Bonus

I was feeling totally exhausted the other day after classes that ended at 6 p.m. and a meeting that extended up to 9 p.m. I was also feeling quite depressed, wondering if, indeed, my relatives and friends were right in saying only martyrs and fools stay on teaching.

Driving home, I told myself to snap out of the depression, reminding myself that when we’re tired, the mind becomes treacherous, twisting and turning our emotions. I found comfort, too, in remembering that earlier that day, my mother had a wonderful visitor, a student of hers some 60 years ago.

That morning I was rushing out of my parents’ home to get to UP when the visitor arrived, saying she wanted to see my mother. She introduced herself in Chinese: “I’m your mother’s godchild, Rosa Chua-Esteban.” I paused; I had never met her but the name rang a bell, my mother having mentioned it several times.

As with other visitors who come to see my mother, I warned Rosa, “My mother might not recognize you.” Rosa smiled and said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going on a trip and wanted to see her before I leave.”

We entered my mother’s bedroom and I tried to jog her memory: “This is Rosa. She was your student in Quiapo Anglo many years ago.” Rosa chimed in, “In Grade 2, language and spelling.” I smiled, knowing that although I don’t have dementia, I don’t recognize most of my former students who come up to me. My mother must have taught hundreds, maybe a thousand, in her years at Quiapo Anglo and St. Stephen’s, teaching English, math and home economics.

My mother was apologetic, saying, “I can’t remember, I can’t remember.” And Rosa was very understanding: “Ninang (Godmother), it’s all right. You’re doing well.” I was relieved. Asians tend to inappropriately tease the elderly with memory problems (“Oh, how can you not remember me?”), which distresses them even more. My mother seemed to appreciate not being goaded. “You’re so pretty,” she complimented her godchild several times, and indeed Rosa was one grand Lola. She told me about how both my parents had been her teachers, and how much of an impact they had on her life. She had lost her mother very early, and my parents gave her the time and support she needed. She herself went on to teach, becoming a supervisor at St. Jude’s and retiring a few years ago.

Teacher, teacher

Listening to Rosa, I thought of a different kind of visitor a few weeks earlier: a Chinese-American who had phoned in from the United States asking me for help to find information on his father, one of the Chinese consular officials executed in 1942 by the Japanese. During our conversation he told me that his and my mother’s families had been very close and that my mother had tutored him almost daily in reading and writing during the war. When he eventually migrated to the United States, he had enough knowledge of English to get into a school there, and he credits this asset to my mother. At the time she was doing this tutoring, she had not received formal university training in education, but it was clear she had instincts for teaching.

My mother never told me about that tutoring, nor about her godchild Rosa. She had many stories about teaching but was almost self-deprecating about it: “Oh, I had students who were older than I was,” or “My goodness, it was so hard learning the new math.” But even as a child, I could tell she was remembered, and loved, by former students who would approach her on the street, in a restaurant, even in a plane: “Sien si, sien si” (“Teacher, teacher” in Hokkien Minnan) or “Miss Lim, Miss Lim” (her maiden name).

These days she’s homebound but I still run into people who remember her, not as a teacher but as the nice Lola. I meet them in all kinds of places: in my kids’ schools, groceries, even banks. They say: “She always had something for us, siomai, siopao, hopia.” Or “Uy, Lola used to bring your kids here for swimming lessons. How is she?”  Sometimes they go, “She was just here the other month,” and I smile, with a tinge of sadness, because in the last year and a half she only goes out for her hospital rehab sessions.

There are times when I find myself missing my mother. Even if she’s physically present, she rarely talks now. I miss the conversations, even the arguments. I bought a copy of Teresita Gimenez Maceda’s “Bride of War,” about the author’s mother and life during the Japanese occupation, but I had to put it down because I kept thinking of my own mother. I think this summer I’ll pick it up again, being more accepting of my mother’s condition. I remind myself, especially when I hear all these wonderful stories about her, that she’s still very much around. That’s my mom, I proudly respond.

She comes alive, too, with the kids, when they storm into her room, screaming “Lola! Lola!” and jumping into her bed. What amazes me most is when they—my mother and the kids—all become extraordinarily quiet, serene and contented, communicating with each other in a secret language of touching, hugging, snuggling.

Six months

To prepare for today’s column, I dug out my mother’s hospital records to look up a “discharge summary” dated July 28, 1965, from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. It was typewritten, with Chinese words scribbled next to medical terms, added by my father as he tried to decipher the report. It was a grim report, about the patient having gone through surgery to remove almost her entire stomach. The diagnosis was “adenocarcinoma of the stomach (linitis plastica),” a type of cancer with very poor prognosis even today, almost 50 years later.

I was too young at that time to know what was happening except that my mother was very sick. We had trips to the hospitals, sometimes in the middle of the night when she would have terrible abdominal pains. My relatives told me, when I was older, that they were all preparing to care for two orphans: my sister and me. Her doctors gave her six months.

Those six months passed, turned to years, and several Christmases when my mother would send gift packages to her surgeons in the United States. She’s outlived many people even as she battles new health problems. I joke about how she has strokes like other people have colds. When I explain her medical history to new attending doctors, they’re astounded. “Bonus na bonus,” they say, referring to all these added years.

She’s strong, I assure the doctors, and I don’t mean it just in the physical sense. My mother is tenacious about living, but always because of a sense of duty, of having to be strong for others: my father, her children, her friends, her students.

These days I know I have to be strong, too—for her, and to carry on her passion for teaching. I will continue to teach for as long as I can, payback for the bonus years my mother has had, and the bonus that is my mother.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph