It was strange to see Mama and Papa smile at each other as though they were an actual couple. Divorce was illegal in the Philippines, and when my mother got the letter about our immigration interview, she decided it was too risky to present herself as a single mother, rather than a happily married woman with a husband who supported his wife and kids, never mind that husband and wife both lived with other people and that neither of those kids lived with them. We were a happy family for the sake of this interview, even when Mama had become a stranger to me, and I never really knew Papa to begin with.

Yet the oddness of seeing us together couldn’t compare to the bizarre possibility that we could be living in America in a matter of months. After years of preparing through books and television, it felt as if I knew everything there was to know about that country, yet also nothing about actually living there.

“How do you think you’ll adjust to school?”

“I have read about America since I was small,” I replied. But even as I tried to impress this man who controlled my fate, what I really wanted to do was ask him how he thought I would adjust, since he was in a much better position to know.

“He is in the top of his classes,” Mama said.

I was surprised she didn’t bring up my whiteness, though I didn’t either. That Mr. Webber himself didn’t mention it made me suddenly aware that I really had no idea whether I would just blend in with other Americans the way my family described. They had no way of knowing, since none of them had been to America themselves.

As the attention shifted away from me and toward my parents, it struck me how cruel it felt to be wrested from the life I’d known, just as I was on the verge of discovering the adult I would become. Mama and Papa knew they wanted to be somewhere else, after life in our country didn’t make them happy. At fourteen, I couldn’t know what kind of grown-up I would be in the Philippines, but I desperately wanted to, just as much as I wanted to find out what my future would be like in America. I wished that all this was happening a decade earlier, when I was too young to know the difference and could have gone on to be just American, only vaguely aware of the country I came from. Yet I also ached at this thought, that I would have never known my grandmother, my friends, an upbringing and a country I’d grown to love more than the fantasy America represented.