7My mother said she was stunned when she read the letter for the first time, not because of the divorce, which was how she expected the relationship to end (‘The decision wasn’t your father’s. A whole society stood behind him,’ she said), but because she was afraid of his promise. She couldn’t imagine being able to give me up to my father under any circumstances. That was at the beginning, but when she thought about it hard, unemotionally, she realised that everyone in the Philippines dreamed of living abroad in a country that provided stability and a decent life. Women gave up everything to marry Western men who would take them off to their countries, for the sake of an opportunity to live well and have a family, but men found it hard to fulfil this dream. In the Philippines it’s the drea
