My brother had been sent to live with Nanay Coro by the time my show first aired, as Mama decided she couldn’t take care of him and also manage a son who was starring in a sitcom. So Mama didn’t send me away as a baby because I was anak araw after all; she just didn’t like raising children. The night my show first aired, my mother invited a group of her friends to watch on our TV. I was expecting Papa to be there, but he wasn’t.

I’d spent the past month working on the show, being introduced to the cast, following directions, and doing scenes. It seemed like everyone in the crew made the show a big deal and told me how my life was going to change. But I was used to getting attention all the time for being me, so the thought of being on TV didn’t feel that different. I found the challenges of being on set more exciting, memorizing lines and blocking, playing my character for laughs, a part that suited me because I was the smart one while my father was dumb, and that was funny because I was so young.

So I was surprised to feel my heartbeat in my ears, when we finally sat down to watch the first episode of my show, me in my usual spot on the floor close to the TV while Mama and her friends were on the rattan couch behind me. As the episode began, there was a laugh track when I first ran into the scene while my TV parents were talking.

“You’re such a big boy,” my TV dad observed, a nod to the incongruity of the show ending its previous season with my mom pregnant and starting the new one with me fully grown. “How did you grow up so fast?”

“That’s because I don’t eat vegetables,” I replied, then smiled and blinked like I’d seen Ricky do on Silver Spoons, as the laugh track came on again and there were chuckles from Mama’s friends. Though their reactions fell away as I continued to watch, and I found myself mesmerized by the odd sensation of being someone else. For a moment, it was as if dreaming of being Ricky had transported me inside that television and I had become him, a real American boy who lived in a giant house and got everything he wanted. Then I started speaking in Tagalog and I was myself again.