Story submitteD by: noel shaw
Virgilio Velasco and Mutya San Agustin
Photo: Virgilio Velasco and Mutya San Agustin
When my mother, Mutya San Agustin, and father, Virgilio Velasco, came to the United States from the Philippines to engage in their respective residency training programs––Mutya in Baltimore for pediatrics, Virgilio in Brooklyn for general surgery––they had not intended to stay. After completing their residencies they had planned to return to Manila to start their own practices.
For five years they worked long hours to complete their training. On weekends Virgilio would take the bus down to Baltimore to visit Mutya. They married in 1960 and I was born a year later in Brooklyn at Long Island College Hospital where my father then worked. My parents made social acquaintances with their American colleagues while having only a handful of Filipino friends who were also in training programs. They were stunned one day riding the city bus when one of their friends, my godmother, was forced to sit in the back of the uncrowded bus because of her dark brown skin. But the while the hurtful sting of a racist America may have deterred my mother and father temporarily it never stopped them from reaching their goals.
My parents kept to their plan and when I was a year and four months, the three of us flew back to the Philippines supposedly for good. My parents were welcomed home as heroes. My mother was seven months pregnant with my brother when we arrived. Eventually, they began a fledgling medical clinic in a suburb of Manila.
The following year my father became quite ill. He was diagnosed with a rare bile duct cancer. His only option for treatment was in the United States. My grandfather flew with him and my mother from Manila to Los Angeles. My mother was seven months pregnant with my sister. The morning after they touched down at LAX, my father went into emergency surgery. Later that afternoon my mother kept trying to make a payphone call. An operator came on and explained to my distressed mother that it was difficult to make calls that day. My mother insisted that she get a line and the operator said, “Lady, don’t you know that President Kennedy was shot and killed earlier today??” My mother was not aware of this.
Ten days later my mother gave birth prematurely to my sister at the same hospital where my father was operated on. My father received treatment for two and a half years until he succumbed to cancer. During this time my brother and I were reunited with our parents and our new baby sister. My father somehow found the will and the strength to continue work as a surgeon until he was too sick to do so. He reached his final goal of setting us up in a house in the Bronx, much closer to my mother’s workplace. He died in New York City at the age of 31.
In a letter to me, my brother and sister, he wrote: “Be selfless. Be compassionate. Be courageous, but not wildly daring. The virtues that one builds in your early years will become your basic weapons of tomorrow.”
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