November 6, 1933
San Francisco, California
Auring, darling it is not true that I have forgotten you. I send kisses for you, for Lolita, for Buddy and for every one there at home through Ma, every time I write her. You ask Mother, and tell her to read to you from the third sheet of my latest letter to her, and you will notice that you have been unfair to me for accusing me like this. Why Auring! Could I ever forget you. Your two big eyes, flat nose, and the “pet” of Aunty. As If I could.
Love and kisses,
Joven
Auring, or the Filipino nickname for Aurora, was my grandmother and I found this picture-postcard along with other photos from her family, friends, and schoolmates. It felt like I was on a time machine when I was looking at those photos, all dated between the early 1920’s to the late 80’s. I discovered photos of my great-grandparents, my grandmother’s siblings, her high school class photo dated 1942, the time when she and my grandfather got married in 1948, and I even found her old I.D. when she was working for the U.S. Government during World War II. The picture-postcard of a young man fishing in a stream with a dog with him was a mystery, a man named Joven. From what I could tell from his previous letter, he moved to the United States in the late 1920s and he corresponded with my grandmother for many years. Was he my grandmother’s boyfriend who moved to another country and left his love behind? Or was he just one of her old friends from their high school?
It was a delight to see how the photos started out from black and white, to multi-colored, and you can see the different styles of clothing and the general mood of those photos as the decades went by. It gave me a view what it was like living years before I was born, what it was like struggling during the Secnd World War, and to be join them during posh dinners in the 50s, high school proms in the 60s, disco days in the 70s. But it also showed me a different side to my family ... one that has always been a mystery to me.
My father’s family was the typical Filipino middle class family able to afford private schools and vacations abroad. My grandmother had deep Spanish-Filipino values and was born in the heart of Manila while my grandfather was born out of my great-grandfather’s second wife with eight children from his previous marriage. They were a well-known family in a town north of Manila and their French surname becoming very popular there too. But even though they seemed perfect, it seems even perfect families have their own problems. At seventeen, my uncle accidentally shot himself on the head while playing with a shotgun, while his sister discovered his body. My aunt died from brain cancer at the age of thirty-six, and both my grandparents also passed away from cancers. Then my father died from a heart attack ten years ago. With their whole family gone, my siblings and I are the only descendants they have.
Despite having a picture-perfect house and a picture-perfect family, my father’s family had tried desperately to conceal anything that would make them less perfect. They tried to hold on to the illusion of perfection and ignored problems like my father’s alcoholism, or my aunt’s deteriorating health from her brain tumor, or the depression they had over my uncle’s sudden death. During birthdays, they would keep quiet so the neighbors wouldn’t know there was a celebration going on inside. Everything was kept inside ... inside the house, inside themselves. Any questions I would have wanted to know about them was lost ... and now it was too late for me to ask.
Finding the suitcase filled with photos and letters was like finding my father and his family again. I may never know who Joven was and I wonder if he ever did return to the Philippines even after the war. I see the photos of people long gone ... and I wonder too who they were and what they were like. I look at their photos as if it were just pieces of a puzzle I probably couldn’t solve ... but at least I had a general knowledge of what it looked like.
