It wasn’t. With a little more time her English strengthened, her conflict about leaving Mama Wena waned and the awkwardness of middle school passed. In tenth grade she sent me a matter-of-fact text that read:

“My current grades:

History: 91

Chemistry: 99

Geometry: 100

English: 100”

Two texts followed:

“Yes!” “Yesssss!”

When the family bought a new suburban house, Rosalie reminded her Americanized children how far they had come. “Mommy grew up in a shanty,” she said.

“What’s a shanty, Mommy?” Kristine asked.

Lara spent our last ride to school talking about the difference between mean, median, and mode, then pumped her fist when she heard there was a test. She had studied Harriet Tubman again (“she saved people, even though they weren’t her relatives!”) and made the A-honor roll.

I offered to mark the occasion with a trip to the toy store, but Lara chose Office Depot and wrote her first book — an enigmatic study of a girl who asks questions.

“Why would I be excited for a TEST? Just why?!”

“Why do I have emotions just why — please tell me? Would you?”

“Why am I so curiouse [sic], just why?”

I thought back to second grade, when her first experience of America was a classroom of especially disruptive kids. Lara spoke little English but was so well behaved that her teacher exclaimed, “I need a few more like her!”

Fresh from the Philippines, Lara was the most foreign student in the class and in a Norman Rockwell way the most classically American — the earnest girl in a dainty sweater with an apple on her desk. She didn’t replace an American; she became one.





This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book “A Good Provider Is One Who Leaves: One Family and Migration in the 21st Century.”