Mama mia, Cara mia

More than a year ago, we wrote of our encounter along the Amur  River in Heihe, Heilongjiang, with a statue simply identified as Mu Qin (mother), signifying the source and sustainer of life, in this case the Heilongjiang.

In China, the mother of all mothers, and also dubbed as the “cradle of civilization,” is the mighty Huanghe, the Yellow River, weaving a route that is usually drawn like a dragon with its tail up the foothills of Qinghai through 9 provinces, widening past Henan into its head at Bohai Sea, a 5,500-km journey.

We are briefly in Honolulu to visit 91-year-old Mom in between teaching semesters in Huanghe’s Dong Bei, but the “image of mother” stuck as it struck us this past year when we heard China referred to as “motherland,” compared to European and patriarchal countries’ Fatherland. Singular bold images of contrast has “father” proud to send his offspring to war and uphold his name’s reputation, while “mother” keeps her roost at home in safety and health.

Mama Lucrecia has five children, girls on bookends, me at the head of the middle section, with one brother a military and police chaplain, and the other in a State law enforcement office. Eldest sister is a retired teacher in the Philippines, and youngest a nurse in one of Oahu’s hospitals.

None in our family went chasing after the limelight, but mother stumbled her way into it. Not unlike many (wife of the 19th U.S. President was the first to attend college, with current Michelle Obama as the most academically inclined, slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton), mother never finished high school to care for her brood.

Migrating to the United States with her Philippine retired Methodist pastor husband, she cooked for residents of Hale Kipa, a discreet halfway house for juvenile delinquents, where she was consistently voted as the “Counselor of the Year.” It appears that she did as much counseling to her wards as she did feeding them nutritious meals.

It was while being a part-time cook that she attended a meeting to construct a Filipino Community Center in Waipahu. Impatient with the wealth of gab but, in her view, paucity of deeds, she finally got up in the meeting, waved a $100 check and said in effect that the group can go on talking but the deed might get moving faster if everyone around the table put their money where their mouths were.

The FilCom (its Pinoy endearing name) is now the largest Filipino community center outside of the Philippines with distinguished Filipino-Hawaiian members on its staff and board. Mother’s name was interred with the century time capsule buried at the groundbreaking ceremony as the first donor toward the building.

Mother is now physically frail, confined to her apartment in Aala downtown Oahu. Father, who made it to 95, lies in tranquil Mililani since 2005, served Governor Ariyoshi’s Commission on Aging, and worked part-time with the senior companion program. One would think mother could easily avail of all the senior citizen public services available.

Not Mama mia. She won’t have any of it. “When I came to this country, I told the immigration officer that I will never be a ward of the state,” she intones in her polished Ilocandia pride, “and I intend to be faithful to my promise.” To the quiet dismay of her children, she told social services that she did not need the company of a senior companion nor meals from communal kitchens. In her characteristic Filipina taray (untranslatable), she says: “With three children on island, if I am not cared for, that’s my problem, and no one else’s.”

One of the three children has assumed the primary caregiver role; a granddaughter joins Uncles and Auntie to look after her quiet but dignified fading into the sunset of her years.

Popular myths tag immigrants as opportunistic burdens to public coffers. Not this mother. She’s poor, nay, indigent without being destitute, but she is rich in memories. Lying on her bed where she now spends most of her time, she occasionally looks into a couple of her albums, with her standing beside towering Mayor Jeremy Harris in her Filipina fineries, or beaming with Joyce Fasi who occasionally drove her to work even when husband Frank Fasi was no longer city mayor.

Our lowly cook from up the hill on Punahou have photos with the likes of Governors Cayetano and Lingle, Rep. Hirono and Congressman now Governor Abercrombie, to name easily recognizable figures, taken on genuine occasions where she was an active participant.

One of the houses used in the Golden Globe-awarded movie Descendants with George Clooney is an old Hawaiian plantation dwelling on Honolulu’s Makiki, its first upscale neighborhood. My sister and I looked at each other when it first flashed on the screen. Mom and Dad took care of the building before it became the meditation center it is today.

China is a long way from Sa Wei Yi (Hawaii) and love from a distance is more sentiment than real, so this son who now relates to Huanghe’s multitudinous offspring in a learning center at its northeast corner, carries the heartbeat of a woman in a bed at Aala. Creating a new role of being a Story Warrior, we chronicle the graceful ordinariness of humans like my mother, to say again that mere existence itself is already a gift, a winsome option and a treasure to be celebrated. What we do with it, and the story we relate, is what makes us human.