For twelve years of school, the nickname “garbage collector’s daughter” was like an impossible-to-erase scar for Lira, a girl from Tondo, Manila, who grew up without a father.
Her father died before she was born; he left her with a thin mother, with calluses on her hands and the smell of sweat and dust: Aling Nena, a woman who collected trash along the train tracks and in the city’s dumps to make ends meet with her daughter.
