“You still have work? What are you writing?” Papa asked when I came downstairs to get a snack one night. I explained to him that at Harvard, final papers and exams were due after the holidays.

“I’m doing this paper that applies social contract theory to the status of women in Shakespeare’s tragedies.”

“I read many Shakespeare plays so I can help you.”

“I don’t need your help. I’ve read everything Shakespeare has written.” This was not an exaggeration—I spent a good part of the previous summer going through my giant edition of Riverside Shakespeare from cover to cover.

“You think you’re better than me? If I was white like you I could also go to Harvard.”

“Lazy people don’t get into Harvard.”

It hurt that he wielded my whiteness, as though I didn’t have the ability to get to where I was without it. It hurt even more that he wasn’t entirely wrong, even though I would never admit this to him. In Filipino families, confronting fathers like this often led to children getting kicked out of the house, but I was fully aware that Papa, for the sake of his pride, needed a son who went to Harvard more than a son who obeyed him without question.

Papa and I avoided each other after that encounter. It was convenient that he and Clara worked long hours, him as a limo driver and her as a home-care worker, so I didn’t have to see them much anyway. That immigrant house became a mere way station between my trips into Manhattan by subway, as I breathed in the culture that cosmopolitan city had to offer—the MoMA, Central Park, the Rose Reading Room at the New York Public Library—and in the process shifted further and further away from the values and priorities of my own family. Poor Asian immigrants didn’t normally go to Harvard, and even when they did, they were often in premed or engineering, fields that came with some guarantee of financial stability, so their diligence could help lead their families out of poverty. But not me. I preferred to behave like the white kids at school who were too rich to care about money and had the freedom to major in the humanities, expend their energy on activities like theatre and dance, which had no tangible practical value.