Life felt normal for a while after my show ended, as I focused on school and returned to the top of my class. Though soon enough, Mama took me to auditions again, and I got small parts in movies. This seemed fun at first because I only needed to act on weekends, and only for a couple of days at a time. I played the young Redford White in a parody Western, and I was part of a gang of waifs in an action movie called Idol. These jobs also didn’t seem particularly interesting, but they at least kept Mama happy, as she and Papa decided to separate and the two of us moved in with her new boyfriend, so I started third grade in a different school.

Though over time, as Mama focused on her new relationship, she also began to lose interest in my career. She got pregnant again with my half sister, who was born when I was ten and she had to raise herself since she wasn’t Nanay Coro’s grandchild. Pretty soon the money from my acting dried up and we had to move to a dilapidated house in Cavite province south of Manila, which extended my bus trips back to my grandmother by two hours. The house flooded every monsoon season, so its wooden frame smelled of rot, and seawater bleached the legs of our furniture. I also had to switch to another school in the middle of the semester, my third in less than three years.

So much was happening in our country in the meantime, as more and more people gave themselves permission to criticize the administration after Ninoy Aquino’s assassination. Because of the complaints, Marcos decided to hold special elections in February 1986, and Cory Aquino, Ninoy’s widow, was put forward as his opponent. I watched on TV as ballot officials staged a walkout two nights after the election, when they saw hundreds of thousands of votes for Marcos appear out of nowhere on their computers.

On February 25, 1986, millions of Filipino people took to the streets to overthrow Marcos, when he declared himself president even after the walkout. I was proud to be Filipino then, awakened to the unique qualities of our people, our selflessness and desire to cooperate with one another, to band together as one to expel an unjust leader.