The interview

As part of an assignment, my 13 year old had to interview my mother about her life when she was a child. My mother was 3 years old and the 7th of 9 children, when the Japanese occupied the Phillipine Islands. My son thought that was an interesting topic and really wanted to explore that in depth. He recently asked (more like demanded but such is the life of a mother) that I transcribe the interview for him. Here's the thing I don't want him to know.

I'm glad he made me do that.

While my mother had told me things about that time in her life, it was always a scant collection of stories. Most of the time she said that she didn't remember too much because she was so little.

In this interview she spoke of how her father was pulled out of their apartment in the city by the Japanese a number of times and questioned. Her mother and her siblings kept vigil, praying and worrying all night until my grandfather came home. My grandfather was not a part of the government or an official of some sort. He was a CPA. Mom recounted how they fled the city in a horse drawn cart. How her brother told them to go to the province because at least there was fresh food there and very few Japanese. The supplies and resources were scarce during the occupation because those things were intercepted by the Japanese and the people had only the soldiers' leavings.  Her eldest brother was in his early teens. She remembers that it was he who had friends in the province farmlands that gave their family refuge. She suspects this brother might have been a guerrilla fighter or at least helped the resistance and the American soldiers. He was maybe 14 - 16 years old at the time. She spoke about how her mother died at age 43, only 5 years after the war ended.

My son asked a question that probably was worded poorly. Maybe he was asking how the family interacted during all of this. How did they cope? What happened during the darkest moments? But no, he instead asked this:

"Did your family feel stress?"

Stress. That euphemism for anything that might bother us like a parking ticket or a library fine. Even the bigger dramas like looking for a job or fixing a septic system pale in comparison to the stressors my grandparents faced. And when he asked the question, to me it felt like a first world question and not anything that remotely applied.

But my mom instead said that she thought it was incredibly stressful for her parents. She said that she thinks that was why her mother died so young; the stress of moving her 9 children, the eldest of whom was helping the resistance and was gone for weeks at a time, and the effort to keep her family together, safe and fed, left her with insufficient reserves to fight off illness when it came.

Mom also talked about her evil stepmother. The kids had nicknamed her "Kabayo," which means "horse." It was not a term of endearment. And before I heard this particular story, I would never have labeled her the evil stepmother. But that is a post for another time.

After I was done transcribing, I did what any good Asian mother would do. I piled on the pressure.

I told my son that he's the eldest grandchild. That he needs to do a great job because he's inadvertently stepped into the role of family historian. There is the chance that his younger cousins and siblings won't have the opportunity to do this interview. As much as it pains me to admit, it could happen.

 And if any of you are lucky enough to have your parents around, set up your recording devices and start talking. You'll be amazed at what you find out.