When she was growing up, Ana knew she had to escape their provincial smallness. Her parents were poor. Her father repaired shoes and umbrellas, and her mother had a small stall at the local tsiangge where she sold everything from cigarettes to candies to eggs to produce from her small garden: kalamunggay, kangkong, sili, and mangoes when the fruit was in season.
They lived in a small wooden house with thatched roof, which was fairly respectable for the most part—but it was poor, and the only entertainment the sisters had was the radio (which blared away from sunrise to sundown) and the flirty gossip about the town’s abundance of horny brown bucks. Gorio supposedly had the biggest d**k in town, or so Criselda and Betchang claimed, giggling like blushing bitches in heat; Manuel had the smal
