1From Kuwait we flew to the Philippines to live in the land of my grandfather, from whom I took the name José Mendoza. Mendoza was really my grandfather’s family name but people often called him by that name alone.
I grew up on a piece of land of no more than 2,000 square metres in Valenzuela City in northern Manila. There were three small houses there, one of which, the largest of the three, had two storeys. That was where we lived, piled on top of each other – my mother and I, Aunt Aida and Merla, Uncle Pedro and his wife and their children. Another house, which was very small and separated from the larger house by a watercourse a metre wide, was where Grandfather Mendoza lived. The watercourse between the two houses was not a stream or a branch of a river, but rather a drain where wast
