Pitoy was the tallest of the neighborhood kids. And I was the broadest. As for Chun, Chun was... different. He was a thin, frail child with skin so pale it looked as though he never played outside. And to top that, Chun had little, slanted, creaseless eyes. Chun was Chinese.

Pitoy and I and the rest of our friends were Filipino, and we never let Chun forget the difference. We teased him about how his old uncle drooled at the mouth and how his mother set food at an altar honoring some long-dead ancestor.

We joked about his incense-scented home and the chopsticks he ate with and his father's skimpy kamiseta-and- karsonsillo outfits. In fact, if his father had not owned the Corner candy store, we'd never have bothered to let Chun play with us. But there he wasㅡsurrounded by large, thick glass jars of chocolates and candies and salted nuts. Such a friend was useful to have around, in case any of us got hungry on an empty pocket.

We'd gather at the corner store and point out our favorite sweets with fat, greasy fingers. We'd gulp down the candies, scarcely managing to remove their crinkly wrappers. Then we'd scamper off, pretending to have forgotten to pay. But Chun always managed to make us pay up, through constant nagging or an insistent tugging at our sleeves. Perhaps we liked to torment him with the uncertainty of nonpayment. Perhaps this is why we begrudged him our coins after an afternoon of begging. But we never considered Chun one of us. Chun was simply...different.

As children's gangs go, there were certain rituals that we all followed to ensure membership in the inner circle. We'd blindfold the prospective member and give him either a plate of cold spaghetti of a plate of dead worms to eat. We almost never managed to gather enough worms to fill a plate, but then we could never decide which was worse: eating cold spaghetti, believing it was dead worms; or eating dead worms, believing it was cold spaghetti.

All of us ㅡexcept of course, that Mama's boy, Bastian, who chickened out on a plate of dead worms had passed the test. All, that is, except Chun. At first, he denied wanting to belong. But, eventually, the urge to be one of us became so strong that he constantly nagged and tugged at our sleeves, begging to be put to the test. By then we had tired of the spaghetti-and-worms routine. We racked our brains for other tortuous feats.

One hot afternoon while we were sitting by the curb rolling pebbles into the gutter, Pitoy had a flash of inspiration. "We have him climb into the manhole at the corner of Nicanor and Blanco" he exclaimed. I instantly seconded his idea. But, when we put it to Chun, he withdrew into silence, refusing to reply to our goads.

"My parents believe that the filth of our ancestors lies beneath the streets. Going into a manhole would disturb all that ancient refuse," he finally said.

"Coward, coward, drooling, slit-eyed coward!" we chanted mercilessly, sending Chun running back to his incense-scented home.

We did not see him for several weeks after that. But one day we saw him sitting by the curb. It was the day someone on the Waterworks Commission decided to remove the manhole covers to dredge up the filth. We had somehow managed to loosen the lock of a fire hydrant on the curb, and were jumping around in a cool spray of high-pressure water. Pitoy's dog, Kulas, was just as lively, for it had been a hot summer and the water relieved the scorching heat on his thick, black coat. We'd run into the hydrant and let the gushing water push us back onto the street while we squealed with delight. Then it happened.

On one jubilant dash, Pitoy and Kulas collided, sending Pitoy staggering back and propelling Kulas straight into the manhole. We gasped but none of us ventured to do more than peer into the black, forbidding hole. None of us knew what to do about Kulas's frantic whines. None of us even considered climbing into that hole to save Pitoy's dog. None, that is, except Chun. As I said, Chun was...different.

Having lingered on the outskirts all this time, he now stepped forward, dragging an old ladder that some telephone linesman had neglected to stow away. Without a word, he pushed its end into the manhole, then clambered down. For what seemed an eternity, we listened to him coax the frightened dog into his arms. Twice he called to us for help, but no one dared extend a hand, afraid of being pulled into that black, smelly hole.

We never figured out how he did it but he eventually emerged, full of scratches and bruises and filthy as sin, carrying Kulas in his arms. Grimly he handed the dog over to Pitoy. "I don't want to belong anymore. I am different and I always will be!" he declared, turning his back on us.

Perhaps we were ashamed to have been such cowards. And we hated him for that. We slowly drifted apart that summer more so after our mothers got and of what had happened, and decided to keep us apart.

When the rains came in June, and we were scowling over pages and pages of clean new notebooks, we heard that Chun had moved away. His family had found a better corner on which to set up her candy store. We never found out where that was. But we figured it was a place called Chinatownㅡ where everyone is just...different.

I have not met Chun since. I am old now and many of my young nieces and nephews have slit-eyed friends with pale, unsunned skin and frail bodies. But they cannot tell the difference.

I often wish I also had never seen a difference ㅡ for, in fact, there was noneㅡ when I was once their age.