Five Years Before We Met: Tess, Ate Rowena, and a Baluyut Cousins' Reunion in Quezon City
Five Years Before We Met: Tess, Ate Rowena, and a Baluyut Cousins' Reunion in Quezon City
A friend showed a young J.F.R. Perseveranda a photo from a family reunion halfway around the world — and the girl standing front and center wouldn't become his wife for another five years.
I saw my wife's face for the first time five years before I ever met her, and I didn't even know I was looking at her.
This photo has been in my hands, one way or another, since the summer after Dennis Ocampo and Amalia's wedding. It isn't a wedding photo — it's a reunion photo, a whole different gathering of the same extended family, and it's the one that actually mattered.
Ate Rowena — if you're reading this: where and when was this taken? I've always believed it might have been a December photo, not long after Dennis and Amalia's wedding, but I've never actually confirmed the date or the exact spot in Quezon City.
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Kapamilya — kah-pah-MIL-yah
From ka- (fellow, shared) plus pamilya (family): literally, "one of the family." In everyday use it reaches past blood — cousins of cousins, in-laws, family friends — folding them permanently into the fold. Exactly this photo.
A Reunion in Quezon City
The occasion was a Baluyut cousins' reunion — the kind of gathering that happens when enough branches of one family tree end up in the same city at the same time. Dennis Ocampo and Amalia had just gotten married, and the reunion carried some of that wedding-season energy. Amalia's Recio brothers were there. Tito Charlie Baluyut's three children were there. And somewhere in the middle of the frame, front and center, was a young woman I had never met: Tess.
Her Ate Rowena stood just to her right. I didn't know either of their names yet. I didn't know I'd spend the rest of my life with one of them.
The Girl I Hadn't Met Yet
The story starts a little earlier than the photo, at Dennis and Amalia's wedding itself. I saw Tess's Ate Mary Ann there — the maid of honor, or so I thought. I later found out she was the matron of honor; she was already married. I remember praying, half-joking and half not, that she would have a younger sister.
The summer after the wedding, my friend Russel showed me this reunion photo. And there she was. I thought: too young, and too far away. Vallejo to wherever she was living in Quezon City wasn't the problem — the ocean between us was.
Five Years Later
I carried that photo, or at least the memory of it, for five years without knowing her name attached to a future. My future wife and I met for real on May 16, 1999. Everything after that — the proposal, the three weddings, the three kids, twenty-one years together before I lost her in 2020 — started from a face I'd already seen once, in a photo I didn't understand yet.
When you wish upon a star, apparently, it doesn't tell you the timeline.
Rowena — where and when was this? I knew it before, but that memory has faded. That's why this website.
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Founder & Editor
J.F.R. Perseveranda
J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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