My story is not only my story. While everyone has the right to report their own lives, I know that telling my secrets impacts other people. To preserve their privacy, I have changed the names of most living family members and friends who appear here. In some instances, I named people with a Tagalog word for our kinship tie.
This book is a memoir and is based on my memories, but I also cross-referenced documents, photographs, records, timelines, elementary school report cards, and the journals I’ve kept since I was a child. Still, some may dispute my recollection of events. Others may wish I had not written down such things for everyone to see.
Because I wanted to protect others from my story, I did not share or write about these memories as nonfiction for a long time. Once I became an aunt and held my niece for the first time, tiny and only days old, I realized how dangerous it was to protect the wrong people by telling only the happy stories. Lies of omission created the conditions that allowed someone more powerful than me to hurt and exploit me for most of my childhood.
At this point, I’ve waited long enough that many implicated in this book have died. I didn’t write this book for them. I wrote it for me, and for you, the living, and for those who come after me.