I had last seen my grandmother alive ten months earlier, when I visited her during a reporting trip to Manila. I picked her up from my cousin’s house in an out-of-the-way section of that sprawling metropolis called Cainta, a place she had no connection to, and so her only wish was to go back to Talacsan, not to live in her house but just to see it. As my grandmother held my hand and marveled at how white I still was, I realized how much of me was a product of her own fantasies as a dark peasant farmer born into poverty, who may have loved me regardless but favored me over everyone else because she connected my color to the wealthy, powerful Americans who had conquered our land. That I’d gone to better schools, gotten more degrees, made more money than the rest of my family was proof that I’d become a manifestation of her fantasies, even as I bristled at the thought that my consciousness was built around a fundamentally mistaken belief, that there was something about my color that made me better, apart from the belief itself.

I also realized how much Nanay Coro valued money because it was where she rested her dignity, having come from nothing and become something through her wealth. So she asked for money the entire trip, a simple refrain, almost a chant, “Wala akong pera, wala akong pera,” even as the cousin who accompanied us pointed out that she had nothing to spend her money on. But because Papa had commandeered her property and her dear husband had died, money was the only measure by which she could regard herself. On our way back to Manila after Papa refused to let Nanay Coro come inside her own house, I went to an ATM and gave her forty thousand pesos, about a thousand dollars, the maximum I was allowed to take out, even when I knew that the money would either idle under a mattress or be given to cousins I barely knew.

My grandmother died in her sleep, stripped of her dignity, on a single bed in a tiny back room at my cousin’s house in that obscure corner of Manila. After Papa bullied her out of her own property, the only person who could have stood up to him no longer existed, because that person was me, but me as a man, and me as someone who hadn’t left.