A Tribute to Esperanza Luna
Thinking of Ma’s birthday tomorrow, April 7. Born in 1915 during American occupation that supposedly ended in 1902. The Thomasite teachers and various Protestant missionaries have landed. While WW1 loomed on the other side of the world, the U.S. established a civil government in the Philippines and named the islands as part of its “collaborative empire”.
My mother was probably born to an ilustrado class. Belonging to a Luna lineage of artists, scientists, revolutionaries (Juan and Antonio and Joaquin), she herself was classically trained as a concert pianist. She told us that when she was learning piano, it had to be done surreptitiously (and I’m guessing it’s because of the growing influence of American patriarchal values). She did become a piano teacher. I think we were the only family I knew who was familiar with Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff and others.
By the time she married my Tatang, it was wartime again, this time with the Japanese forces trying to establish the Greater East Asian Co Prosperity Sphere. Japan lost that war.
My Ima and Tatang were newly married and starting a family with war in the background. The eldest son was born in 1942, followed by five daughters between 1944 and 1957. My Tatang said he was active in the resistance movement but never said aloud that he was a member of the Hukbalahap movement.
We had settled in Pampanga and my Tatang found a job at the largest U.S. military base at that time, Clark Air Base, while my Ima continued to supplement his income with her piano teaching. Sometimes she would have piano students come to our home or she would visit the student if they had a piano at home. She often walked to and from these gigs, sometimes chased and bitten by dogs. I remember when she had to have 25 anti-rabies injections! She also gave Mr. Tongol, the piano tuner, a steady income from having to tune our piano regularly.
Amidst the larger historical events, our local rural lives navigated the modern world as it slowly encroached on our provincial life, adorned a bit by my mother’s cosmopolitan ways but shy and gentle demeanor. She took pride in sewing all our clothes and having us wear new clothes to church first. Having converted from Catholicism to Methodist, we were also unconsciously being shaped into becoming dreamers of the “American dream.”
Still, she kept our home and hearth with the warmth and deliciousness of her cooking. Making sure that we, too, learned how to butcher a chicken, or skin a frog, gut a fish, saute vegetables, or make various delicious meat dishes. I love best her kilawin and lutung toyo. Often, when we didn’t have enough money to spend at the wet market, she knew how to extend a simple dish, like adding cabbage and broth to canned corned beef and turning it into a large pot of soup. As we didn’t rely on cookbooks or youtube recipes like we do today, I learned how to cook by being with my mother in the kitchen.
Now that I am almost the same age as my mother in her 70s, I look back at the 40+ years on Turtle Island. Once, when she visited us in our CA home, she said she felt overwhelmed by what her children have accomplished in life. She couldn’t comprehend how the world has changed her children. I don’t know what she had dreamed about what each of us could become. She almost couldn’t find the words to tell us how she felt about each of us.
She saw her life as simple: it was local, community-based, home-bound. In her daily journal that I gathered after she passed away, her entries were simple notations about who among her children have visited or have called long distance from Canada, Florida, Detroit, California. She also noted visitors or relatives that came to visit that day. Once in a while there was an entry about my Dad’s busyness and how lonely she felt when she had no one to talk to.
Today, I am teary-eyed as I meditate on my Mother’s life.She is 110 years old today. I have her photo on my altar. I find myself talking to her more than I talk with my Dad. It feels strange now because I grew up thinking that I am more like my Dad.
I now think of all the details of her life that I don’t know because by the time I was old and wise enough to ask her to tell me stories about her early life, she said her memories have started to fade.
So I re-imagine her life and connect her to a longer lineage that is now mine to reclaim and continue..
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Zen Buddhist teacher, says that birth and death are just concepts. Who we are is a continuation of an ongoing story that has no beginning and no end.
So as I celebrate my mother’s life today. I can see that I am her continuation. Yes, she knew what suffering was. She also knew what she wanted her continuation to be: It was going to be good. Her children would call her Blessed.
Her name is Esperanza Luna — Hope, Moon! It is my compass pointing to my north star and the Moons that are yet to be discovered and named.
