MY MOTHER’S COURTSHIP
My parents arrived in America within a year of each other. Ironically, they’d both attended the same school in Manila but they didn’t
meet until they were both graduate students at Stanford.
Back home, their families lived within a mile of each other, in an enclave of homes patterned after American suburbia, with streets named after the signs of the zodiac: My father’s parents
lived on Hydra, my mother’s on Leo.
In Manila, my mother had had two boyfriends: the first was the son of a Chinese tycoon who was named, improbably, Archie. His real name was Archimedes Wenceslaus Chua. Archie’s parents
expected him to study in Boston College, which was also his father’s alma mater. After his first semester in the Jesuit college in Manila, Archie left for Boston, and then
