Manila, a set of modern, rectangular buildings painted white on the outside. We entered a waiting room crowded with a few dozen light-skinned children, and I realized I’d be meeting other anak araw for the first time. Though as the mothers began talking, and as I observed that most of the kids were darker than me, I discovered that most of them were not really anak araw, but either kids who had American fathers or mestizos with Spanish blood.