“Salamat po sa inyong pagdalo,” I began, thanking everyone who came, and for those few minutes, I felt as if I had never left and had been living with my grandmother the last twenty-five years. I spoke in the innocent Tagalog of my youth, as the deferent, dutiful grandchild of a singular woman, who emerged out of her humble upbringing to become one of the most respected members of our village. I spoke of how much our family loved her, how much she persevered through many obstacles, and how much she loved the people of Talacsan even when she didn’t live there in the last years of her life. By the time I finished, I’d not only forgotten I had left for America but that I was a different gender than the boy those people knew, a change that felt trivial in the face of my grief.

We buried my grandmother beside her husband at the municipal cemetery. I cried as pallbearers pushed her casket inside the raised mass of concrete that would be Nanay Coro’s permanent resting place. Though I wasn’t just mourning her, I realized, but the two of us together. I once told her I wanted to stay in the Philippines, and she convinced me I would always wonder who I could have become if I didn’t go to America. But seeing my grandmother for the last time, and knowing how heartbroken she was when I left, how unhappy during the last decade of her life, it didn’t feel like the regret I would have felt if I stayed could be any worse than the regret I felt at that moment. She would have been so much happier with me there, and I would have made her happy, which could only mean that I would have been happy myself. Maybe I would have needed to sacrifice my ambitions, been less likely to live my life openly, but as a man used a trowel to cover the side of Nanay Coro’s tomb with fresh cement, so that soon my grandmother was encased in concrete, I also mourned that dutiful Filipino grandson who appeared during that mass like a ghost, someone I hadn’t noticed I’d buried.

6.

We’d been in line for nearly half a day, or really, over fifteen years, before our number got called one April afternoon in 1990, and we walked through a maze of hallways to an ordinary fluorescent-lit room at the U.S. embassy in Manila, except that behind a sturdy wooden desk sat a brown-haired man with a narrow face and lips nearly the same shade as his skin. He introduced himself as Mr. Webber and motioned for my family to sit on thinly padded chairs in front of him, my younger brother on Mama’s lap.