Mother dearest

Earlier this year, we visited my 91-year-old mother as she independently sleeps her sunset years on the eighth floor of the Aala apartments in Honolulu, cared for by a son and a daughter, and the more than cursory attention of a grandchild.

Mother traces her upbringing around pre-World War II Filipino luminaries of the likes of the Quezons and the Ablans, and later, the Marcoses, so she has a habit of hob-knobbing with folks in high places. She is forever enshrined in Honolulu Pinoy memory as the lady who donated her hard-earned $100 to kick-start the fundraising for what is now the Filipino Community Center in Oahu.

Mother dearest, Mommie dearest, Mother fairest are a few book titles around extolling and chastising personae who significantly played the role to their not-always-grateful offspring. Our title takes a different slant. Instead of focusing on the Mom, we glance over to the brood.

One of the exercises in our oral English class is for the students to talk about a subject they are familiar with-themselves. Zhongwen (Chinese) focuses on social harmony and thereby tends to be general, abstract, polite, and cautious. Yingwen (English) on the other hand insists on what is true and real, grounded on the concrete and verifiable. Or, at least, that’s where the two languages are at in their current state of evolution.

My intro at the start of the semester is, to an irreverent HS classmate who reads my stuff, high-falutin’. Not totally inaccurate, but we are not offended by it for we account to the truth of what we say. Our opening goes: “I am a child of the universe, a citizen of the world. I was born a unique and unrepeatable gift of human life into history. There has not been one like me before, and there will never be another one like me ever again.”

In a culture given to moderation as a virtue, the above sounds extreme, more so when I look 30 folks in the eye and point at each of them saying, “This is also true of you and you and you!”

I then take them back to their process of conception and how each is a 200-million-odd winner of the biggest lottery of their life, and it is not a question of proving themselves that is the issue, but how to live out gloriously the gift of creature-li-ness they were born with. “This is the life I have. I can choose this life or waste it away. This is the life I have,” we chant.

Other than the girls’ expected giggle over our feeble attempt at “sperm” and “ovum” in Chinese, we usually get blank stares of disbelief. They are too trained to think that they have yet to pass a test in order to live an abundant and meaningful life rather than being born with the choice to do so!

In our first attempt at personal introductions as a speaking exercise, a litany of self-effacing generalities issues. Nine weeks later, the struggling newly bilinguals lay out their intro: “Let me tell you who I am, where I came from and where I am going,” they say. We’ve come a long way, baby!

The American Chamber of Commerce has successfully exported Mothers’ Day into China’s calendar, replete with chocolates and greenhoused roses. Heretofore, mothering has been a communal task of care and nurturing so “mother dear” as a focus is only now taking root, more to wean the mother away from breastfeeding into homogenized bottles from Australia than to celebrate the mothering job. The original impulse for the day, of course, was the recognition of the growing dynamic of the young, but alas, it has since been supplanted with the dare to purchase the latest tight-fitting Levis for grandma at 50!

We play with the “C”s to get at the context we usually set when talking about our lives. “Cause” comes naturally; we bloom from the stock that breeds us. Royalty used this to justify privilege in the past; “inalienable right” is the constitutional use.

“Chance” is the big thing in China, relying on being “the right person, in the right place, at the right time” as the sought-after state of being. Wishing someone “good luck” and “good fortune” are holiday wishes, invoking assistance from ancestral spirits in the process. Religion as opiate of the people is true when a symbol system like the bagua (yin-yang with the eight variations of the three stripes) moves over to the realm of superstition and it is this “gambling” instinct (placement by chance) that the casino-obsessed CNMI wishes to exploit.

Our orientation, free, liberated, and democratic is on “Choice.” Mother taught that we choose to relate to the vagaries of birth, the experience of the journey, and the vicissitudes of tomorrow. Choice is the determining factor in the appropriation of the given-ness of our lives, even if we cannot control the outcome of endeavors.

I was newly 20 when only mother (Papa and siblings were 12 hours away from Manila) saw me off a U.S. President Line on a 20-day sail to SF in the ’60s. She did not say much; she had shown enough in 20 years. Twenty days later, in an Oakland room overlooking the Bay upon my arrival, I finally broke down and cried.

A Canadian-Chinese colleague opines that teaching any subject is but my excuse for getting students to reflect and appropriate their lives. My sister reports that there’s a smile on my mother’s face when she sleeps! I smile with her today.