To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there. — Barbara Bush
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces. — George Santayana
MANILA, Philippines - Unlike not a few people who myopically mistake fame, fortune, glamour and power as the ultimate measures of success, one self-effacing and extremely low-profile daughter of business leader Lucio Tan and wife Carmen Khao Tan — 47-year-old Jeselyn “Gigi” Tan Yu — recently requested that her photo and profile need not be cited if this columnist will write about her two daughters’ new children’s book project, the proceeds of which will go to help indigent cancer patients. Jeryl Tan Yu is the author of the book The Little Dream and her sister Richelle Jerika Yu is the illustrator.
Gigi and her husband Richard Yu (sons of entrepreneurs Antonio and Gloria Yu) are personal friends since way back, and they sent me an invitation to the July 15 launch of The Little Dream to be held at Bizu in Greenbelt 2, Makati City. I had to ask their permission to write this, on condition that the focus wouldn’t be on them personally, but on the book project itself.
What impressed me so much was not only Gigi Tan Yu’s personal humility, but also her low-profile success as a good and devoted fulltime mother who considers raising a good family as one true and meaningful measure of success.
Like the three kids of billionaire Senator Manny Villar and six children of taipan John Gokongwei, Jr., all of Gigi Tan Yu’s four kids are good kids and not one is spoiled. All are fluent in Hokkien, Mandarin, Tagalog and English, with basic education in Singapore’s topnotch Dunman High and with daughter Jeryl Tan Yu just recently graduating with magna cum laude honors from University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). A son is also studying now in California, after having successfully studied at Shanghai University in China’s bustling center of socio-economic progress, that city described as the New York of Asia.
When I asked how her kids turned out to be so level-headed, not frivolous or swell-heads like many spoiled, confused kids, Gigi Tan Yu explained it’s not only the parents’ job, but that “it takes two to tango,” and that good, caring parents and obedient kids should work together.
She said she decided years ago to become a fulltime mother because she considers motherhood “a vocation.” She hired no yayas or nannies, raised her children personally, brought them to school, cooked their meals, helped them with their homework and acted as their mentor and friend.
When I cited my own late widowed mother who was a working teacher, but nevertheless a very good mother, as well as my younger sister who has four sons but also runs a business with her husband, Gigi Tan Yu agreed and stressed that it’s unfair for others to denigrate those parents who do have to work. She said her choice was just a personal preference, and that she opted to sacrifice a business career.
She added that many parents who work can successfully raise their kids by giving kids quality time, care and “unconditional love.” She said there are professional women or businesswomen who are good and even better mothers than she is, that it’s more the genuine concern for kids and giving them unconditional love that are the more important criteria.
Gigi Tan Yu shared this poem from an unknown author, which she said inspired her to consider motherhood a calling, one more important than creating a fortune, grabbing the public limelight or any other endeavor:
A hundred years from now,
It will not matter what kind of house I lived in,
What kind of car I drove
How much I had in my bank account.
But the world will be a little better,
Because I was important in the life of a child.
Coincidentally, also on July 8, it was reported in an interview for Yahoo! News and the online Huffington Post that the world’s richest and wisest investor, Warren Buffett, credited his father Howard Buffett with teaching him how to live, and explained that all parents can make a “better human being.”
Buffett said: “The power of unconditional love — I mean, there is no power on earth like unconditional love. And I think that if you offered that to your child, I mean, you’re 90 percent of the way home. There may be days when you don’t feel like it — it’s not uncritical love; that’s a different animal — but to know you can always come back, that is huge in life. That takes you a long, long way. And I would say that every parent out there that can extend that to their child at an early age, it’s going to make for a better human being.”
Indeed, I believe being able to raise a good family by giving kids or kin our unconditional love is one true measure of success in life, far more important and meaningful than just material wealth, temporal power, fleeting fame or ephemeral glamour.
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