My cousins called him “Zeus” or “the Americano” every now and then. This was my father. He loved to preside over dinner-table conversations and would sometimes even instigate discussions of controversial nature to hear how and what we thought. Of course, he won every discussion, and characteristically would say “You Filipinos . . . in my country, God’s country. . . “ We all knew he was referring to the United States. That was his country, and he never tired of extolling her virtues.
Emiterio P. Reyes. That’s how he always signed his name. He never left out the “P” which stood for “Panganiban,” his mother’s maiden name. If he were alive today, he would be 121 years old. The story is, at 13 years of age he joined the US Navy. He added 3 years to his age on his papers and off he went to see the world to escape his “fearsome” American Thomasite teacher. At that time the Philippines was an American territory. Somehow he was accepted in the US Navy. So began the adventure of this third grader that spoke very broken English. He traveled the world before there were the Iron Curtain and the Bamboo Curtain. He saw active duty in World Wars I and II. The family joke was he went to war not with a rifle, but with a coffee pot! He put in 33 years of service and was a Chief Petty Officer when he retired. He was very proud of how he had conducted his life with very scant formal education.
Growing up, I was unaware of how differently my father was raising his family. He was a product of two cultures and many a time I would hear him pontificating about how “You Filipinos just can’t be completely honest. Even if you mean ‘yes’, you say ‘no’. Why can’t you be frank?” This is a complaint about the Asian way of non-direct communication. When our neighbor gave him a bad time about wasting his money on having his girls (there were four of us) go to college, I heard him say, “Listen, their being girls is all the more reason to get them educated.”
Years ago, a friend asked me how it was that I was a Protestant though the Philippines was a Roman Catholic country. The answer goes back to the life-changing experience my father had as a young man. One night as he was walking on a city street in the United States, five guys mugged him. He was beaten up and left sprawled on the sidewalk. A kind man from a nearby rescue mission came to his aid. My father talked about getting even etc. etc. And the kind man admonished him that vengeance belonged to God. I believe this was the first time he heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. When he went back to the Philippines, he and my mother looked for a church that preached the same. He raised his family in this faith, teaching them from the Bible. The church became a very vital part of our lives.
I have fond memory of little things he did that may have not have meant much to him, but did to me – how he would take me to the ferry landing at the American naval base at Sangley Point, so I could take the ferry boat to Manila during my college days. He would sometimes treat me to an American breakfast, just the two of us, at one of the base cafeterias. One summer I spent a month in a Christian camp in Southern Philippines. During one mail call I was sure I wouldn’t get any mail, so I announced to everyone that my parents were not into writing and it was fine if I didn’t get any mail. To my great surprise and everyone’s amusement, I got a very thick brown envelope from home. He had sent me a short note with the four-page comics portion of the Sunday paper! Then there was that time he took me to the Manila Airport for my trip back to my teaching post in Mindanao. He stood by the lamp post pretending to read a newspaper, but my quick glance at him revealed his tears at seeing his young daughter fly so far away from home.
When Don and I got engaged, Don asked my father for permission to take me to his home to meet his parents. He was adamantly against it. “I cannot allow my daughter to make this trip with you,” he told Don so strongly. (His parents were in Fresno, a good 3-hour drive from San Francisco where we lived.) “You tell your parents to come here and ask me for my daughter’s hand in marriage.” By American standards, he was being hard-headed and stubborn. Don had fears that his parents would not agree to driving the distance from Fresno. (His dad was just as bullheaded as my father was!) But they did come. Don’s Dad asked for my hand in marriage in traditional fashion, over a beautiful dinner hosted by my parents at the Empress of China restaurant in Chinatown. Days later he explained his action to me. Before he married my mother, he had an Irish girlfriend. When he proposed to her and talked to her parents about it, her father rejected him saying, “No Chinaman is going to marry my daughter!” My father wanted to make sure that my American future in-laws would treat me with respect. Many years later, Don’s sister told me her Dad’s account of that evening. She said they went home completely impressed by my parents. They were so proud that Don chose a girl with good values.
It is amazing that though he has been gone a long time, there’s hardly a day passes that I do not feel his imprint on my life. Sometimes I hear him in what I say. “It is important that you make your bed soon as you get up,” I would tell myself and everyone else in my family. This was a discipline my father learned while a young sailor. I open my linen closet, and I notice how I fold my linens, exactly the way he did. He had worked as a steward for an Admiral and knew how to run a household. “When you open a door, you close it behind you.” A habit I have easily acquired. When I oversleep, I tell myself, “Look to the ant you sluggard . . .” One of my father’s favorite Bible quotes. He impressed upon us the importance of being true to one’s word, citing Matthew 5:36-37, "Nor shall you make an oath by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black. But let your statement be, 'Yes, yes ' or 'No, no'; anything beyond these is of evil.” Years ago, I lost my whole Philippine stamp collection to a friend, and realized how deeply this admonition has been impressed in my heart and brain. My friend had just started a Philippines stamp collection and I promised to give her my duplicates. I made a mistake and inadvertently gave her my own collection. My friend realized my mistake and tried to give me back the stamps, but I couldn’t take it back because I had given her my word. I thought my father would have been proud of me, but I did feel sad at losing my collection.
His legacy runs the gamut of varied lessons and values - how to make a perfect pie crust, how to make a bed, how one has to be reliable, to being honest in my dealings, to working hard and being diligent, to caring not just in words but in deeds, to being balanced in conducting my life (“Too much of even the good things is no good.”) This third grader ran away from his American school teacher in the Philippines and into a faith in an encounter in an American city street, a faith that permeated our whole lives. Today, that faith lives on in his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. A son, three grandsons, and a son-in-law have been pastors serving in New York, the Bay Area, in Arizona and in foreign missionfields. They have served in ministries in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan, in campus ministries, youth work and in helping children traumatized by war in Bosnia, Israel, China, etc. Not a bad legacy for one who spoke broken English and had very scant formal education.
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