I didn’t own a computer, so I walked to the lab in the basement of the Science Center to work on my essay the rest of the afternoon. I wrote that I was a freshman who had just come out, that I grew up in a Catholic household in the Philippines, then moved to California at fifteen. I wanted to take the course because I’d never been exposed to gay culture before, and the class felt important for my intellectual growth. I learned “intellectual growth” from a teacher who helped me write my college essays and used it because it sounded impressive. I wanted to leave out the part about the Philippines but wasn’t confident enough to pretend like I was native-born. After I turned in my essay that afternoon, I came back the next morning to find my name on the class list taped to Professor Miller’s office door.

I was studying in my common room that night when the phone rang. It was Mama.

“Kumusta na, anak?”

“I’m fine,” I replied in English.

“How is your classes?”

I was tempted to tell her how her bowling lessons helped me figure out my life. Maybe we could be like other families, where parents supported children and took simple pleasure in their accomplishments. After a childhood full of resentment against her, I had come to understand more of why Mama was the way she was. I had known as a child that she got left behind when her parents and three brothers moved to the U.S., because she was married, and the waiting period for married people was a decade longer than for single people who didn’t have families of their own. What I didn’t piece together until I got to America was that Mama was forced to marry Papa because she got pregnant with me, in a culture where unmarried mothers were the very symbol of moral failure. So my existence was the source of Mama’s ruined life, and this insight allowed me to better understand why she found it so hard to raise me.

Yet that conscious knowledge couldn’t undo the way Mama ignored me all of high school and was staunchly against me leaving home, because she wanted me to make money and take care of my siblings while she gambled. Yet she also had no compunctions about taking as much credit as possible as soon as I got into Harvard, finding ways to bring up my college acceptance to strangers at the supermarket or our apartment complex.

“I learned about deconstruction,” I replied. “It’s a method of analyzing texts that a French theorist named Jacques Derrida proposed, which reveals the underlying signification of meanings.” I continued in this vein, regurgitating the most abstruse parts of Professor Miller’s lecture.

“I do not understand,” she finally said.

“Then stop asking me questions.”