They uncover eighteen-year-old MingMing [Elaine Macamay] who returns from the spirit world to see a collage of her family’s narratives unfold before her. She pieces her family’s darkest secrets and the reasons for her death.

Three generations of a powerful political family dodge the controversies that have threatened their survival. Eighteen-year-old MingMing exorcises her past and makes personal retributions. Politics and the expediency of political survival in a highly clannish community have dictated the family’s decisions on various facets of their members’ lives: kawing (marriage), courtship, social affairs, dissension, education, and the like.

She learns that her "liberated" mother R [Jean Graciela Peñola] has had two failed marriages, the last a convenient excuse to hide the real facts of MingMing’s birth. MingMing is the love child of her mother’s affair with an Economics Professor in a Manila University after her mother’s failed marriage arranged by her family with a much older man to prop the family’s dwindling political fortunes. The first husband, an ambitious politician, turns out to be more interested in the company of young handsome boys who frequent his mah-jong sessions.

Ming Ming's mother’s pregnancy is kept a secret (family honor or maratabat is a high virtue). The mother is kept in Sarrat, Ilocos Norte, to give birth to MingMing. A marriage is arranged with a distant relative who is unaware of MingMing’s origins; he only knows that the baby has been adopted. MingMing is born seven months before the mother’s 2nd marriage. The next husband, it turns out, is a chauvinist and sadist.

A tradition-reared grandmother I [Venus Tan] masterminds the deception in MingMing story to save maratabat and her only daughter’s life. For such a sin, death — sentence by the family’s own laws and carried out by the family’s hands — resurrects honor and cleanses shame. The grandmother has been subject of her family’s decision to disregard her choice of a husband. At 14 years old she was married to the elder brother of her secret lover P [Al Fay Vintola] to end a bloody rido (family fued) and consolidate the political power of the clan. This turning point devastates P.

P lives with resentment and derision, and the frustration of losing I to his brother, heir apparent of his family. He is trained a guerrilla, becomes a dissident leader, and adopts an extremist stance regularly decreeing fundamentalist views to his family, MingMing and R. In these webs of conflict, MingMing’s real being is slowly uncovered, and the inevitable occurs.


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