Felisa Tan Li

his is one of those times in life where you find yourself sitting in front of a keyboard trying to figure out how to honor in words the most important person in your life, knowing you will never have the fortune of being in her presence again. That realization was delivered to me in the early morning hours of March 28th, when the powerhouse that was my mom drew her last breath and left a world that brightened in response to her mere existence in it. As I weep uncontrollably, I can’t help but think about what she would be telling me right now. “Why you crying, Jo Jo? You not a baby. It’s natural.” But there is nothing natural to me about the extinction of a light and a force like my mom. The sheer energy that was Felisa.

How could she be gone? How am I to survive it?

If you never had the fortune of knowing Felisa, she was born into an affluent family in 1930’s Manila, the centerpiece of 6 children and fiercely independent. That independence would lay the foundation for a woman who wrote her own rules and through sheer will, forged her own path becoming the singular creature who was my mom.

Felisa was tough. She was a tom boy. While her sister learned to sew and cook, Felisa longed to read, fish, climb trees, and travel. Where her mother admonished her, her father encouraged a sense of adventure leading to an eventual escape to Taiwan in 1964 to marry a poor man, an exiled Chinese soldier, of whom her mother disapproved, a man known only to her through 7 years of letters. She was a teacher, whose patient yet stern approach taught a myriad of cousins, nieces and nephews. She was a benefactress, who never turned away from friends or relatives in their time of need, even when she struggled herself to make her own family in a foreign land with all the cards stacked against her. She was mighty. She threw her dainty 4’5” frame into all manner of occupations working as the only female crane operator in an industrial steel mill to taking a second job as a nursing home caregiver when her husband lost his job to the back breaking monotony of an assembly line worker, at times functioning as a typist at night to support her husband’s pursuit of advanced degrees, securing a better life for her family. Yeah, Felisa was tough. She never looked back. Never felt the sting of falling from such fortunes. She focused on the future and the American Dream.

And now with her passing, I can’t help but wonder how Days of Our Lives can continue to broadcast without her faithful viewership, how the coffee industry can sustain without her endless consumption, or how a world as dark as it can be at times could ever be graced with light again without her brilliant mischievous smile to illuminate the way. I suppose the answer is that she lives in all who loved her, of which evades enumeration. I suppose we should be grateful for the 95 years that we had. And as I know this to be true, I also know whatever this experiment of living is will suffer forever from her absence.

So now, alone in a darkened room mirroring the emptiness that will forever occupy my heart, I grieve with the kind of grief that only a child can grieve a parent, with only the kind of grief that can never be fully extinguished and becomes a part of who you will be from this day forward, drawing strength from the knowledge that if I am ever considered joyful, that’s my mom – if ever I make you laugh, that’s Felisa shining through me - and if ever I am lucky enough to leave something better than I found it, the world has my mom to thank. 

I love you always, ma. Thank you for sharing your indomitable spirit with the world and for being the best part of me.