Communities of such simple faith figured significantly in Sarah Joaquin’s life.  She was born in San Isidro, Nueva Ecija, some one hundred and eighty-five kilometers north of Manila. There church bells still rang to announce the Angelus, baptisms and funerals, and the Masses of the day. As did the church bells in Sta. Cruz, Laguna, where Sarah spent her childhood days and, from her father, learned of God’s creation and the proper appreciation of birds and many other of God’s creatures, and in San Miguel, Bulacan, where each year her family would go for the traditional Christmas gathering, where she played to her heart’s content with her favorite cousins, Irineo and Meneleo, and with the neighbors’ children.  And when in her seventh year she was placed as a boarder at the “Centro Escolar de Senoritas”, there too she lived in an environment of simple faith:  fifteen-minute morning and night prayers, the rosary, Sunday Mass in special holiday uniforms of “pink satin, with a square neckline with a collar trimmed with lace and with six mother-of-pearl buttons in front," exercises in the virtues and “workshops” in civility, Bible History and catechism, First Communion, an implicit faith in the efficacy of prayers, to God some times but often to Our Lady and the saints, each invoked upon for his or her patronage of some special area affecting human lives.

Omnipresent was a deep - almost instinctive — sense of Providence, which sometimes was still referred to, in the speech of the folk, as “Fate”.  When it became clear to her that her mother opposed her relationship with Ping Joaquin, Sarah did not let it bother her “too much":  she remarked, “I was also willing to leave Fate to take it from there."  On the day she eloped nevertheless, she prayed that God would bless her decision, “since it was He who allowed me to get this far with my love."  And after her separation from Ping, she welcomed her appointment as head of the Radio Department at Far Eastern University as a “blessed relief.”  She saw it as a “new lease on life” that had been given her.  When, in June 1958, she was given a baby boy for adoption, she saw it as a “miracle from God. . . .  Perhaps,” she said, “a fitting reward for my volunteer services to the community and, at the same time,  an assurance of God’s love to assuage the pain of a solitary existence."  It must have been less than two years afterwards when she received an offer of a Fullbright scholarship to spend some two years in the Speech and Drama Department of the Catholic University of America under the tutelage of the renowned dramatist, Rev. Gilbert P. Hartke.

In the face of her indecision about accepting it, brought on by a sense of duty to her aging father, Sarah asked God for a sign:  “I asked Him to give me a red rose within one week."  A different flower or color would have meant that she would have to turn down the offer.  Four days later, out of the blue as it were, she received her red rose from a Thai student who had purchased it for her from a vendor near the church of Santa Mesa, “because I know you love roses.”

Sarah Joaquin’s hope is variously delineated throughout the book.  It is expressed initially as a seven-year old’s trust in her father’s decision to enroll her as a boarder at the “Centro Escolar de Senoritas’, to be “guided in the proper direction with strict and consistent discipline softened with gentle patience" and “be brought up to be good Roman Catholics".  In her imaginings during her first few weeks in the school, she found in the gala uniform for the adult students the appropriate symbol for her hope, a Filipino “terno” on the butterfly sleeves of which was embroidered the school logo with the words “Ciencia y Virtud”.  She writes:  “I remember a feeling of hope then that someday I would qualify to wear that gala ‘terno’."  Four years later, she was to define her aspirations in terms of higher achievement still when she spoke of wearing the “terno” as the class valedictorian, the graduate to be honored with the /Excelencia/ Award for consistently ranking first in schoolwork and conduct throughout high school.

Two thoughts, not unrelated, filled my mind when I finished reading this book:  first, that a deep hope, generated in large measure by a faith that was simple and sometimes even folksy, drove the “dynamo” that, her brother-in-law Nick Joaquin wrote in the Introduction, Sarah Joaquin was; and second, that her story reminded me of one Kristin Lavransdatter, a fictional heroine of similar faith and hope, whose story, told in trilogy by Sigrid Undset, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1928, I had read in the early fifties.  Coincidentally, that was the same period when I first encountered the name of Sarah Joaquin.  It was at the gala performances of “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino". She was at that time playing Pepang, the thoroughly modern Marasigan sister of Nick Joaquin’s classic “elegy [of Manila] in three acts."  

Hope found expression too in a resolve, made in the midst of a Christmas season without Ping amid forebodings of her failing marriage, to “hold on to the children” and to cultivate “the arts that I had learned and loved from childhood and that had been fostered at the /Centro/ [/Escolar de Senoritas/]."

More often than not, hope emerged as prayer:  to God, for blessing on the day of her elopement with Ping Joaquin in 1929; to Our Lady of the Rosary, for her advocacy before God on the matter of forgiveness, not for past sins but for the hurt, still in the future, the elopement would inflict on family and friends; to Saint Anthony, for his intercession on her wish that a boy would be born from her first pregnancy; to Our Lady of Lourdes, for her mediation on Ping and Sarah’s petition for a girl from her second pregnancy; to God, for his help “so that [on the real reasons for Ping and Sarah’s separation] my children and my parents would someday be proud of me"; and to the Black Nazarene of Quiapo [Jesus Christ of the /Via Crucis/ — on the Way of the Cross], for the grace of liberation from a “relationship [with a man] that was not at all uplifting" and was, indeed, becoming fodder for gossip.

Aside from the grit and passion that both Sarah Joaquin and Kristin Lavransdatter exhibit, the link between their stories, I believe, derive from the story line of each narrative and the themes that emerge as a result of the interplay of character, culture, and faith:  Kristin, in a Norway that is so much a part of medieval Christendom; and Sarah, in a Philippines still deeply imbued with the values and traditions of the Catholic missionaries of Spain, even if not entirely freed from folk beliefs of their pre-Christian ancestors, and at the same time nevertheless, beginning to pick up the secularist and pragmatic  perspectives of the American colonizers of the early twentieth century.

The story line follows the life of each from the age of seven under the firm and caring guidance of a good father and the constant and active support of an uncommunicative, even if loving, mother, through adolescence and young womanhood, and adulthood as wife and mother.

It depicts love-choices at once passionately and single-mindedly made, which leave in the women’s lives unremitting undercurrents of disappointment and pain, pain above all brought on by memories of  “one time happiness. . . shared" and, always, cherished.  There is redemption nevertheless in the many little victories that life offers, in the exercise of motherhood, in the cultivation of relationships among family and friends, old and new, at home and abroad, and in the accomplishment of tasks, domestic as well as professional, in the service of God and their communities.

The principal difference between the story of Sarah Joaquin and that of Kristin Lavransdatter is that the latter is fiction and a finished work: / finished/ in the sense as much of “completed” as of having been finely wrought.  Sarah’s story is a memoir and is /unfinished/ in several respects.  Death had taken her before she had a chance to take her narrative through her life as an immigrant in the United States, for the most part her twilight years.  How so laden with reflection would her account of those days have been!  Twilight, whether in a day or in a life is the moment of reflection in any woman’s day or life - and any man’s, I know.  Moreover, hardly enough is said about her children and how she related to each of them, and, from her perspective, they, with her.  This is a major loss to us who know Sarah and her children well.  How so revealing it could have been of a dimension of special tenderness in the person that she was!  We are permitted a glimpse of it, when, in one of the few instances in which she mentions her children, she remarks, almost in passing, on how, after her separation from Ping Joaquin, she was kept busy “teaching and broadcasting, and at home seeing to the comfort of my children, who were very sympathetic towards their father and disappointed in their mother." Poignant!  So unbearably poignant indeed.  Yet understated so utterly.

/Of Laughter and Tears/ is /unfinished/ in more senses than one.  Sarah’s illnesses and occasional hospitalization in those last few months of her life took away whatever opportunity she was counting on to clarify and examine, or at least draw from the narrative of her memoir, several issues roiling the larger Philippine cultural milieu, with which she grappled, sometimes subconsciously.

The differing or “double” standards, for example, with which Filipino society measured the moral performance of men and women in the dance of courtship and marriage left Sarah “terribly hurt,” “confused” and “unsure,” and, to a point, somewhat progressively cynical about “male-female relationships.”  Though not entirely convinced, after entreaty and even pressure from her elders, men and women alike, she recognized then that the infidelity of the male was “part and parcel of male-female relationships."  It was something she found “hard to accept and even harder still to forgive."  Sarah also struggled with two other issues, related to the first.  One was what appeared to have been presented to her as the absolute principle, unquestioned by family and friends and passed on to her in various forms of admonition and instruction, and even warning, that a wife was never ever to deny her husband  “ the pleasure that he sought.”  And the other, underlying the creeping insecurity and occasional displeasure and sarcasm of her husband over Sarah’s growing stature at the university and in the theater, the assumption that he should earn enough “to at least equal” what she would be earning.

The theme of guilt and its impact on the direction of a person’s future actions is present in this memoir, but it remains unexplored in terms of her values and beliefs.  Very soon after the couple’s first child, Tony, is born he is turned over to Sarah’s parents.  About the event she writes:  “I had the same longings [as her mother’s ‘to hold the boy close to her bosom’] but I was quite ready to give him to her for a while so to makeup [sic] in a very small way, for what hurt I gave them by my unexpected elopement."  He is raised by them in Sta. Cruz, Laguna, through his first six or seven years.  I wonder, had she had time to finish her memoir, would she have reflected on this event not so much necessarily on its consequences for Tony (who, I know as a friend, thrived with his grandparents) as on how, for example, it could have changed the circumstances of her marriage and life with her husband.

Not too long after Sarah’s discovery of Ping’s infidelity, she spoke these words to him:  “Okay, Ping.  Let’s get one thing straight.   I want you to understand that every action has its corresponding reaction.  Not that I’m planning on it, but if some day in the future I pay you back with the same coin [the coin of unfaithfulness], don’t hold it against me."

Would Sarah have remembered these words had she been permitted to write the final chapters of her memoir?  Would she have realized the irony of it all?  Its prophetic significance?  A few words spoken in anger, maybe, and frustration?  Would she have thought that her veiled “threat” - for that is what it sounded like - uttered some time in 1933 reverberated still in Ping’s memory in 1946?  Enough to arouse his jealous anxieties and aggravate the rift between him and Sarah, and eventually bring about their separation?  Would she have speculated that she could have been driven, perhaps even subconsciously, by the sentiments she had expressed in these words into her close relationship with her friend Jose, who would be the object of Ping’s jealousy?

Like Kristin Lavransdatter, Sarah had come to a profound understanding of what it is to live a life of one’s creation.  In her strength, she knew, lay her weakness.  She realized her vulnerability to her own awesome pluck and passion.  Notwithstanding her many awards and accomplishments, her life in Falls Church, Virginia during her declining years reflected a sense of her own frailty.  She came to recognize that her hope at last - our hope indeed — lay in the divine mercy.  She must have recalled, if not from her own schooldays, certainly from those of her son, Tony, at the Ateneo, that image of God as “the hound of heaven” who, driven by love, has pursued man through all of history “with deliberate speed and majestic instancy."  For as in the “Epilogue” Fred de la Rosa, her son-in-law, says of those years, “she lived by the biblical injunction on forgiveness.  Her faith was strong and her obedience to her Maker was absolute.  This showed not only in her churchgoing but also in her daily life.  She had willed her life to God."

The book is /unfinished/ in its more mechanical aspects too. Copy- and proof-reading could have been more carefully done.  Not a few typographical errors would have been avoided:  misspelled proper names, missing commas, duplicated words or phrases, missing periods, missing auxiliary verbs, periods in place of commas, and words misspelled because of missing letters.  Much more scrupulous editing could also have caught some slips in syntax, slips probably carried over from the original.  It would have served readers well, moreover, had a chronology of the more important dates in Sarah’s life been appended to the text. Without it I had difficulty placing events of some significance in the narrative in an appropriate time-line. In order to get my bearings as it were, I felt that I had to reconstruct from other sources a chronological outline for my own reference.

That Sarah Joaquin’s memoir is/ unfinished/ ought not detract from its value.  It still leaves us with the facts of her life and with some of her thoughts on that life.  It remains for someone of understanding and vision, perhaps a close friend, a son or a close relation, to take this book and do a biography of the woman, giving it the depth of treatment, the rich literary texture and the delicately designed structure that a Sarah Joaquin /vita/ deserves.  Until that is written nevertheless, those of us interested in the person can appreciate this memoir, Sarah Joaquin in her own words, hurried maybe and /unfinished/, but genuinely herself to the core.

I must, in conclusion, admit that I have not been able to distance myself enough from Sarah’s story to achieve some meaningful degree of impartiality in this review.  She was Tita Sarah to me from the first moment I met her, someone I appreciated as an affectionate aunt to my wife, someone I respected and cherished as a person, and hailed for her talent and achievements in the Philippine theater and at the university.  Tony, her son, and I have been close friends for some decades now, since my college days at the Ateneo de Manila and since that year we happened to be together as graduate students in Toronto, Canada when it was not yet the audacious town that it has become. I have tried to point out some of the book’s positive qualities, and some of its negatives too, but I have done so not as a critic but as an old friend merely, trying to be helpful. Should these observations contribute in some small measure to her children’s efforts to come forward with a good biography or, at least, a more/ finished/ second edition of Sarah’s memoir, my purpose would have been well served.