CONTRIBUTED
We remember mothers today, my mom, yours, their moms, and their mothers. And of course, the mother of my kids, and her mom.
It’s the infinite love of Mother’s Day.
You can’t stop at one. There are never enough cards.
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But, of course, I want to drill down to the mother I know best. My own.
Mom was not a Tiger Mom really. We didn’t have those in my generation really. She wanted me to get an education, and to strive to be better. But mom was no tiger. More lamb.
Emil Guillermo with his mom | CONTRIBUTED
She was Lamb Mom.
She was quiet and reverential. As a Catholic woman, she prayed a lot. But she was also deferential. She was small and her physicality meant she had to be wise not to be overcome or bamboozled by overt strength.
Maybe she learned that in the Philippines, where my mom grew up in a tough part of Manila during World War II during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.
She worked in a seamstress shop and hid under sewing machines to avoid being taken by soldiers who were looking for women to be comfort women.
They never found my mom.
Instead, she was taken my a shop patron, an older Spanish woman who I only know as Lola Angelita.
The angel.
My mother was essentially her “valet/daughter,” who traveled with her “lola” to San Francisco after the war.
There, near the old Fillmore and St. Dominic’s Church, they found a community of Filipino women who had become the answer to the Filipino bachelors who had been waiting for decades for more Filipino women to arrive to the US to start families.
Anti-miscegenation laws prevented race-mixing. Intended mostly to keep Blacks from marrying whites and other races, it applied to Filipinos as well. But when the ratio of Filipino men to women was more than 10-1 in those days, the odds were bad for Filipino families. That explains my father’s arrival in the 1920s to the US, but no family until the 1950s.
Filipino baby boom
When my mother and Lola Angelita arrived in San Francisco, they joined that group of women who were the beginning of a Filipino baby boom that spurred the growth of the Filipino community in San Francisco.
They got busy.
They were making up for a lost generation.
That’s what comes to mind when I think about Mothers Day, and all the mothers, and mine too.
Happy Mother’s Day.
I talk more about my mom – more lamb, than tiger – and her love of the pope, any pope, in my show “69, Emil Amok: Anchorman—The News Made Me Do It,” when I premiere another version of my “Amok” monologues at the San Diego International Fringe Festival this week starting Thursday, May 14, 6 p.m., with performances at various times through May 23. Tickets available here.
Emil Guillermo is an award-winning journalist, news analyst, comic stage performer and former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.” He writes for the Inquirer.net’s US Channel. He has written a weekly “Amok” column on Asian American, race and social justice issues for more than 30 years. Find him on YouTube, patreon and substack.
