As a Filipino child growing up in a small Massachusetts town, Grace Talusan felt both scrutinized and unseen. Having arrived from the Philippines when she was 2, she rehearsed a Boston accent and prayed for a metamorphosis, pleading with God to turn her into a white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. But her transformation one morning at the age of 8 turned out to be less Barbie and more Kafka: “My lips had disappeared into a mass of swollen flesh, my earlobes were triple their usual size and my cheeks were throbbing hot.”

In “The Body Papers,” Talusan’s precise, delicately constructed memoir-in-essays, her brief turn as a “puffy pink monster,” inflamed with hives, was a sign that something monstrous was being done to her. Her father’s father, Tatang (Tagalog for “father” — Talusan uses the Filipino vocabulary for kinship ties throughout), would arrive from the Philippines for an extended visit every spring and enter Grace’s room at night, pulling her floral nightgown over her shoulders. The sexual abuse started when she was 7 and ended when she was 13, after she waited for Tatang one evening and shoved him into the bedroom wall. Seeing the look of humiliation on his face, she knew that one form of torment was over: “My rage turned to joy.”

“The Body Papers” doesn’t track a one-way march to triumph from adversity; Talusan’s essays loop in on themselves, as she retrieves old memories and finds unexpected points of connection. It was only a few years after the abuse stopped that she told her family about it. They were supportive but not surprised. Her grandfather, she learned, “was an unrelenting pedophile.” Her parents were compulsively secretive, having fled an authoritarian country where “a story could get you killed.” After her father’s student visa expired, the Talusans became undocumented immigrants; Grace and her older sister only found out about their vulnerable status when they had to miss school for the blood tests and fingerprinting that were part of the immigration application process.

“There is no paper trail to document what happened to my body,” Talusan writes, recalling what her grandfather did to her. But once an order for her deportation arrived, a paper trail controlled her fate. She later obtained her immigration file through a Freedom of Information Act request and reproduces some of the pages in this book, as if entering them into the public record. “With a shuffle of papers,” she writes, “life as I knew it could be lost.”