Follow me to the home I almost knew:

Follow me to the city where stray animals and fruit stands meet lackadaisical urban sprawl, where schoolchildren dangle legs off rickety bridges to watch the cars inch by below. Follow me to chaos and motion. Fill your lungs with the density of smog and tropic—let it sink in. My little sister has always loved that smell, still searches for it everywhere else she goes. To her, born and raised as she was in clear Canadian air, it smells like comfort. Family. Laughter. To me, it conjures summers of wandering through megamalls and wet markets, of finding my place at a table of ten or twenty instead of four.

And we’ll take a drive, so I can show you the city the way I’ve always seen it, through the tinted windows of my uncle’s large white van. I’ll point out the KKK monument that confounded me as a 12-year-old—the good pan de sal shops—the tin-can jeepneys the Second World War left behind. If my father’s there, he’ll take us past the neighbourhood he and my mother walked the streets of as children, coexisting and somehow circling but never meeting ’til Los Angeles (everyone here has someone sending money home from Dubai, Hong Kong, California: this is a nation of diaspora, of flux, flow, and scatter). If we’re lucky—or unlucky—monsoon season will envelope us whole, the storm falling in sheets ’til water gushes out of the sewers. Ay! Basa na! And at dinner my aunt Susan will pray for the families we saw huddled in doorless homes, watching the baha lap at their doorstep. May God watch over them.

This is not the Manila of the postcards. This is not the Philippines of white-sand beaches, of bangkas bobbing low in turquoise waters. This Manila I carry with me in my bones is the Manila where the rich own five or six cars, drive a different Lamborghini each day past children washing themselves in the rain. Where homes of tarp and sagging laundry lines share a skyline with glittering high-rises. We can drive to Divisoria and buy knockoff Kate Spade for less than a Happy Meal in America, but wear your backpack in front and whatever you do, don’t flash your phone. Jesus may be watching from every storefront and tricycle, but when did that ever stop the hungry?