I could not believe she’s gone. I want to pretend she gave up on us–but we did. She’s been fighting against her sickness for years and all we did is apply those stupid herbals on her wounds. She have suffered a lot, night and day.

          Her life was a mystery and became even more mysterious when we found the box that contained documents from her past. There were old photographs of funeral with people wearing white bandanas. She was also wearing the white bandana but with a black veil almost covering her face and another old photographed of a Japanese man. There was a paper says a woman owns 12.3 hectares of sugar land and few birth certificates– a boy named Jonathan, a girl named Baby Elias and the a woman named Socorro. Aunt Corazon, her younger sister looked sentimental after seeing the photograph of the Japanese man and the rest of the documents.

That’s all I remember.

      My name is Juliana. It’s been almost 15 years since my grandmother Aurora died. She was all I ever had. I don’t know my ancestors and my parents’ story or maybe I’ll never know but I know what I felt, what I heard, and what I saw. This is where my story begins…