I continued to search that white man’s face for answers, as he spoke to my parents about their finances. With a mixture of puzzlement and relief, I realized I no longer worshipped Americans like him, or the promise of living in such a rich country and becoming white myself, indistinguishable from those creatures with so much power who ruled the rest of the world, who every day decided on the fates of us brown people pleading to be let into their country, a situation they themselves created when they conquered us against our will, used our land and our hands for free to enrich themselves. No, I didn’t want to go, and no one could force me to leave.

It was easy enough to say this to myself, harder to figure out how to tell my family, after Mama sent news from Manila to Talacsan two weeks later that our petition had been approved, and we could move to America whenever we wanted. I joined the celebration on our front porch, where relatives and neighbors congregated when they heard the news, even as I plotted to stay home.

—

I sat in a rocking chair on the second-floor terrace of our new house, shortly after sunrise a few days later. I could see the brown mass of our old home in the middle distance, and the gray sloping line of the road beyond, which had finally been paved a couple of years before. A bamboo fence stood diagonal to me, beyond which was a network of low wooden huts with corrugated metal roofs, nearly all of them rusty. I’d never been able to tell the dozens of neighbors who lived in those shanties apart from one another, but my grandmother could, because she grew up among them, which was maybe why they didn’t resent the change in her circumstances. This generosity of spirit allowed our village to live in harmony, and I wondered if I really needed more out of life than that happiness.

“Do you want to have breakfast soon?” my grandmother asked as she opened the sliding glass door behind me.

“Why don’t you sit with me first.”

Nanay Coro sat in the rocking chair next to mine, made of hardwood with caned backs, not like the rickety bamboo chair at the old house that she and I used to rock in together, me on her lap. Now, though the two of us rocked apart, the wood made coordinated creaking sounds beneath us, so it felt for a moment like we were traveling together, before I remembered that I was supposed to leave and she was supposed to stay in this village all her life.

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

I’d uttered those words many times before. Maybe those dozens of goodbyes were supposed to prepare us for the one where I wouldn’t see her for years, to become a person she might not understand.