The following first appeared in Youth Outlook.
Looking Back to the Islands
My mother’s stories always started in the Philippines, a far-off land where she was born, where the rain fell like waterfalls. These stories inspired me to learn more about my people. I wanted to find out who am I, where I came from, and why I am here.
As a child, my mother would run away for the day, crossing the river into neighboring villages. She held onto a single bamboo pole and walked over a rickety bamboo bridge, then ran through the rain-soaked rice fields to visit the next village. She stared and wondered why these people were different. They looked the same as her family, but somehow they were different. She loved this difference enough to travel miles through monsoons to see.
Then one day the bellow of the fog horns echoed throughout the ship as it anchored in Pearl Harbor. In the excitement, she managed to pry herself from my grandmother’s grasp and run to the top deck of the boat, where she saw a strange, mysterious land— Hawaii.
Although I am proud to say that I am Filipino, I find news segments on my country disturbing. People could associate the Philippines with the authoritarian Marcos regime; Amelda Marcos’ shoe collection; or kidnapped scuba-diving tourists in Mindanao.
Who are the true Filipinos? What do they do? How do they live?
To answer these questions for myself, I went to the Philippines— a decision which my whole family in the states thought was foolish. But as a photographer, I wanted to share photographs with the people I met there and to bring images back for my family to see what they have been sheltering themselves from. To me, knowing my past is the beginning to understanding where I am going. So I went to the place where my mother’s stories began, with enough reasons to travel through monsoons to see.
>>Back to the introduction to Roots
by Marc Angelo Ramos 
My mother also told me of the day she left Manila Bay to come to America. My grandfather, a sugar cane plantation worker in Hawaii, sent a letter about the new home he was building near Pearl Harbor. He also included three one-way boat tickets to join him. My mother told me how the ocean air felt cool and damp in her hair. She told me about standing on a pile of ropes to see over the side of the boat, and saw the ocean spreading across the horizon as far as the eye could see. She thought that the trip would never end. When they went to the dinner hall of the gigantic ship, they wore their pajamas. I can imagine my grandmother, younger, with two little girls clinging to her arms and dressed in pink and green pajamas, standing there looking utterly confused. 
Currently, the U.S. government now believes that the Abu Sayyaf, the Muslim fundamentalist group that held a Berkeley student hostage, has ties to al Qaeda. I’m afraid that people will get the wrong impression of who the Philippine people really are. Not all Americans are shoot-em-up cowboys, gangsta’s or white supremacist skinheads.