As an Ilokano language teacher at the university and secondary level, Julius Soria has made it a practice to survey his Ilokano students on their reasons for taking his course to get an indication of the students' language history background and ideas for ongoing curricular innovation in heritage language teaching. His students' responses inspired him to conduct an ethnographic study (Soria 2012) to research the bigger stories of these students in the contexts of their home, school, peer relationships, and community, highlighting the role of language as the connecting element in coming up with their "pakasaritaan" or history. This paper reports on one Filipino high school student's story, Rimat (a pseudonym), from an ethnographic study Soria conducted at Nakem High School (NHS), a public high school in urban Honolulu on students learning Ilokano as a heritage language. The article begins with an overview of the heritage language field in the United States, specifically of Ilokano in the diaspora and in the Hawai'i Department of Education (HIDOE). Next, Soria describes the context of the study and "pakasaritaan" as a theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical lens in the collecting of students' stories. The final section is the presentation and the "making sense" of the student's narrative.