When she thought back on her adolescent years, Min remembered her busy hands. She stood behind the family’s butchering stall, a stained apron around her waist; she pounded her cleaver down on the limp, featherless chicken before her, cutting through the skin, crushing through the bones, slicing the meat into neat, equal pieces. Chop chop chop.

My story is in the faces of those I pass along Orchard Road on Sundays, the women and men sitting in groups atop picnic mats laid out below stacks of Tupperware—adobo and pansit alongside paper plates—always looking familiar, expectant; yet those who sometimes look at me as if I don’t deserve to approach them and say, “Hello, po. Kamusta, po”—those customary greetings between acquaintances—because I am not exactly of them. Still, they are who I picture in place of the character on the blackboard: all persons—or rén.

The inauguration of the Spaceport of France was declared a holiday in Guiana, and tribes from as far as Brazil made camp along the coast to witness blastoff.  It was a rainless day in the jungle, rocket fueled and gleaming on the launchpad.  As the boys from Saint-Sébastien hopped off the school bus, commands crackled from the control center like the voice of God.