Sitting with my aunts made me feel my mother’s absence. When my mother was still alive, she and her sisters had formed a trinity: Rosa the Wise, Benedicta the Beautiful, and Dominica the Adventurer. My mother was Benedicta, a woman who loved abstractions and therefore study, but her scholarly pursuits had been overshadowed by her fine features and stately bearing. She had met my father, an American, in graduate school in Boston (he was studying law). Then she settled into raising their children—there were four of us, an even split of boys and girls—in the town of Concord. In the grip of a fury against “the West,” my mother had moved me and my younger sister to Manila when I was thirteen and my sister eleven. The West was a conglomerate of corrupt and soulless cultures populated by selfish, materialistic people. The West was any nation that didn’t abide by amor proprio and pakikasama. The West was the States when my mother was missing home. My brothers remained in the West, because males needed profitable careers, or so she said, but she also felt that males were a lost cause. My father had acquiesced because it was pointless to oppose my mother and also because he knew that by letting her leave, he had avoided her splitting the family in ways both permanent and legal. My sister and I had not wanted to go, but then we had not been consulted.

I spent all of high school and two years of college in Manila, while my younger sister, who, miraculously, had never learned a word of Tagalog and managed to hang out with the few foreigners available the whole time in school, had decided that she was going to college in the States. For reasons known only to her, my mother had taken this as her signal to return, and she did, to my father and younger brother (the older one was already in law school), and my parents picked up as if the last six years had never happened.

I could have stayed in Manila, but I returned with my mother, although at that point the Philippines was more familiar. Visits to Concord, where I would see my childhood friends—who were obsessed with The Official Preppy Handbook and asked me why I hung out with my cousins—had made me see, a bit, what my mother’s “West” was all about. But I thought myself less articulate in the Philippines, not only in the language, but somehow in my being. I had transferred to Boston College, but the return was not without difficulty. During my years in the Philippines, I felt American, but back in the United States, I felt alien. Later, my husband would introduce me as an American, my whiteness assumed. And I had gone along with it, managing a good impression, until “good” became “effortless” and then morphed into a variety of being.