[Oe List ...] Fwd: [NAFAUM] Short takes, news - February 1

[Jaime R Vergara]

A version without the photo was in today's Saipan Tribune.  The following made the rounds on the Methodist listserv of Filipino-Americans as well as the Realistic Living folks of which I am a part.  Someone suggested that I should share it with OE colleagues.


Mom was in ITI '74 with the Cramers and Harry W; Dad was with ITI '73 with the Marshalls and a bevy of SEAPAC colleagues.



The usual caveat: if curious, welcome; not, see you at the next bend.




 
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-yr old Mom in between teaching semester in Huanghe’s Dong Bei, but the image of mother struck us this past year as we herd China referred to as ‘motherland’, compared to European and patriarchal countries’ Fatherland. Singular bold images of contrast has father proud to send his offsprings to war and uphold his name’s reputation, while mother keeps her roost at home in safety and health.




 
Mama Lucrecia Vergara has five children, girls on bookends, me at the head of the middle male 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. Eldest and third are retired; second, has a new set of tires.  Fourth and fifth ploughing along.
 
None in our family went chasing after the limelight, but mother stumbled her way into it. Not unlike many (wife of the 19th US 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.  She stayed home 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 discrete 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 on the groundbreaking ceremony as the first donor towards the building.
 
Mother is now physically frail, confined to her apartment in Aala downtown Oahu. Father who made it to 95 lays since 2005 in tranquil Mililani, 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 mi Mama mia. “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 burden to public coffers. Not this mother. She’s poor, nay, indigent without being destitute, but she is rich in memories. Lying in 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.
 
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 offsprings in a learning center at its northeast corner, carries the heartbeat of a woman in 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. 
 
Jaime, text; Alex, photo, sons
 



 

Pong Javier 
www.nfaaum.org/filipino.html
 
 
 

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