The letter writer and her mother

Unconditional love is the greatest gift of all. — Sylvia Massara

Every year on Mother’s Day, we read or hear so many heartening tales about mothers and their boundless love for their children. Let me share a different story.

In the mid-20th century after World War II and amid a raging revolution, a beautiful young woman and youngest child of her family from a coastal city of Fujian province in south China was assigned as a public school teacher in a rural village. An urbane third-generation scion of an ethnic Chinese family from the Philippines vacationed in his ancestral village and he learned about the beautiful teacher. He introduced himself as a doctor and courted her. They eventually got engaged and then a festive wedding took place.

Unlike most sojourners of the overseas Chinese diaspora who migrated due to economic hardships or other problems, this teacher chose to migrate to the Philippines out of love. When the teacher tearfully bade farewell to her beloved widowed mother, she promised to always write letters and said she would return soon for visits.

The newlywed couple spent their honeymoon in the then fabulous “Paris of the Orient,” the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, where the husband processed the young teacher’s immigration documents in the Philippine Consulate. She started writing letters to her mother and to her relatives. She recalled staying at a charming hotel where their window had a view of fresh flower sellers in the street. Soon after the couple arrived in post-war Manila, the land of their ancestors was overrun by a revolution, one that triumphed and abruptly cut off direct links with the Philippines due to ideological differences.

The young couple settled in a nice home in the Malate district. The former teacher kept her promise: she sent a detailed letter in her elegant calligraphy every month to her mother as well as letters to her three older sisters, her nephews, and nieces.

The idyllic marriage soon unravelled. The ex-teacher realized that her husband was an incorrigible playboy. She nevertheless continued sending letters to her mom about her happy life, without mentioning any of her growing troubles. The husband’s ex-schoolmate, best friend, and a future national government leader recalled that he would accompany the former to the nightclubs on Roxas Boulevard until they would close in the wee hours of the morning with both of them as the very last customers. This best friend said that if not for his vices, the husband was a brilliant guy and could have become among the richest entrepreneurs in the Philippines.

The former teacher wrote in her monthly letters to her beloved mother that she had decided to resume teaching, that her life was blissful, even though the harsh reality was that she had decided to leave her husband — a move that, in the 1950s, wasn’t common: married couples rarely broke up over infidelities, let alone a wife who was an immigrant and totally new to her adopted land.

She sought work as a Chinese-language teacher in various schools throughout the Philippines, mostly in provincial cities in order to keep away from her husband.

Before the teacher left her troubled marriage, she and her husband had adopted a son. The adopted son was born out of wedlock, sired by the guy’s younger brother with a woman who tried to abort the pregnancy, so the baby was born sickly.

Every month through the years without fail, the teacher sent her mother letters of her happy fictitious life and she also saved her wages to remit as gifts. Her letters passed via Hong Kong, since there were still no direct flights and no official ties between Communist-ruled Mainland China and her adopted land of the Philippines. The teacher’s elegantly handwritten letters to her mother every month described her happy and peaceful existence. She didn’t want her beloved mom to worry about her youngest child alone overseas, whose real life was that of a teacher who had left an unfaithful husband and was raising an ailing adopted son.

She worked in various Chinese-language schools in different parts of the archipelago — Cebu City, Dumaguete City, Tabaco City in Albay province, Cabanatuan and San Jose cities of Nueva Ecija, Tarlac City, cities in Metro Manila, etc. She was also the first principal of the Philippine Institute of Quezon City (PIQC). Once, the husband went to Cebu seeking to reconcile, but she turned him down.

The teacher’s dutiful monthly letters recounting her good life continued, interrupted only when she relayed the bad news about her adopted son’s death. Not long after, the estranged husband also died in Manila when she was then teaching at the Tabaco Pei Ching School in Bicol.

Upon receiving news of her estranged husband’s demise, she decided to travel to the city on her own and was at the wake up to the funeral to perform her duties as a widow, based on Confucian tradition.

For years, she didn’t say bad things about her husband, preferring to remember his love and their good times together. Stories of their troubled marriage would only eventually be recounted many years later by her closest friends. The widowed teacher continued faithfully writing letters and sending gifts to her aging mother, assuring her that her life was happy and peaceful. When the teacher was in her early 40s, a fellow teacher’s husband introduced her to his cousin who was also a widower and a talented entrepreneur in his 50s.

The entrepreneur courted her, even when she eventually served as a principal of a small and now defunct Chinese-language elementary school in Iba, Zambales. He drove all the way from Manila to Iba in the 1960s to visit her on weekends.

The teacher later wrote her mother a happy letter announcing her remarriage to the entrepreneur. She subsequently mailed more good news: she was giving birth to a son and, a year later, a daughter.

The teacher continued writing happy letters to her mother every month, despite her husband dying of cancer after several years of their marriage, his business folding up, and the teacher losing a legal battle over his assets with the husband’s children from his late first wife. She never shared her grief with her mom.

The teacher raised her two children by herself without rancor or bitterness, leading a happy yet simple life of hard work, frugality, love of books and music, unwavering Christian faith, and indomitable hope.

In sickness and in health, through happiness and tears, the teacher lovingly continued sending happy letters home every month to her mother and for years always kept her mother’s framed picture by her bedside desk. She kept writing until one evening, her two children saw her crying when news came that her beloved mother had died.

Who was that filial letter-writer teacher, who out of love never let her mom know how she had stoically overcome many crises in life? She was my late mother.

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