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

[Doris Hahn]

What wonderful pictures, Jaime--your words and the photograph.
Doris Hahn

2012/2/1 Jaime R Vergara <svesjaime at aol.com>

> 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.
>
>   [image: LucretiaVr.jpg]
>
> 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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