The evening packed all the siblings inside the corners of their family TV room. Over the action and drama that flashed on the screen, the children awaited the sound of hurried footsteps on the staircase.
The distinct heavy thumps on the steps made their hearts race. Just like every night before, the sound made them jump on their feet and rush out the door with a chorus of greetings.
It only meant one thing: Their father was home.
“That was one of the very happy memories I have as a young boy,” Chel Diokno, who grew up with nine siblings, told alike. Their house on Roxas Boulevard was hardly ever quiet, and his mother often had to do a roll call before they went around places.
The siblings knew life as children of a senator. Chel understood early on how his father was being revered by everyone else—after all, his father was Jose W. Diokno, a man recognized by history for his courage, compassion, and integrity. “I grew up in awe of him, as a child he was like a demigod to me,” he shared.
The elder Diokno’s stature demanded respect. But it was his warmth and his words that were ingrained in Chel’s treasured memories. He fondly remembers how his parents treated them as equals; how they spoke to them as adults regardless of their age—it was their fundamental awakening to maturity, he said. It’s with this same openness to converse that Chel now enjoys a close bond with his own children.
According to one of Martial Law’s revered figures, a lawyer lives in and by the law. A lawyer strives for justice. A lawyer must work in freedom. A lawyer builds on facts.
In a letter he wrote during his detention, Jose W. Diokno, had these words for his son: I have loved the law; and have always loved being a lawyer. But I have never been prouder than the day, five Sundays ago, that you told me you wanted to study law. Regardless of what you may finally decide, the fact that you that you thought of becoming a lawyer despite my arrest and detention, allows me to hope I have not failed as a lawyer and a father.
The son is now 58 years old. He has spent the last 30 years of his life defending human rights, continuing the work his father introduced to him during his teenage years. It all began with a simple request—a list of law books to read. Chel Diokno’s remark gave birth to a letter he has grown to treasure throughout the years, backed with experience that continues to influence the choices he partakes.
Getting yourself through law school takes a ton of commitment.
“I pretty much lived in school,” Sean Borja revealed. The 2018 Bar exam topnotcher recalled how most of his classes would end late in the evening. Law school had a lot of demands, but Sean had moot court competition trainings to look forward to as the night deepened. On some days, trainings made him face dawn without any wink of sleep.
“I realized I can’t be all about studies, so I might as well broaden my perspective. There were a lot of issues I didn’t fully understand like the South China Sea disputes, cyber attacks, legality of nuclear weaponry—but these are the discussions that the nerd in me is in love with. It’s a huge part of me,” Sean shared.
Becoming a lawyer wasn’t a childhood dream of his, but the drive to become someone with the courage to stand his ground and speak up was instilled early in Borja. “You can say I had a rough childhood. A lot of the teasing stems from being too feminine,” he told alike.
“I realized that I didn’t really have the courage to speak up then. I was so ashamed to be myself. There were times that I lacked the bravery and lost my voice all of a sudden. I told myself I never want that to happen again and eventually that drive fueled me to get take up law. Because in law, you get to say your piece with reason and you get to argue with logic,” Sean shared.
There are battles we like to keep in the shadows. And it is only when one gets comfortable with defeat that a different kind of fearlessness emerges.
Kiana Valenciano’s “See Me” has an admirable honesty to it. As she slews tongue-twisters of truths in her verses, the 26-year-old singer audaciously asks for your attention. But it is isn’t a call to feed vanity, it is a question of essence.
Do you see her for who she is? Is music truly meant for her?
It is a title track born out of Kiana’s deepest frustrations. Here she sings “overlooked and disregarded / in the shadows since I started,” a song that weighs Kiana’s musings as she positions herself as an artist in an industry she wishes to make a mark in.
She wrote all 10 songs featured in this album. It took more than a year to put it all together and it unexpectedly became a cathartic confrontation with her past experiences. “There’s a whole lot of self-discovery that went along with making this. I never saw myself as a songwriter but I think I just learned so much more about myself in this album, and during the time I was producing this. I became more self-aware of the things that I can and cannot control and got to put it into words,” Kiana said.
“This album took a whole year, and I went through a lot in that year. But I was told not to focus on just one aspect of my life, which is why I was able to talk all about its other parts—not just relationships and the usual [love songs],” she added.
It’s easy to forget that Shaira Luna’s arms are riddled with ink. We see her strut in long sleeves, with its soft fabrics draping gracefully around her arms. But underneath the dainty clothing, a collection of memories is revealed—with fragments of time embedded onto her skin.
Shaira’s tattoos have multiplied since she got a small half moon engraved on her back. She was 17 then and thought it was a nice mark to symbolize her last name, which, in Spanish, translates to the celestial figure. But even tattoos transform over time, and the symbols that people carry on their body find new meaning.
Over her first tattoo, an image of a tiger now takes over her lower back. “The tramp stamp is now a tramp envelope,” she jokes.
She recently had an old-school metronome inked. The photographer estimates more than 30 tattoos have found a home on her skin, and at this point, Shaira has stopped counting them altogether. What baffles her is the public’s unceasing curiosity about her tattoos, with all its meanings and histories. “It’s funny because I think the more tattoos I’ve gotten, the more I kind of cover them up,” Shaira says.
For someone who’s been getting inked almost half of her life, she insists there are no profound meanings that attach themselves to her tattoos, but each one is a link to a certain past that she wants to remember. A lot of them are objects that belong to a different decade, and there’s an obvious fascination on symbols, a gravitating curiosity on things that are lived in.
Detailed line work in black and white ink—that’s how Shaira likes her tattoos. The designs often take shape with the guide of old photographs. It’s important for her that each tattoo holds its own flaws and, to an extent, mirror its image of being in the past. The tattoos are trajections of how she remembers these certain objects.
“I think that extends to everything that I collect or acquire. I just like things that are used, things that have a history or have a story to them,” the avid vintage collector shares.
Among the tattoos she likes to show people is her dad’s favorite drag racing car—the 1979 Ford Escort. “I really love vintage cars and things with wheels. I don’t know how to ride motorbikes and I’m not a very good at parking, but I love driving,” Shaira admits.
An old-fashioned desk-mount pencil sharpener sits on the back of her wrist. It makes her reminisce all those times when she would sharpen pencils while waiting for her grandfather, who used to own an office and school supplies store.
She also has a table that stands for her favorite band. It is a nod to the Dave Matthews Band 1994 album “Under the Table and Dreaming.” Shaira became a fan of their music in the late 2000s, and this particular tattoo was on her list as early as 2017. “I was supposed to put Matilda under it so she’d be the one under the table and dreaming,” she shares.
Every Sunday, she sets aside time for personal shoots. In these productions, she pours in a remarkable attention to detail. Shaira sources tableware, fabric, and all sorts of decors from decades before, putting all these little things to channel that distinct nostalgia in her images. Often, it goes unnoticed. But Shaira finds no need for validation as she seeks to build reflections of the past through her photographs.
“I have attachments to certain objects, not in a materialistic kind of way but objects really help me tell stories. So I think it was just natural for me to put objects on myself,” she adds.
Among the map of vintage trinkets are the words "Stevie" and "Wonder" on her forearms. It's not a tribute to the singer, but to her most loyal cat. “I used to doodle in my notebooks, and I just think of my skin as kind of like the back of my notebook where you put your extra thoughts and things that you want to remember, the things you want to look back at,” Shaira says.
As for the tattoo that means most things to her, it's got to be the word "Machine" inked on the side of her left arm. Apart from borrowing the word from Florence and the Machine and Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine,” Shaira explains it stands for two other things: "I want my photos to feel like a time machine. And also because I feel like I don’t really stop and I don’t really need to rest so much—so I feel like a machine."
Shaira likens her skin to a furniture store catalogue, and she’s looking to have another vintage chair inked on her neck. If she gets the go-signal from her creative agency, she’ll be back on the tattooing chair of Dyun Depasupil (more popular as @dyuntats) once again to bring it to life.
Most of this artist’s ink work has been done by Dyun, and she shares she’s not looking for anyone else to do the job. Anyone who wants their own permanent marks on their skin should study a tattooist’s work, as each has a different technique and style in designing.
“I was seeing a lot of Dyun’s work over the years and every time I compliment someone on their tattoos, they were done by him. When I started getting my ink done by Dyun, there really was no looking back,” she says.
“You should build a good relationship with a tattoo artist. You’re gonna have these things on your skin forever, you might as well have happy memories while getting them.”
Photos by Wilmark Jolindon, Gab Loste, and Sean Xie for alike.
We were told to take a seat at the table located at the very edge of the room, quite far from the stage adorned with the words “Pia Made Iconic.” A wide-eyed, charming 4-year-old greeted us as we approached, and we were surprised it was Pia’s very own niece seated right beside us.
Lara Wurtzbach-Mazen looked simply adorable in her simple black dress, with her hair braided in a tight bun. Her mom had just told her to behave and sit like a lady, and right after she adjusted herself in the middle of her chair, she whispered to my ear: “Tita Pia is inside that red curtain.”
She pointed at the figure enclosed right in the middle of the stage. As the young girl waited for the program to start, she couldn’t help but constantly say “I want to see her already!”
It was a feeling that everyone in that room shared. Right before us was the very first Madame Tussauds wax figure of a Filipino, with the final look of the icon even concealed from the muse herself.
As Madame Tussauds Hong Kong general manager Jenny You and Pia Wurtzbach pulled the curtain back to unveil the figure, the very first words that slipped out of the 2015 Miss Universe was in the tune of disbelief and joy. “I feel like I won again,” Pia said staring at her life-sized and undeniably life-like replica.
Mike Gaston is the head of his own company, a Seattle-based video production studio called Cut. Primarily using YouTube as their platform, Cut asks the necessary questions—some are simple, some dig into culture, and some are targeted to make people empathize.
Mike’s creatives company aims to tell stories that matter. Together with his cousin, Christopher Chan, the two have decided to make Cut’s stories navigate through society’s ambiguity. These are videos that don’t just seek to inform, but in the process involve its viewers and make them understand the diversity of individuals and their truths.
Cut doesn’t try to differentiate what’s right from wrong. It revels and resides in realities’ many grey areas, and recognizes the growth of culture and people. Mike is keen on developing this worldview, and Cut remains defined by it.
His work lives on the internet. But in the same digital landscape, Mike Gaston is simply known as Ernie’s dad.
Ernie is a 5-year-old kid full of wonder and curiosity. His imagination never runs dry. On top of that, Ernie never stops telling stories—and his stories never seem to find an end to them either. Ernie has his own cheeky little moments, wearing a bright smile across his face as he faces the camera.
We’ve seen him fish bobba out of the glass with his tiny hands. He’s toured us around his home. And the little fella has even created his own odd recipes that a professional chef obliged to follow.
One of the suggestions that keep popping up is to dedicate a YouTube channel that’s all about Ernie. It’s a great idea, but Mike shrugs it off and says: “It’s all up to him.”
What’s curious is how Mike raises his kids—with 4-month-old Zora as the newest addition to the Gaston family—the same way he runs his company. Together with his wife, Jenny, he treats them with maturity. Even at a young age, he tells Ernie to take autonomy over his own decisions. He makes his son understand that right and wrong are different for everybody. He is firm in his belief that life is made up of ambiguity—it is full of questions, uncertainties, and contradictions—and he wants his kids to be comfortable with that.
“I remember my mom saying ‘Aren’t you glad your parents are so young?’ They had me when they were only 22. I’m like, ‘No. You guys didn’t know what you were doing,’” Mike shares.
He was 33 years old when he became a dad, an age where he was more secure about his place and aspirations in life. alike talked to the Filipino-American Cut CEO, asked him his views on parenting, and discovered he’s the absolute antithesis to how a father raises his child:
