A mother bear always protects her cub

When the child is in danger, the mother will attack everything in its tracks. When the child is endangering itself, the mother will usually shake it senseless to put it back on its feet.

In the summer of 2001, I did not want to move to California.

Secure with a long-earned path toward American citizenship, my father was ready for a new horizon. He was tired of the encroaching stupidity of Florida Men, the summers drenched in mosquitoes, the administrators at UCF who cared more about finding the next Daunte Culpepper than securing funding for his research grants.

The University of California swooped in and took him in as a professor, and Davis was our next destination.

I was a 15-year-old teenager. I was the center of the universe. I did not want to leave my friends, my experiences, my comfort. And as every 15-year-old probably has desired at some point, I DID want to leave my family.

So for a few weeks, I floated the idea with a few close friends of staying back in Florida. My easygoing dad nodded along with it for awhile, figuring I’d be done with my tantrum in a week.

My mom was less forgiving. She immediately sat me down and hit me with the three essentials of Asian parenting shame: Tears, fears, and jeers.

“You hate us this much? What will you do without your family? Nothing.”

I was in Davis a month later. There would be no transfer portal for me.

But like my mom, I carried grudges, and punished her by punishing me.

Instead of embracing a new challenge, I chose depression. Instead of hitting headlong into the books, I hit cruise control and skated through the rest of high school. When your beloved blogfather ended up at UC Berkeley, the dream of so many families, it was an actual afterthought.

One of the few things that did pique my interest through this adolescent haze was hearing that UC Berkeley had a good football team, and there was this Heisman contender called Aaron Rodgers to watch out for.

Although I did have a crucial follow-up question for my orientation hosts: Why did they call the team Cal?

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My mother’s journey began on the other side of the Pacific in the Philippines. Her childhood was never provided. In a household of nine brothers and sisters, she was deputized as a secondary chaperone to the youngest kids in the family. She worked in the family business while she babysat. She worked numerous jobs. She drew. She parented. She sewed. She sang. She studied. She DJed. She labored. She danced.

Just like she pushed me to do many things in my life, she would do the same for my father, always demanding he strive to look higher. That relentless drive took them from Bangkok to Buffalo, to the Sunshine State and the Golden State.

Like so many immigrants before and after, her dreams were deferred. She had to put her career to the side to support my dad’s career, and then eventually us. She gave my sister and me whatever childhood dreams she could, in the midst of pursuing a PhD that fostered her own.

But she never made us settle. She took us to piano lessons, taekwondo class, soccer and basketball camp, hoping to develop us into something greater.

It was not always linear. It was not always peaches and roses. There’s a price to pay for nurtured ambition, and the debts are still being paid. But the expectations leveled us up. We were a family that was always pushed to do more, and she never stopped providing us doors to walk through.

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In the spring of 2008, with mere credits remaining from a degree, I withdrew from UC Berkeley for the second semester in a row.

Depression and burnout had consumed me. I didn’t want to study. I didn’t want to learn. Decades of overachieving and bookworming had left me undersocialized and terminally online. People who know my writing don’t realize my blogging started as a means to escape reality.

I started writing about Berkeley, then eventually centered my writing around the 2007 California Golden Bears, the best team to pick for emotional stability.

I spent most of the spring wondering why Nate Longshore’s ankle couldn’t have healed faster. I had more in common with the TikTok generation than my own, eschewing bar crawls and social gatherings for 240p videos of Desean Jackson running past Pac-10 defenses.

There was one problem: I told no one I withdrew. Not my friends. Not my family.

I walked at my graduation stage, knowing full well I wasn’t done with Berkeley.

This photo says a lot. This is one of the happiest days of my mom’s life. I wanted to sink below the gravel of Lower Sproul and never be found.

Knowing that I was too drained to finish my degree, I moved back home that summer, and used the excuse of the stock market crash to not seek employment.
My mother would get more confused with each passing month that my diploma hadn’t arrived. I couldn’t finish a few stupid courses, but my 22-year-old idiot head could spin one excuse after another for why it was taking so long to arrive.

For a full year, in the peak of my youth, I sat at home, bathing in shame, keeping myself happy with tape of Jahvid Best and a top-10 Cal team. That fall, I would meet TwistNHook, ragnarok, HydroTech and the California Golden Blogs team at numerous Cal games, getting the offer to write for the site a year later. My official Cal sportswriting life was a real-life defense mechanism.

The truth finally broke in Rome in June of 2009 as the heat flushed my guilt into the humid summer air. After an hour of yelling, crying and cursing, my mom then sat me down, and through gritted teeth, exclaimed:

”You are going back to Berkeley. You are finishing your degree.”

Then we made up, drank a lot of wine somewhere in town, and pretended that conversation never happened.

In 2010, while writing about the beloved Golden Bears collapsing back to mediocrity, I dragged my burned-out husk over the finish line academically. I recall begging a professor to pass me.

The math degree was mailed the following January. My mom framed it on our kitchen wall, where it’s been hanging for a decade and a half.

There was pride that her child had a degree. There was vindication that she was responsible for her son’s success. She wasn’t all the way wrong.

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My mom was an explorer. In her 70 years on this earth, she discovered every aspect of what it meant to be human.

The best way to describe my mom to those who never knew her is unfiltered. You would always get 100% of what she was, wherever she was, with unshakeable confidence. She’d walk into a room and deliver her opinion, and it became fact. She was always purely herself, the main character in her story.

She went up to Lavar Burton at an education conference, and the first thing you told him was that MY favorite show was Reading Rainbow (I wasn’t even there). She spent many nights at the UCF library writing your dissertation (now in the Library of Congress) while juggling two growing kids. She traveled to conferences across the planet to present her research. She wanted to become a citizen of Estonia and buy a house in Portugal. She saw the world as fully wide.

Her health issues began manifesting when she turned 40, and it felt as if she made a pact to do as much as possible before her clock ran out. Her overseas calls were the things of legend. An earthquake in Hawaii, passport stolen in Paris, battling negative wind chill to get to Brandenburg Gate, how to walk up a mountain to Davos.

Life was an adventure, and she made the most of what she had. Once she became a free mother bear, the world was her territory.

Often times, it meant choosing her over us. It wasn’t easy, but she wanted what she wanted.

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The third clash of the bears came in 2015, when self-defeat was all I could feel.

Mom’s pride soon gave way to more confusion as I took my math degree and became…an entry-level sports writer, where I stayed for most of my 20s in the family cottage. I took my less-than-minimum wage earnings from Vox and spent all my savings on snacks and trips to Cal football games.

In my 20s, I still dreamed that sportswriting could be the gateway to a full career, even as my colleagues steadily abandoned the race. I stubbornly dug in, and put all my efforts into making California Golden Blogs my vehicle of success.

Mom herself chose passion over practicality, abandoning a steady paycheck to start her own business. There wasn’t much of a plan, nor was there ever a lot of investment. But I took her entrepreneurial spirit as a permission slip. If she could project her dreams into the universe, why couldn’t I?

My mother’s independent spirit has raged through me throughout my creative career. I chose what I wanted over what was practical. I eschewed editors, I deviated from process, I refused to yield. I fought friends. I ignored lovers. I endured failure. The battle was always with myself. I built prisons that didn’t have keys. Like so many other sportswriters, the dream withered on the vine.

And so everything came to a head in the winter of 2015, when she saw me apply for food stamps. For the third time in a decade and a half, she said ‘enough’. Get a real job before I see you collecting trash on the streets. Very harsh. Very mom.

I course corrected. I applied to a thousand jobs. My first full-time work came because I was a sports writer. A decade later, after years of slogging and extra hours of hustling, I’m doing data, just as she forecasted years ago.

To the very end, she would not tell enough people she told me so, all the way back from the day I ‘graduated’. She often credits the public website resume she built for me for getting me job offers. She copy-pasted it from my LinkedIn.

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My last solo lunch with my mother was in the summer of 2024, before my Golden Bear world turned right side up.

It was at the Cheesecake Factory in Union Square, arguably one of her favorite places on the planet. When we first arrived in Northern California, she complained about nearly everything, except our monthly visits to the downtown San Francisco Macy’s and her microwaved quesadillas.

All her mobility improvements from her stroke rehab were long gone. I walked her slowly to the elevator, to the bathroom, and back to her Uber. I knew that every trip she took to see me could be her last.

I’d love to say it was a wonderful conversation, but those final years were fraught with conflict, as she self-diagnosed her treatments and eschewed medical advice. In a moment of utter frustration, I asked my mom, the queen of questions you should never ask, the question you should never ask.

“Would you have been happier if you had never come to America?”

In a split second, she said yes, and I knew she felt it to be true.

In the next second, she broke down, and said, “But then I would never have had you and [my sister]”, and I knew she felt it to be true too.

A mama bear has to live in toughness, especially in foreign territory. But the children must be raised, must be toughened up for the world. That is the duty.

Then they must be set free. Even if it means she might be left alone.

She said afterward she loved the conversation. I didn’t talk to her for months.

I wish I had those months back.

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Through all my beautiful mess, California Golden Blogs grew from a niche sporting blog full of vibes into one of the best sporting communities on the planet. Blog posts became tailgates, roundtables became road trips. Before the Calgorithm and GameDay, there were thousand comment posts about the spinning UC logo and Drop50 shenanigans.

Often, in spite of me, the site thrived, because the Cal Family was always bigger than me. I didn’t know what I had until I flipped the switch. This family brought me something different—a community free of judgment, full of acceptance, creatively alive, unbound by shame and expectation.

After pairing my passion with an actual career, a weight lifted off my shoulders. I was finally opening up. I could accept being the face of it all. What I had missing from my family, I found in this one. I could share and speak my feelings without worrying about duty.

Mama bear took me out of the woods again. As her health declined, that second family became more critical than ever. Even if they didn’t know what I was dealing with, they became an anchor to produce actual meaning for everyone.

As the photos and videos appeared of my journeys and travails with my people, my mom’s confusion about my second life faded. It was replaced with appreciation that the bear cub could finally leave the nest and find refuge elsewhere. I hope she knew that I could finally be okay on my own.

Of course, that didn’t mean she didn’t stop growling. In one of her memorable contributions, she even got a person online to apologize.

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“You need to come home.” The phone call I had dreaded for months finally came from my always hopeful father.

The alarm bells had been buzzing when my mom had been hospitalized in December, cried at every care center she couldn’t stand up from in the following weeks, when she wouldn’t answer the phone for Mother’s Day, or her 70th birthday. At our last talk in January, she could do nothing but weep and yell. I felt something was coming, but dared not speak it.

I had pre-grieved for months. I was prepared.

I was in the ICU the next day. I was not prepared.

My fierce mama bear had shrunk, her skin peeling, her mouth unable to form words or swallow food. Her body, after decades of hospitalizations, conditions, surgeries, transfusions, diabetes, strokes, cancer, rehabilitations and therapy, finally had no more fight left in it.

She managed a few final words to me before the pain completely took over.

The last call of a mama bear to her cub.

“My sweet son.”

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In the first week of June, after 70 years and 21-plus days on this earth, my mother took her next journey.

In her last years, Mom started to watch Cal games more closely with my father, expressing excitement when we won, and exclaiming, “Is this why you are always so sad in the fall?” after another gut-wrenching loss.

The Mama Bear had become a Golden Bear in her own spirited way. It was colorful, unpredictable, ferocious, embarrassing, motherly.

There are so many stories of immigrant parents sacrificing their dreams to make sure their children get the opportunity to fulfill theirs. My mother did find time for some of her dreams, but I know that she left a lot of room for us to stumble around to keep finding ours.

But as she saw what the Cal Family meant to me, she was beginning to find space for other things. That she wanted to share this thing that was so deeply embedded in my identity was an olive branch I never appreciated enough.

So I’ll honor her the way I lived with her.

I’ll keep making dreams happen. On here. Out there. Into the stars.

And I hope she’s watching from the sky.

My personal wake for my mother is available here. Thank you to all those who have left me kind words in the past few months—it would mean the world if you donated to the fundraiser we set up for medical research in the disease that took mom from us. SJS/TEN is still not well-known and impacts disproportionately Asian and Black communities. It is a terrible disease that no one deserves to die from. Please help contribute.