The young girl with sparkling eyes sat down on her mother's lap

Walking through the village of Tinglayan in the northern mountains of Luzon, I came across a mother and child stepping out from the shadow of a wooden house. The little girl sat on her mother’s lap, gazing at me with sparkling eyes, as if the camera in the hands of a foreign traveler were some kind of magical device. Her stare felt like a silent questionnaire, asking, “Who are you, and why are you here?” By contrast, the mother sat quietly, her eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the horizon, as if my presence were of no consequence at all.

For people living in the Philippine highlands, travelers are surely not a frequent sight. Northern Luzon is a place that feels like the blank margin of a map—forgotten, hard to reach, and exhausting to arrive at after hours of jolting bus rides on half-paved roads. Tinglayan is home to an ethnic minority community that remained largely untouched even during centuries of Spanish rule. Here, where colonial influence seldom intruded, unique languages and traditions have been preserved. History has its ironies: the very inconvenience of geography has, in its way, helped safeguard a culture.

It occurs to me that the phrase “a child’s sparkling eyes” is a cliché overused in magazine captions, yet when confronted directly by such a gaze, the traveler is the one who feels unsettled. Instead of being moved by innocence, I felt as though my own clouded vision were being measured against it, which was oddly uncomfortable. Perhaps the mother, staring into the distance, was not indifferent at all but rather testing me in silence: “Can this outsider withstand the weight of my child’s gaze?” In the end, that is the nature of a parent-child bond—whenever a child fixes their eyes on something, there is always a guardian in the background, watching closely.