The Fairest of Them All

Review of Fairest: a memoir by Meredith Talusan (USA: Viking, 2020)
By Aileen Liang

It is 1980s Manila, and journalist Meredith Talusan buckles us in with her and her Nanay Coro in a jeepney, trundling its way through the colorful hustle and bustle of village life. We travel a fair way, looking over wooden houses and their thatched roofs, past the Angat River and its vastness, before we reach her home up on the hill. As it turns out, it will be just one out of the many homes she will go on to inhabit—she will cross the ocean to America, the courtyards of Harvard University, the dance floor of a queer club, Liquid. In Fairest, Talusan’s debut memoir, we follow Talusan’s journey from being an anak araw (a “sun child,” or albino) to accepting the myriad facets of her identity, both as a transgender woman and a Filipino-American.

Talusan’s memoir is split into three sections. In “Sun Child,” Talusan focuses on her childhood in the Philippines; in the writing here she approximates a child’s sense of wonder. She recounts how her younger self would fantasize about being “a golden-haired American woman singing in front of thousands of other Americans” while listening to Lea Salonga. More significantly, Talusan reproduces her younger self’s understanding of gender, with all of its rigid binaries. She recalls how she would swap the pronouns in Lea’s song “because I was a boy.” The simplicity of this declarative statement, in separating fantasy consciously from reality, sets the foundation for the subsequent unraveling of this supposed truth.

From the chapters of “Sun Child,” it is clear that Talusan’s childhood was marked by a sense of alienation. The chapters recount her experiences as a child actor in the film industry, as well as more quotidian school memories. They pay special attention to her friendship with the rugged, boyish Samuel, whom she met after transferring schools to live with her grandmother, Nanay Coro. Episodes of a seemingly innocuous friendship played out; Samuel saved her from mortal embarrassment in the classroom, coached her in basketball, and shared a seat on a particularly bumpy car ride. Talusan grew infatuated with Samuel, but even then she recognized how improbable a relationship would be: “I still hoped… [a] part of him didn’t consider it so monstrous, the thought of being with a boy who was also his best friend.” Even her skin set her apart. Talusan’s “corn silk hair and fair skin” granted her the name of anak araw. This genetic condition made her the prized object of Nanay Coro’s affections—the beacon of hope “for a better future”—but it also set Talusan apart from the very people she held dear.

As a child, Talusan set her heart on America, where she would be sent to live once she was old enough. This faraway land became the receptacle of her dreams, glittering projections of “Santa Claus at Christmas, arcade games, a giant bedroom of my own.” Her white-passing skin would grant her membership in an America that was romanticized to be the “wondrous place I was destined to inhabit, a fantasy that my white skin made real.” This idealization of America was troubled when Talusan learned about the complex historical relations between America and Philippines through a book: The United States and the Philippines: A Study of Neocolonialism. Through it, she realized that Nanay Coro’s understanding of whiteness was an ideal imposed upon her, one that was founded on the mistaken belief “that there was something about [Talusan’s] color that made [her] better.”

Throughout the “Sun Child” chapters, Talusan criticizes a sanitized and romanticized version of America and white-passing privilege in retrospect, thus acknowledging her present conflicted relationship with the country. Even though Talusan writes in English, her deference towards Tagalog binds her to her motherland. She learned the American way of speaking from Ricky on the show Silver Spoons, becoming for an instant “a real American boy,” yet this pretense was shattered after “speaking in Tagalog.” This tension, however, did not cause Talusan to deviate from her path. Though she pushed back against Nanay Coro’s claims that America would be better for her, she also did not reject her insistence that “You won’t be happy if you stay. You’ll always wonder how vast your life would become.”

Talusan’s new life in America is foreshadowed using the word “malawak”—a Tagalog word typically used to describe vast landscapes, now applied to the “possibility of America, the new ways of life.” In the second part of the memoir, “Harvard Man,” Talusan lives out these possibilities after her move from the Philippines to America. At Harvard, Talusan learned about the concept of homosexuality in her class, “Topics in Gay Male Representation.” She learned about cruising and the coded language used to hook up. She began to describe her emerging sexual identity with the vocabulary of a gay man.

It was strange to be thought of as feminine, when I grew up around flamboyant bakla… But in America, the fact that I didn’t puff up my chest or speak in the lowest voice possible, that my gait wasn’t halting and my hips swayed a little when I walked, this all meant I was femme, or a femmy twink, as one of the students in Professor Miller’s class called me when we were discussing different labels for queer people.

Talusan’s confusion here opens up subtle critiques of the way that queerness is policed by rigid linguistic taxonomies. In a community where categories such as ‘femmy twink’ are opposed to more masculine presentations, Talusan struggled to make sense of her own identity. The confusion of ideas led to a confusion of behavior. In her first sexual encounter, she was overly eager to please. “I wanted to say yes because I knew that was what he wanted,” Talusan writes, her use of the subordinating conjunction “because” resonating with her anxieties to grasp a coherent notion of gayness. Her deference to the more clearly articulated desires of her sexual partner helps demonstrate a quote from Eve Sedgwick’s seminal Epistemology of the Closet, a theorist Talusan studied in her class: “erotic identity is never to be circumscribed simply as itself […] is never to be perceived outside a structure of transference and countertransference.” In such episodes Talusan renders the theoretical in intimate terms and so articulates the struggle of making erotic identity, even sexual desire, intelligible.

In her final year at Harvard, Talusan developed a play entitled Dancing Deviant for her creative writing class and staged it in the spring semester. The memoir identifies this as a breakthrough moment and recounts how Talusan climbed out of the trunk, stripped off all her clothing, and confessed to gender fluidity onstage: “I grew not to care whether I was a man or woman, that I could be both or neither.” She even performed the act of self-penetration, pronouncing her defiance against conservative heterosexuality and its obsession with the male body as an untouchable space. Yet the radically subversive potential of her performance was undercut by the latent confusion that still surrounded Talusan’s gender identity. At this point, Talusan still articulated her beliefs using the male/female binary:

I described how my body, and the self that came with it, was so different from other bodies […] I imagined my rectum as my substitute vagina, a body part that gave me access to some of the womanhood I did not experience in my daily life.

Expressing her desire for femininity in reference to the vagina, Talusan seems to hint at an emerging gender identity that was trapped within the binary while straining to subvert it. At that point, however, she continued to flit from one closet to another, and shuttled between secrecy and disclosure. Although she had “dutifully gone to the gym multiple times a week,” it was the queer dance club Liquid that became a closet for her femininity, where she could wear “cheap women’s clothes that [she] was thankfully small enough to fit in” from the basement of Urban Outfitters. It is possible to see the size and setting of the basement as a symbol of Talusan’s feminine self, straining against the front of a gay man keeping up an adequate performance of masculinity.

Finding the vulnerability to disclose failure, in all of its uncertainty and ugliness, can be difficult. As with Dancing Deviant, Talusan’s retrospective voice sometimes insulates readers from the emotional stakes of the memory by presenting theoretical ruminations instead of direct description. Yet, there are also moments in the memoir where Talusan resists over-sanitizing her own narrative. After graduating from Harvard, Talusan returned to the Philippines and at one point tried to reconnect with Samuel, her first love. When she was rejected, Talusan left for Manila and hired a sexual escort, Boy. Boy became the projection of her fantasies of having remained in the Philippines, and at one point she imagined “[she] was one of [Boy’s] friends on the beach, who he unexpectedly ended up on top of.” Yet this romantic flight of fancy is incongruent with the dingy hotel room “designed to look fancy even though everything was fake.” The grittiness of the incident resists glamorization. Instead, the incident reveals real vulnerability in Talusan, who sees her and Boy as “just two boys from the country who had never been taught what it meant to be together.” Talusan was a successful, white-passing man from American who could afford a sexual escort, but she was also a man deprived of viable role models from young. Boy became more than just another sexual encounter; he became a mirror reflection of Talusan’s younger self.

Of the various identities that Talusan took on, it is her journey to eventual acceptance of femininity that is most powerfully expressed. In “Lady Wedgewood,” the book’s final section, Talusan charts her process of self-discovery from gay man to transgender woman. In it, Talusan writes about how she first attempted to rationalize the growing urgency of her desire to be a woman. Her conflicted self would compare her dysphoria to a sensationalist tabloid news article about a man with a twin growing in his belly, wondering “what precipitating force awakened this dormant being […] to grow and threaten the man’s life.” The image of abnormal growth expresses her own initial aversion towards this new identity in potentially problematic terms. Yet, when read in reference to Judith Butler’s Imitation and Gender Insubordination, the metaphor feels like a visceral expression of what Talusan feared to lose. Her female self disrupted her settled and neatly categorized life, emerging almost like a siren’s song: 

I often felt as if I was in a trance, heeding no call except that beguiling woman who stared at me from the other side of the mirror whenever I put on makeup, my transformation something out of alchemy, the stuff of myth.

In a fevered effort to grasp her female identity, Talusan shuffles the images of a “selfish and rapacious [woman],” “siren,” and “goddess,” in an attempt to apprehend her desire to identify as female. The mythical nature of these labels harkens back to Butler’s work, in particular to Butler’s question: 

Can sexuality even remain sexuality once it submits to a criterion of transparency and disclosure, or does it perhaps cease to be sexuality precisely when the semblance of full explicitness is achieved?

In her essay, Butler questions the value of ascribing a normative, legible definition to sexuality, arguing that it is in the very nature of queerness to defy efforts to categorize it. Talusan’s amorphous, mythic, re-imagination of her self brought her to a transcendental moment of self-realization. She might not have seen herself immediately, but her inner self now spoke to her, to ask “whether [she] was really willing to smother her, that beautiful woman, and let her die.” In an act of radical acceptance, Talusan resolved to let that unknown self live. As Talusan sprang to reclaim “her” as “I,” “to cross that bridge of light and make her whole, with whatever I had,” she synthesized her fragmented self until she could say, “I was looking at one of the most beautiful faces I’d ever seen.” Talusan’s “I” has brought her self to herself.

At the end of the memoir, Talusan contemplates the what-ifs that she could have lived—her alternate lives as a gay man or a Filipino farmer alongside Nanay Coro. We are reminded of the identities she had negotiated—the born Filipino in conflict with the white-passing immigrant, the gay man becoming a woman—and the paths that were taken and not. Yet, Talusan does not deign to tie up these threads completely, instead conceding that “I was finally satisfied with staying put, because I now know there’s no such thing as the single best, the single fairest life.” The title Fairest comes to encompass the various tenets of her identity—her albinism, her white-passing in America, and the life that is most authentic for her to live. Although the reader sees Talusan in different kinds of fairness, she shows us too the shades that lurk beneath and in between.


Aileen Liang is currently an undergraduate of English Literature at NTU, with an avid interest in the fields of women’s writing and Southeast Asian literature. When she is not reading and writing, she teaches creative writing to primary school students, in the hope that they, too, will uncover beauty and themselves in words.