Fatherless achievers

My father? I never knew him. — Eminem

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, “Why me? Why don’t I have a father?” … But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, “But if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?” — LeBron James

Last year for Father’s Day, I wrote a column on “Successful men who grew up fatherless.” I received numerous feedback, including a touching letter from a mother who said her young daughter cried and was inspired when she read the title of that piece because her dad had left them when she was still a child.

I forever remember people, past or present, who have become successful despite their fatherless childhood because my own father died a month before my seventh birthday.

Another reader, Philippine Business Bank (PBB) chairman Francis T. Lee, said my column last year missed a person among business tycoons who grew up fatherless — the “rags-to-riches” Zest-O juice and PBB founder Alfredo “Fred” Yao, who was only 12 years old when his father died and who had to struggle through hardships.

Indeed, I recall a long chat with Fred Yao in the mid-1990s at his office in the early evening. When our conversation delved into his fatherless youth, tears welled in his eyes. I didn’t tell Fred Yao that I empathized with him, that I had also lost my dad as a kid and that I know exactly how he felt.

One of my favorite self-made entrepreneurs is John Gokongwei, Jr., not just because he is so well-read, not only because his life of struggle and his visionary ventures are inspiring. One big reason I admire him is because he overcame the adversity of a fatherless youth. His uncle Filinvest Group co-founder Andrew Gotianun recently mentioned to me that Gokongwei’s dad “was a very good person,” that he died due to typhoid fever at age 35 when Gokongwei was then only age 13.

FOREVER IN SEARCH

OF ONE’S LOST FATHER

Growing up fatherless creates a bottomless abyss in one’s heart. Whatever our age and future circumstances, we will forever be searching for our dad. Why have I become an expert in our clan’s over 200-year-old history in the Philippines and interviewed kin from all branches? It was due to my endless research about my dad, plus anything, anyone or everything connected to him.

As a child, I had only vague but distinctly fond memories of my father — his personally fetching us at school, his driving us to Rizal Park, our eating out in restaurants. Mom recounted that he had saved my life as a baby during a big quake, taking me out of the crib just seconds before the fluorescent light on the ceiling crashed into my crib.

Dad seemed ecumenical, he used to be a Catholic as well as a Buddhist and Taoist. As a kid, I remember he and mom bringing my younger sister and me to a church where we lighted little candles in an area filled with many other beautiful lighted candles. I have no idea which particular Catholic church it was, but it was unforgettable.

Though our fifth half-brother Jaime had brought a pastor to our dad’s hospital bed for his eventual conversion and our family became born-again Christians due to our going to a Protestant school, I still am delighted and awed when visiting Catholic churches and lighting prayer candles. I just inexplicably love churches with prayer candles, whether it’s in Baclaran, Quiapo, San Sebastian, the Baclayon Church of Bohol, the historic Catholic, Orthodox, Coptic cathedrals of Europe, Turkey or Egypt.

Our father was tall and had a strong personality. As a kid seated at the back of the car he was driving, I remember wondering why and how the moon up in the night sky was constantly following us wherever we went!

My younger sister Marilou was papa’s daughter, and often on Sunday mornings I’d wake up to discover that she and our father were already gone to have breakfast in some café or resto. Once a boy at kindergarten tried to bully my sister, dad stormed into the school and literally warned off the naughty boy with his lighted tobacco!

My sister and I would play pranks on our dad, sometimes stealing his cigars from the wooden boxes and taking out the red-colored labels to play around as our rings. 

LOVE FOR A DAD WHOM

I REALLY NEVER KNEW

I recall dad was boss of a sawmill business in Tondo, Manila, where we also lived on the second-floor of the office building. My last memories of him were of our after-school visits to the hospital. My younger sister seemed more prescient or mature than I was and she cried during the hospital visits, but I didn’t realize that dad was critically ill.

His death was indescribably sad, bleak. We not only lost a protective loving father, our lives turned upside down. We moved from a sprawling sawmill compound in Manila to a rented bungalow when he got sick. After his demise, we moved to a small apartment in Quezon City where our furniture — from the long dining table to the huge beds — couldn’t fit. We lost business, trucks, dogs, maids, cooks, drivers, big cars. Luckily, our teacher-mom was a heroic woman, a gutsy and loving single parent.

Due to our being dad’s children from his second marriage when he was already a widower, our side of the family didn’t inherit any business or wealth, but I was and am exceedingly proud of him. Dad was well-educated and multi-lingual — fluent in English, Tagalog, Hokkien and Mandarin. People extolled his business prowess and work ethic, and mom passed on tales of his life that he himself used to tell her.

Among the former employees dad trained and who became future self-made tycoons included the late Lee Tian Kay who founded Mackay Machinery, which in the 1960s and 1970s was the Philippines’ top sawmill/logging machinery supplier; also Samuel Lee Malapas who became a garments businessman, steel mill owner and once national president of the Long Se or Lee clan association of the Philippines.

Though a sixth-generation scion of a top ethnic Chinese business family in the Manila lumber trade since the 19th century, dad wasn’t a spoiled child because he wasn’t the eldest son. I heard he became my grandfather’s favorite son at age 18, when he exhibited leadership and entrepreneurial qualities. Dad became boss of the clan’s sawmill business at age 25, after grandfather suddenly died of a stroke. Dad grew the firm.

Dad was in his mid-50s and had just lost control of the clan’s sawmill business due to a bitter legal squabble versus our grandfather’s second wife plus his other kin, when I was born. Unknown to me as a kid, he was then operating his own but much smaller fledging sawmill firm and fighting a protracted legal battle, which I believed caused him extreme stress leading to his cancer and death at only age 63. 

Do I feel bitter and disconsolate that I never had a father during my youth? No. It’s more of a sadness and forever missing dad, but no bitterness or rancor whatsoever, because I was blessed with an exceptional mother who was both a good dad and a great mom to us, and because I believe that we should not question the wisdom of God’s will.

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