But I did observe a boy across from me in the waiting room, standing between his mother’s legs, who I recognized as anak araw from the way he squinted his eyes. He seemed really shy though, and I wondered how he would do performing in front of a camera if he couldn’t even pry himself away from his mother’s arms.

I went over and introduced myself to the boy, whose name was George. He told me that his mother heard about the audition on TV and that they came from Bataan, a province near my grandmother’s. I couldn’t help but judge him as we spoke, how he seemed so unsure of himself and kept blinking too much, so it really looked like there was something wrong with him. Having learned from Ricky on TV, I controlled physical tendencies that made me look weird, like squinting too much and looking down to see where I was going. George, on the other hand, seemed not to know or care that he came off as odd, though Redford White was like this too, funny-looking, so maybe the two of them would be good at playing father and son.

When my turn came, I walked into an office with Mama and sat on a chair in front of a confident man with an unusually square jaw for a Filipino, and I wondered if he was half-American; he introduced himself as the director, Steve. He asked me normal questions about where I was from and my favorite subject in school. I told him science, specifically astronomy, which we hadn’t studied yet, but I’d read about it from the books my grandfather had sent from America. He handed me a script and asked me to read several lines.

“You’re a good reader,” he said, then told me to keep the script to study, and he would have me read it with Redford after lunch.

“He’s not only so intelligent but very hardworking,” Mama said as she came over to kneel next to my chair. “He spends his days staring at books.”

I didn’t know Mama had noticed, and I turned to face her as she effused about me, realizing that I’d never been this close to her for this long, that there were details of her face I hadn’t discovered. I knew her cheeks were chubby, her hair wavy and cut short, but I hadn’t noted that the skin on her face was rough and marred with tiny pimples, many more than I could perceive from far away.