Batangas, a coastal province to the south of Manila, was not our home province. That was Nueva Ecija, to the northwest of Manila, a place marked out in rice paddies and small, dusty towns. The rainy season would quickly turn the roads to rivers of silty mud. Carabaos still plowed the fields and people still used the woven salakot to keep the sun off their heads as they bowed to the mud to plant the rice. Nueva Ecija was all industry. The music of it was the flat drilling sound of motorcycle engines as the tricycle taxis circuited the concrete buildings and shopfronts, the storehouses, the mostly abandoned ancestral homes. These houses were now occupied by ancient doñas unwilling to leave the only life they knew and by the maids to whom they were most likely, although distanced by legitimacy and social standing, related. Although we still collected the seasonal tribute from the kasamas, our percentage was small and what the workers were left was such a sliver of profit as to make life survival at best. The wealthy in my family had moved on to business, real estate, technology, infrastructure.

My cousin Jim had bought the acreage in Batangas thirty years earlier and embarked on a building project somewhere between Versailles and the pyramids. Batangas had all the advantages of the coast—views, beaches, waving palms—but also got hit with the brunt of typhoons and was ever threatened by that most awesome specter of the Philippine psyche: the tidal wave. When Jim had first shown up, there was already an impressive house in place, complete with swimming pool, but this structure was soon downgraded to the status of guesthouse and another house built on such a scale that the terrace was the same size as a luxury hotel, something you might find on Waikiki. His most recent project had been a tower, equipped with an elevator, which had glass panels that gave a 360-degree view of the property. Guest rooms were tucked into the various floors below the viewing area. From the outside, the structure looked like an air traffic control tower. From the top floor you could see everything: the island that Jim had constructed because he wanted to see an island; the lake he’d carved out to raise his own sturgeon and lobster, although the climate was not cooperative; the family museum; the chapel; the playground; the helipad; the horses that had once been corralled in a stable and ridden with varying degrees of success by his children and me but that had been set free and now roamed: a mix of Arabian, quarter horse, and thoroughbred, skittish and imposing, nibbling at the grass, galloping away when we tore through the fields on our ATVs.