Chapter 1: Engkanto

Fifteen years ago, on a night when the veil between worlds thinned, I chose to change my fate.

I like to think my life didn’t really begin in a bright, antiseptic birthing ward but in the salt, soot, and sweat of Burgos, Makati’s red-light district. People write about escorts and paint our stories in shades of tragedy, with brushes dipped in sorrow. But that night, the night I stepped into the demimonde, I wasn’t afraid or full of self-pity. I was hungry. I was cold. I simply had bills to pay.

I hadn’t planned for life to turn out this way. For a while, a sports scholarship was supposed to be my ticket to college and, by some measure, a decent life. We were poor—there’s no sugarcoating it. And while my mother did everything she could, she didn’t have the means to put me through school. But despite her limited resources, she made up for it with connections. Through her friend, I joined taekwondo classes one summer because she saw it as a way to earn a scholarship, the key to a good high school.

I didn’t even like taekwondo, at least not at first. But I was a good daughter. I trained, learned, and eventually, I even loved it. High school for me was relentless: one to two hours of training in the morning, a full day of classes, then three to five hours of training after school, with weekends dedicated to practice. The time I had left, I used to earn extra cash—helping out relatives, making milk candies to sell at school, even ghostwriting book reports for wealthy classmates. Looking back, I guess I always had an entrepreneurial streak. But, I digress.

My mother’s plan worked. I became a student-athlete with a golden ticket to college. But in my final year of high school, at a qualifying tournament, my knee shattered. It never healed right. And just like that, the door to a “respectable” path—scholarship, college, good job—slammed shut, not just for me but for those I loved. I was the eldest daughter in an Asian family; my younger sibling and my mother depended on me. I was the de facto provider.

Every eldest daughter knows what that means. The weight of your family’s future settles on your shoulders. And there I was, with no way to do it. No clear way to a good future.

For two years, I faced the darkness of that closed door. But when you’re poor, sadness is a luxury. There’s no time to mourn the dreams you’ve lost. You put food on the table and do what needs to be done. Straight out of high school, I took odd jobs, put on a smile as a wedding organizer, and answered calls in the dead hours at a call center. But no matter how hard I worked, it would never be enough to secure my sibling’s future. And I loved them too much to watch their dreams fade.

So, I turned to what I knew and loved with unflinching honesty. I loved sex. I loved connection. And I asked myself, Why not earn from it too?

Back then, I thought I knew what this would mean. I assumed escorting was just sex. But I was naive, brimming with courage and maybe a little arrogance, unaware of the dark waters I was stepping into. Maybe it was the spirit of Halloween—that night when everyone wears masks—that made it easier to take the plunge. For one night, I could slip into a role, pretend to be someone else, and see if this path was one I could follow.

I wore flat shoes as I did not own any high heels, paired with a black miniskirt and a spaghetti-strap top. My mother thought my call center job was throwing a Halloween party. Outside the Filling Station in Burgos, I stood, unsure of what came next, clutching a bag where a box of condoms weighed heavier than I expected. But getting the attention of men was easier than I’d thought—I was young, with a 22-inch waist and a fire in my eyes. The challenge lay in navigating the streets: the waiting, the figuring out which corners were staked out, learning whose hands I could trust and whose I couldn’t. Pimps reaching out, trying to pull me into their fold—that was the hard part. It was never the sex that’s hard.

Then he arrived—a Korean man, eager yet barely able to bridge the gap in our broken English. But after a quick negotiation (he accepted my price without question), we headed to a nearby short-time motel. I was young, my energy unrestrained, and I devoured him. I took my money and his number and walked away with a newfound resolve. Easiest hour of my life.

I didn’t feel dirty, and I didn’t feel ashamed. Doors may have closed on me, but that night—when spirits roamed—I realized this wasn’t just a role I was slipping into. It was as though the thinning of the veil had awoken something deeper within me. I no longer mourned closed doors, because with this newfound strength, I can build my own.

That night, I came to power.