On July 17, 2007, Miss Alicia Y. Chu died in Kabasalan, Zamboanga Sibugay province in the Zamboanga Peninsula region in Mindanao. Only a little over a month before she died, she had made her final trip home to the place where she was born and where the main branch of her family--brother, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces--lived. In truth, they hardly knew her. She was laid to rest in the family plot, her gravestone engraved with the words "Alicia Y. Chu" and underneath, in parentheses (Formerly Sr. Mary Hyacinth, MM).
These two tributes--the first one, which I had written as president of the St. James Academy Alumni Association at the time of her death, was read at her funeral ceremony together with tributes from two other classes; the second, written and delivered at the alumni association's "In Memoriam," the annual remembrance of departed alumni, teachers, and admin staff of St. James Academy in Malabon City, gives us a brief glimpse into her poignant but triumphant story.
In my mind's eye, I still see her: a Filipina nun, the first Filipina nun of the order in the memory of my generation, in the traditional black veil and white habit, on the second-floor balcony above the school entrance after afternoon dismissal. Her perch gave her a perfect bird's-eye view of the main road of the town she had told me much later--when she was no longer in Maryknoll's black-and-white habit--she had liked so much the first time she saw it.
That was in 1958-1959, when the population of Malabon, then a town of Rizal province, was only a little over 60,000. The school where she was assigned--St. James Academy--had only two sections for each grade and year: one for boys, one for girls. Even then it was already the premier school, and the Maryknoll Sisters the most admired order of nuns, in our town.
Sr. Mary Hyacinth was, from the start, unusual in our experience of Maryknoll nuns: not only was she Filipina, she also taught a subject we didn't expect a Maryknoll nun to teach--Biology. The American nuns always taught Religion, or English and English Literature, or Speech. She also liked to spend hours every afternoon on the balcony, talking one by one to the members of our third year class to which she was adviser, trying to get to know the real us. I remember--from my house's own balcony across the street from St. James--looking at her and wondering whether she was making any headway with another member of my particularly reticent and close-mouthed class.
Later, there were other memories of her: a reassuring touch of her hand after I had just made a complete fool of myself in front of the student community; a consoling letter from Victorias Milling, where she worked as pharmacist; visits to her Marikina address when she was already Miss Alice; conversations with her on the phone while we reminisced about the old days; her failing eyesight; the magnifying glass from my classmate in the U.S.; her determination not to undergo surgery; her radiation therapy; her fear that her cancer was growing and sapping the life out of her.
Today, as you lay her to the final rest she so richly deserves and the heavenly life I know she so eagerly anticipates, I prefer to remember her in her prime, there on the same balcony, in the gentle light that precedes the setting of the sun--a nun who hung on steadily to prayer and her faith, her hands still making rosaries even as her eyes and her body started to fail her and each moment brought her painfully close to life's end. She is, to me, a gallant soul, loving and thankful for the little joys that crown a former teaching nun's often misunderstood service.
"For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar."
Goodbye, Sr. Mary Hyacinth. The St. James Academy Alumni Association extends its sympathies to the Chu family, and congratulates Sr. Mary Hyacinth on her glorious crossing of the bar.
Nila Barican Tupaz, Class ‘60
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
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This tribute is supposed to be for Sr. Mary Hyacinth. But who is Sr. Mary Hyacinth? Call the Maryknoll Sisters' residence in Quezon City, and they will tell you they don't know a Sr. Mary Hyacinth. So let me introduce her to you. Those who were here from 1959 to the mid-Sixties remember Sr. Hyacinth. She was a slight, somber (“stern and cantankerous”) Filipino nun who taught Biology and was adviser to the third year girls' sections.
To put it mildly, Sr. Hyacinth was ... quite controversial. She liked to spend hours on the balcony above the old school entrance every day after afternoon dismissal. That perch gave her a bird's-eye view of the school surroundings.
It was only after I left St. James that I heard stories about the results of her afternoon surveillance. The complaints ranged from: “She told my mother I was boy-crazy,” to “She accused me of going out with boys to the movies just because we all walk home as a group together,” to “She remembers the students who stay at Nels-Ofel and Zeriba after school to play songs on the jukebox,” to “She brands girls who talk to boys 'boy-crazy.'”
If the tales of what Sr. Hyacinth gathered from the balcony were alleged to be products of her overactive imagination, the numbers she inked into many report cards were very real. In junior year, with only one more year before graduation, those who failed had to face their parents' wrath, scrounge for alternate schools, and, influenced by the heat of the moment, vow to hate her for the rest of their lives.
After graduation, many of us gave no further thought to Sr. Hyacinth--that is, until our silver jubilee dinner in 1985. According to a classmate, one of the boys who had worked as detail man for a pharmaceutical firm told him a story about her. According to the story, the detail man had gone to the clinic at Victorias Milling in Negros Occidental in the mid-'70s to sell his firm's medicines. And who did he see at the clinic but Sr. Hyacinth—in civilian clothes and working as pharmacist. The story was that he and his group invited Sr. Hyacinth and her group at the clinic to dinner and drinks. Sr. Hyacinth, he said, downed her alcohol as if it were water. Would you believe? he asked us. I was not ready to believe. It sounded apocryphal to me or, at the very least, heavily embellished.
* * * * *
In October 1965, Pope Paul VI released a document of the Second Vatican Council. The “Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life” proclaimed that religious communities, or orders, must use the next 25 years to adapt their way of life to the environment and circumstances in which they minister. The Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, like some other communities of religious women, gave up their schools, went into alternate housing arrangements, and moved out of their convents, except the motherhouse in New York. To many Maryknoll sisters, the new life meant the flowering of their leadership talents and skills. To other Maryknoll sisters, however, it was a sad ending to the community life they thought they would live until death.
Sr. Hyacinth belonged to this second group. In the 1970s, she realized that nothing was the same anymore. She decided to leave the order. The name “Sr. Mary Hyacinth” was expunged from the official list of Maryknoll Sisters.
In 2003, I visited Miss Alicia Y. Chu for the first time after our graduation. Her hair was white and quite fashionably cut. She always wore a blouse and skirt, with sandals on her feet. She smiled easily and loved to talk about St. James and her students, mentioning them by name. Instead of appearing stern and cantankerous, she looked gentle and at peace.
She told me that one of the reasons why she left the order was because she did not want to give up the black-and-white Maryknoll habit. Then she chuckled quietly at the irony of the fact that she was not wearing the Maryknoll habit anymore, after all. Whenever we talked about a gathering of our class on somebody's birthday or for a visiting classmate, she wanted to hear all the news. She never asked why she was not invited; she knew why.
Her life was not tragic, but it must have been very lonely. Upon her retirement from Victorias Milling, she gave a younger brother half of her pension to buy a house in Marikina. It was designed as a duplex. She thought he would outlive her, but he did not. After his death and as her nephew's family grew, the duplex transformed into a bungalow and her half of the house became just a hot little room near the kitchen.
When her nephew asked for financial help for his business, she gave him a little more from what was left of her pension. When I first visited her, she was already half-blind from glaucoma, but she was still making rosaries for the parish priest to give away. For her visits to an ophthalmologist, she would ask her sister-in-law's permission so that the maid could accompany her as they took public transport all the way to the hospital. In 2005, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She went through radiation therapy alone in a public hospital in Pasig.
In June 2007, her doctor at the Philippine General Hospital told her she needed further treatment. That was when she decided the time had come to stop. She turned over boxes full of Readers' Digest copies in large print, a prayer book, and another box with four good blouses and four good skirts, all that were left of her earthly possessions, to Ellen Rubio of Class '62. She requested Ellen to bring them to the School for the Blind in Marikina.
She then packed a bag containing a couple of house dresses and personal wear and, with the money for her fare sent by her older brother, she boarded a plane and traveled alone, back home to Kabasalan, Zamboanga Sibugay province. This was where she was born and where her older brother, former mayor of Kabasalan Alfredo Chu, and his family live. They were very kind to her, although they really hardly knew her. Her nieces did not even know that she had been a Maryknoll nun until Ellen told them.
A few weeks after that day in June 2007 when Ellen saw her off at the NAIA 2, she sent a text message to Ellen: "I'm dying." On July 17, 2007, she passed away. She was 84 years old.
* * * * *
In August of this year, a son delivered a touching tribute to an all-too-human father both celebrated and reviled by the rest of the world. "My father," he said, "was not perfect. But he believed in redemption."
Redemption is the overriding narrative of our Christian faith. We may think Sr. Hyacinth made the wrong decision, and we may think nuns should not leave the nunnery, but I believe that Sr. Mary Hyacinth, lovely as her religious name was, only won her redemption after she made that fateful decision to return to her life as Alice Chu, after she accepted fully, without any complaints, what that life dealt her: the poverty, the loneliness, the lack of any warm familial or community love, the pain of knowing and sometimes seeing former students shun her. Through it all, she hung on to prayer, faith, and the little joys of occasional visits from kinder students.
And that story about her outdrinking the men in Victorias? When I was in Florida earlier this year, I heard the same story again, almost 25 years after it first circulated, this time from another classmate. At least within Class '60, the legend of the hard-driving, hard-drinking ex-Maryknoll nun is alive and well. Were she still around, Sr. Mary Hyacinth would have been livid, but Alice Chu would have chuckled softly and enjoyed the legend. It would have been a warm, bright light during the rough journey and dark night of her redemption.
Rest now in God's loving peace, Miss Alice. He is kinder and more forgiving than some in this world will ever be.
Nila Barican Tupaz '60
In Memoriam 4, Saturday, 7 November 2009, Malabon, Metro Manila
