Luisa was born in Manila, 32 years ago. Although she has a birth certificate showing two Filipino parents, which having been redacted by Filipinos is inaccurate and gives her the wrong name as well, our theory is that she must have been switched at birth. Hospitals there are rather sloppy, after all, and there seems to be no other explanation why, of her entire extended family (a considerable number of people, as typical of all constantly reproducing Filipino families), she is the only one who seems to have a functioning brain. She certainly behaved like a changeling, all her relatives will testify to that. But due to her very small stature and facial features, it's obvious that she was the actual child of her parents. Much to her misfortune.
Her first word seems to have been "Why?" During her often unbearably stressful young life, that family has done everything in their power to beat the living daylights out of her and to crush any spirit of inquiry. They failed, but they nearly killed her trying. As I told everybody in another thread, your family is your worst and most dangerous enemy in the Philippines, and Luisa fully intents to crack the skull of her biological father if he ever tries to get near her again. She would gladly shoot him instead, but in the Philippines a woman is not allowed to lift her hand against a man, so SHE would be the one to go to prison instead of the scum who would have held her for ransom or sold her into slavery. The rest of her story will make a great book one of these days, maybe she will be the Filipino equivalent of Amy Tan
Luisa is the only one who is truly fluent en English in her family, she passed the TOEFL on her first try with a nearly perfect score. Her education and upbringing was in English only, because her grandfather, apparently a very wise man for the times, decreed one day that his Spanish-speaking household would from that day forward learn English and speak it exclusively. In those days the Americans had just liberated the Philippines, transportation and schools actually functioned, there was an economy, and America was where it was happening. Unfortunately the Americans left, successive Filipino governments destroyed the economy, stole the entire treasury, let the school systems become a joke, rule by law as we know it ceased to exist, and the lowest common denominator of life forms there had a population explosion which swamped the cities and dragged under the last vestiges of public services. Grandfather died, and the rest of his household reverted to "traditional Filipino values" while managing to lose or spend any of the security and prestige that their branch of the family had in the 1950's. Poor Lu came into existance during the downward spiral at the end. A helpless girl-child had the resentment and stupidity of the entire family fall right on her head.
The fact that she is still existing can be credited to the internet. Without it, she would have never been able to maintain a window on sanity, education, and a degree of normalcy. We are going to get her out of that hellhole some day, soon I hope. She is worth saving.