by Celena Cipriaso

In the Philippines, the heat was so thick our thighs clamped together, the air so moist it felt like the raw air was raining. The locals complained they couldn't breathe during the hot typhoon season. The air felt fresh to me, the heat a welcome warmth.

In the Philippines, my boyfriend and I ate the food of my childhood, food from my homeland that my parents made: garlic rice with fried eggs and dried beef, soy sauce vinegar adobo sauce with every meal, fried bananas wrapped in sugar. Every day, I felt like I was five years old again, my hands gathering the rice with my fingers, sauce spilling down my arms as I forced handfuls of food into my mouth.

In the Philippines, we climbed rice terraces, went cave diving. We lay in hammocks until the sun heated our bodies and we swam in the deep blue water.

In New York, I was trapped in a cubicle at a well-paid corporate job, trying to pay off debt and loans, trying to be an adult. I did nothing right, and my boss never forgave a mistake.

"Do you remember that time you spelled that VIP's name wrong? You're not still doing that, are you?" He'd anticipate the mistake before I even made it. "You're not going to fuck up scheduling this meeting, are you?"

With each mistake I made, the punishment grew worse, yelling at me in front of co-workers, making me stay later than 8pm to lecture some more, giving me the silent treatment when he was tired of yelling, talking about me to co-workers behind glass-encased doors where I could see them talking about me. I kept my head low, turned my red face away from the whispers of my co-workers who kept saying, "What's wrong with her?"

Even though they came here to America to give their children a better life, as a little girl I'd always heard about the Philippines. My father told me how he caught fish with his bare hands. My mother told me how she spent her summers walking around the lake with her sisters, the sun shining off the water. I'd even spoken Tagalog fluently as a kid. Over the years, Tagalog slipped into the back of my mind.

Needing a distraction from work, I began Tagalog classes. I studied every night, quizzed myself with flashcards on the subway. I was the star pupil, Tagalog becoming the second language I needed. When I left work and went to class, I was reminded, I'm not an outsider.

One night, after a particularly bad fight with my boss, I told my boyfriend, "Let's go away. To the Philippines."

So I quit my job, cashed out my retirement fund, and dragged my boyfriend halfway around the world with me.

We spent forty days in the Philippines. One morning as we drank coffee on the beach, the sand a cushion to our feet, eyes out over the blue horizon, I said to him, "We can always live like this." But we didn't have money to extend our trip. I couldn't imagine another boss that might hate me, another job I'd mess up. Every time the words "New York" came up, my palms began to sweat, my breathing uneven.

"You have to return sometime," my boyfriend said gently.

Sipalay Beach was the last scheduled place we'd see in the Philippines before we were supposed to begin the journey to New York. When we boarded the bus, we forked over a large bill and waited for the ticket-taker to give us change. Hours passed. The ticket-taker had a smooth smile, shifty eyes. I didn't want to ask for the change. I'd been avoiding fights since I left my job.

Finally, the ticket-taker did give us change. His name was Manuelito. In a mixture of Tagalog and English, he inquired where we were headed. When we told him Sipalay, he declared, "I am the doctor. I fix things. I will get you there in the rain."

Manuelito worked to find us a tricycle and boat to the beach. But with the rain, no tricycle and boat would withstand the flooding. The entire town was asleep in the storm, the rain pounding our clothes into our skin. Seeing how tired and hungry we were, Manuelito asked us to join him for dinner.

Over a dinner of adobo chicken better than my father makes it and bottles of San Miguel beer, I tried my best to link my Tagalog words together as Manuelito tried to link his English words together. "You must be from Manila. You speak like they do," Manuelito said to me. I didn't tell him I was American just yet, pleased that he saw me as one of them right now, a Filipina.

Manuelito went on to tell us about his "bad boy" days, drinking and partying, flirting with joining the rebel forces in the Philippines. But then, he got his girlfriend pregnant by accident. He became a dad, began to work as a ticket taker. "Now, I work this bus. I sleep on this bus. I don't see my family. But I work for my family." I imaged life as he described it – the long winding route, the days and weeks it took to finish a one-way route, nights spent sleeping on the slim bent seats.

Throughout the night, Manuelito tried to list off all the things wrong with the Philippines – the petty corruption in the government, the unstable leadership, the wide gap between the rich and the poor.

"Things were better in when we had a dictatorship. At least we had one leader," he declared.

I tried to remind him of the Philippines' accomplishments has done – how the people had peacefully overthrown two corrupt governments, how the Philippines was the first country to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. My face flamed up with my urgent speech, the beer adding force behind my words.

Manuelito patted my hand, a parent to a stubborn child. "In America you move, you can move. In the Philippines, we cannot move. We are stuck. Here. Where we are. On that bus. There are days I'd like to be Bad Boy again. But I have to grow up." Manuelito understood what I dreamed of, even if I couldn't say it, and he was trying to wake me up.

Manuelito drove the huge bus through the small streets of the town to bring us to the town's only hotel. He took our hands and said, "Good bye, my American friends." We watched him rush back to the bus. That night, my boyfriend wrapped his arms around me in our warm bed, I thought of Manuelito asleep on that cold bus, the rain pounding down around him.

The next morning, we scoured the streets for Manualito, but the bus was already gone. In the sober light of the morning, the gray sky parted, a sliver of sun shining down. The storm was over.

Celena Cipriaso has written for the Emmy-nominated writing staff of ABC's "All My Children." Her publishing credits include nonfiction essays in Seal Press's anthology P.S. What I didn't Say, the Harper Collins anthology Yell-Oh! Girls, Growing Up Asian American, AsianAvenue.com, Rollick Guides, and WordRiot.org.