My mom was a tiger, literally and figuratively. Born in a Chinese Tiger year, mom lived up to the very essence of a true tiger – fearless, confident, active, sharp, straightforward to a fault, extremely loyal and dangerously protective to her cubs. And I am that lucky cub.
Of course, with that personality, mom had to be a lawyer. Her last trip one day before her sudden passing was a discovery trip for a new pro bono case that she just took on for a charity organization. In our daily video chat, we caught up on each other’s day and she talked about the things that she had discovered. She was so sure that she was going to win, she couldn’t wait to tell the charity that they were getting their money back from the crooks.
Oh, winning was all mom did. After decades of serving as a judge, mom started her private practice after retirement. In the first year, she took five cases to the appeals court – three for appellant and two for appellee, and she won them all. I can still see her eyes gleaming when she told me about her wins during my summer vacation with her.
Mom’s fierce sense of right and wrong came from her working years as a police detective. I vaguely remembered those dangerous years as I was very young. I remembered the adults hushing around me and some young policeman being always with us. Then our pets got poisoned, which was followed by lots of commotions. Then mom suddenly became a prosecutor. Only when older, I learned that mom took night classes and graduated with a law degree while being a detective and raising us tiger cubs.
A lifelong learner is what mom was. When older, I asked how she ended up getting a law degree while working full-time as a detective and raising us. This is her secret – in those non-digital learning years, my mom used her spare time reading out aloud the textbooks and taped into audio tapes. Then, she told me that she just played those tapes again and again when taking care of us or doing other chores until knowledge became ingrained. That was how she became a lawyer – through virtual classes and digital books she invented many decades before these words were ever put together.
Mom made little red dresses for me when I was young. But she was not a warm and fuzzy type – she didn't bake birthday cakes or wrap pretty gifts. She expected us to soar high no matter how hard it may be. But when the world falls apart, we cubs know that she will always be there catching us -- until today, December 14, 2020.
JLF's tiger cub
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