In a rare public outpouring of his personal feelings, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday eulogized his mother, who died earlier this month, and expressed the hope that he could be her son again in “the next life.”
The tribute in the form of a Facebook post came after Chin Hou-hsiu (秦厚修) died on May 2 of multiple organ failure in a hospital in Taipei at the age of 91.
Her remains were cremated three days later following a private funeral.
In the 3,200-character eulogy, Ma lamented that today will be the first Mother’s Day without Chin in the 64 years of his life.
Ma recalled the final moments at the hospital when he held her hand, kissed her face and whispered farewell.
She always taught him and his four sisters to work hard, lead a simple and honest life and be patriotic, Ma said, adding that his bedtime stories as a child were never about Robin Hood or Snow White, but about China’s revolutionary heroes and fighters against Japanese invasion.
She will be most remembered for the love and education she gave her children, Ma said.
Ma described how Chin was also a model wife and daughter-in-law and showed him how happy helping others could make him.
Even during the last three weeks of her life, she kept her sense of humor and the hospital room “was often full of laughter and never any feeling of suffering,” he wrote.
Chin was born to a well-educated family in China’s Hunan Province and attended a prestigious school in Changsha, the provincial capital, before entering the Central Political School, a college established in 1927 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Ma said in the tribute.
The school became National Chengchi University in 1946 and reopened in Taipei in 1954.
When she attended the college, which was relocated from Nanjing to Chongqing because of the war against the Japanese invasion, Chin met her future husband Ma Ho-ling (馬鶴凌), who was also from Hunan. He died in 2006.
However, life was not easy for the couple: Much of China was devastated by the war against Japan and then torn apart in a civil war pitching the KMT government against the communists.
Ho-ling, who joined the army in 1944, brought his family first to Hong Kong, where his only son, Ma Ying-jeou, was born in 1950.
The family moved to Taiwan the following year.
One of the pieces Ma and his mother studied together was Peach Blossom Spring (桃花源記), a 400-character piece written in the fifth century about a hidden utopian society, Ma wrote.
When his mother was first admitted to the hospital and was still alert, he would recite the article to her, he added.
With an oxygen mask on, she would nod or shake her head to let him know whether he got the text right or wrong.
“In doing that, we relived our happy moment from more than 50 years ago,” he said. “Now that mother has gone, I will not pick up Peach Blossom Spring again for fear of not being able to hold back my tears.”
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