To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. –poet, educator, playwright and activist Maya Angelou
It’s Mother’s Day again, an annual fiesta for restaurants, flower shops, bakeshops, hotels and malls to do brisk business honoring the greatest woman on earth. In my case, since my mother died 14 years ago, this is only a day for remembering Mom and a constant reminder of my own search for another "perfect" mother. No, I’m not looking for a mother to take care of me, it’s just that my search for a future wife centers not so much on physical beauty or charm, socio-economic class or even just brains, but on her being an over-all ideal mother to future kids.
I am not shy about this and I’m honest when I tell friends who try to fix dates with various girls, my most important consideration is a person’s being an ideal future mother. Before, I would always make physical beauty as the first pre-condition for being interested to know any girl, often dismissing average girls for lack of stunning looks or even height.
My younger sister would berate me: "Who do you think you are, Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt? Don’t keep looking only for pretty girls and complaining about the imperfect looks of other girls! Our mother was only 5’2"-tall, and don’t forget that Tom Cruise’s ex-wife Nicole Kidman was taller than him. Nicole even told CNN that she could already wear high-heeled shoes after their divorce."
Maybe my sister can’t understand it, but I’m keenly aware of the importance of good genes and good values of mothers. My fellow males of the world might hurl rocks or invectives at me, but my theory is that men contribute only genes and some economic sustenance or security to families, but the ultimate development and future of kids lie mainly in the upbringing and influence of mothers. Proof? How many of the achievers and heroes in human history were fatherless kids who had great mothers, compared to men whose mothers died early?
US statesman Abraham Lincoln, British leader Winston Churchill, US President Franklin Roosevelt, inventor Thomas Edison, conqueror Alexander the Great, ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius and military hero General Ye Fei, Dr. Jose Rizal and many others had great mothers who profoundly influenced their lives.
Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong became a tall swaggering leader who excelled at Harvard and Cambridge not by accident of fate, but because his dad Lee Kuan Yew had the good sense to marry a Singaporean lady, Kwa Geok Choo, who was smarter than him at Cambridge University and who became a good mother. Double-degree Wharton summa cum laude graduate Lance Gokongwei and his siblings, like New York University-educated Robina and Columbia-trained Lisa, became successful business executives with traditional Confucian values, because self-made taipan John Gokongwei Jr. married a wife who became a good mother in the person of the unassuming and wise Elizabeth Yu Gokongwei.
The three Mano Po movies portrayed a lot of stereotypes in our ethnic Chinese minority experience in Philippine life. I couldn’t help but cringe upon seeing the scenes of soap opera telenovela power struggles and opulence which seem superficial, frivolous and an incomplete glimpse of the local Chinese life in our society. The creators made sincere efforts, and the Mano Po films were not bad, but I believe the demands of commercial box office viability required those concessions to stereotypes. Not all the greatest stories in our community involve squabbling business titans or matrons, not all the best people in our ethnic Chinese minority are industrialists with three wives.
I kept telling myself, someday I should produce a movie or write a novel based on my late mother’s colorful life as a Chinese-language literature and history teacher set in wartime south China and postwar Philippines, complete with two love stories which ended in her being a widow twice. She was a scholar-educator, an anachronism of ancient China’s love of Confucian literature in Southeast Asia where peasant migrants created communities of wealthy traders as preeminent kings. Hers was a saga more like America’s Joy Luck Club rather than the stereotype Mano Po flicks.
I don’t know how my late mother Mary Young Siu-Tin would react to my writing about her untold life before I and my younger sister were born. Mom was a young educator from the ancient port city of Quanzhou in Fujian, south China, who was courted by the late George Dy, a young tourist equivalent to our Philippine balikbayan and scion of an overseas Chinese business family from a major city in northern Luzon. I heard it was a whirlwind romance. They had an elaborate engagement ceremony in Quanzhou and later a grand wedding celebration in Dy’s ancestral home village. They toured pre-Communist Shanghai and settled in postwar Manila just as Mao Zedong’s revolution totally engulfed China.
Mom’s old friends said that she and her first husband loved each other, but he turned out to be a hopeless playboy. The late Tourism Secretary Jose "Joe" Aspiras told me that his La Union childhood friend and he would carouse in Manila’s fancy nightclubs until closing time daily. Aspiras said Dy was a brilliant, natural leader, and he was charismatic, but led a playboy life. In a rare and almost unheard of move for Asian women in the 1950s and 1960s, the young immigrant educator one day defied the philandering husband, left home and taught in various Chinese schools in the provinces. She even served as a principal in some schools. She was cut off by Communism from her kin in China, but she bravely made a life of her own in her adopted new land. An old friend recounted that while she was teaching in Cebu, her first husband visited her seeking reconciliation.
When her first husband died, our mom years later met our widower dad Lee Tek Hong, whose family had been Philippine lumber industry pioneers since the 19th century. She was the principal of a small school in Iba, Zambales, when our dad would drive all the way there from Manila to court her. She was 39 and he was 55 when they remarried. Many beautiful women often marry men for their power or wealth, but our mother was the opposite – she came into our dad’s life when he was suffering the worst crisis of his once illustrious business career and had lost an acrimonious family squabble.
Our mother married dad after he was ousted by kin from the family’s main sawmill firm. He was not poor, but he had to rebuild his fortune again. Unfortunately, our mother soon became a widow the second time in less than seven years. A woman of staunch pride and independence, she juggled the burdens of being a full-time educator and a full-time single parent without once asking for help from any relatives.
During our mom’s funeral wake in 1991, her teaching colleague told me that her life reflected the ancient Chinese proverb hong-gan po-mya or "a great beauty often has a sad fate." I disagree. Mary Young Siu-Tin might not have been a "success" in the conventional sense of great material wealth or fame; she might not have enjoyed "happiness" in the way of luxurious lifestyle, comfort, glitz or glamour. However, she possessed a quiet dignity, peace, contentment and fulfillment in her heart which up to this day never ceases to amaze me.
Our mother hardly gave sermons or lectured us, but the nobility of her life as a selfless mother and as an outstanding educator will forever inspire me to try and make my life meaningful. I share the sentiments of America’s greatest President Abraham Lincoln when he once said: "All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my angel mother."