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2665 Redefining Americaby the prospect of better opportunities for their daughter. Teachers had remarked that I was talented. My mother, especially, felt that Ecuador was not the place for me. She knew how the country would limit the woman she imagined I would become%u2014Hillary Clinton, perhaps, or Princess Di.My parents sent loving letters to Ecuador. They said that they were facing a range of hardships so that I could have a better life. They said that we would reunite soon, though the date was unspecified. They said that I had to behave, not walk into traffic%u2014I seem to have developed a habit of doing this%u2014and work hard, so they could send me little gifts and chocolates. I was a toddler, but I understood. My parents left to give me things, and I had to do other things in order to repay them. It was simple math.They sent for me when I was just shy of five years old. I arrived at J.F.K. airport. My father, who seemed like a total stranger, ran to me and picked me up and kissed me, and my mother looked on and wept. I recall thinking she was pretty, and being embarrassed by the attention. They had brought roses, Teddy bears, and Tweety Bird balloons.Getting to know one another was easy enough. My father liked to read and lecture, and had a bad temper. My mother was softspoken around him but funny and mean%u2014like a drag queen%u2014with me. She liked Vogue. I was enrolled in a Catholic school and quickly learned English%u2014through immersion, but also through %u201cReading Rainbow%u201d and a Franklin talking dictionary that my father bought me. It gave me a colorful vocabulary and weirdly overenunciated diction. If I typed the right terms, it even gave me erotica.Meanwhile, I had confirmed that my parents were not tony expats. At home, meals 10could be rice and a fried egg. We sometimes hid from our landlord by crouching next to my bed and drawing the blinds. My father had started out driving a cab, but after 9/11, when the governor revoked the driver%u2019s licenses of undocumented immigrants, he began working as a deliveryman, carrying meals to Wall Street executives, the plastic bags slicing into his fingers. Some of those executives forced him to ride on freight elevators. Others tipped him in spare change.My mother worked in a factory. For seven days a week, sometimes in twelve-hour shifts, she sewed in a heat that caught in your throat like lint, while her bosses, also immigrants, hurled racist slurs at her. Some days I sat on the factory floor, making dolls with swatches of fabric, cosplaying childhood. I didn%u2019t put a lot of effort into making the dolls%u2014I sort of just screwed around, with an eye on my mom at her sewing station, stiffening whenever her supervisor came by to see how fast she was working. What could I do to protect her? Well, murder, I guess.Our problem appeared to be poverty, which even then, before I%u2019d seen %u201cRent,%u201d seemed glamorous, or at least normal. All the protagonists in the books I read were poor. Ramona Quimby on Klickitat Street, the kids in %u201cFive Little Peppers and How They Grew.%u201d Every fictional child was hungry, an orphan, or tubercular. But there was something else setting us apart. At school, I looked at my nonwhite classmates and wondered how their parents could be nurses, or own houses, or leave the country on vacation. It was none of my business%u2014everyone in New York had secrets%u2014but I cautiously gathered intel, toothpick in mouth. I finally cracked the case when I tried to apply to an essay contest You may not know what %u201ctony expats%u201d are, but what can you figure out about this group by reading the rest of paragraph 11?11What %u201cintel%u201d (par. 13) does Villavicencio gather that explains what sets her family apart from the impoverished characters she read about?22Copyright %u00a9 Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. Distributed by Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers. For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.