But as I continued to stare, those narrow rows of wood unfurled a cascade of jarring images—shiny balls, a black grip on someone’s hand, a puff of smoke when Mama stepped her bowling shoe in a box of rosin. It must have been around the time my show went off the air, for three years starting when I was nine, that Mama got bitten by the bowling bug and started taking me to practices and tournaments. It was strange to think of my mother as ambitious, but I suddenly remembered that bowling was an exhibition sport for the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and Mama dreamed of competing there. I even recalled that Arianne Cerdeña, one of the women Mama bowled with, won the Philippines’ first Olympic gold medal, even though it didn’t count in the official standings.

I remembered Mama teaching me how to bowl, how I had to stretch my fingers to fit into the holes of the mottled-red, eight-pound ball. She taught me the mechanics of the approach, the swing, and the follow-through.

“But how do I know what to hit?” I asked. “I can’t tell the pins apart.”

“Do you see those arrows?” she asked as she pointed to some marks down the lanes.

I nodded. The arrows were a lot closer to me, and easy to distinguish because they were black against the light wood.

“You just need to guide the ball to the proper arrow, then it will take a good path to the pins.”

She taught me how to aim for the arrow to the right of center to get a strike. Over the following months, before she gave up bowling shortly after she failed to qualify for the Olympics, Mama taught me to use those arrows to hit whatever pins I wanted, when I needed to pick up spares or splits. It was only in that hallway at Harvard that I realized these lessons had applied to other parts of my life, how I’d searched for closer cues whenever I couldn’t see something from afar, and how I learned to move boldly toward a direction even if I couldn’t see where I would end up. These lessons became so woven into my consciousness that they helped my very decision to come to America, even when my impulse was to stay home.

Mama reminded me that going into this class was the right choice. Whatever future was in store, I couldn’t bear the idea of hiding who I was, and I didn’t need specifics to understand that being an out gay man was better than staying in the closet. If this was true, then Topics in Gay Male Representation was the arrow that could guide me toward my path. One of my legs was numb when I stood up, but I managed to shuffle through the tall wooden door and into the classroom.