That image from Dead Poets Society flashed through my head, when Neil looks out his bedroom window in the middle of a snowstorm and sees only white, but could not see himself in that world because his father was forcing him to study medicine instead of following his own dreams. But here I was, alone at the center of the most famous school in the world, and I was only responsible for myself, free to find my own way. I was poor but independent, with no obligation to my parents or even to my grandmother, the person I loved most in the world, because I already far exceeded her expectations. In that white, unpeopled landscape, I felt the overwhelming freedom of being able to study whatever I chose, become whoever I wanted.

I experienced that sense of freedom again, on New Year’s Eve a month later, when I finally watched Angels in America on Broadway. It didn’t matter how conflicted I was about accepting Papa’s invitation to come to New York for winter break; I had little choice since the idea of going back to Mama was even less appealing, and Harvard shut down the dorms. But going to New York at least allowed me to finally see that play, which I loved so much that I decided to explore theatre as a career. The production started at eight and went for three and a half hours, so when I got out of the show, I discovered that the street had been blocked off in preparation for the ball drop, and I decided to stay while the rest of the audience rushed to their New Year’s plans. I leaned against a wall next to a giant picture of Prior as he watches the Angel descend over his bed. I could see the bright, pink-hued sky from the part of Times Square where many thousands of people were and heard the unearthly roar of that crowd counting down to midnight, their even louder cheers once the new year, 1994, began. Somehow, it didn’t matter that I was alone in the world, not just because I had no real friends or family but because I’d never met anyone who came even close to sharing the collision of circumstances that formed my very being. I was an outcast among outcasts, but I didn’t feel despair because I’d come to accept the blessing of my unique experience.

—

I knew you were albino, but I didn’t know you were from the Philippines,” a woman named Camilla told me as we waited in the buffet line at reunion dinner, May 2017. She still had traces of her girlishness from twenty years earlier, though the lines around her eyes had also given her the appearance of a benevolent mother.

“I didn’t come to the States until I was fifteen.”