They had every reason not to go to the United States.
Life was relatively easy for the newlyweds Nehemias and Perlita Legaspi in the late 1970s. He was the lone dentist and she was a staff nurse in a top teaching hospital in Manila. Together they were earning more than enough to start a family without having to sacrifice personal comfort and everything else.
Still, the announcement came that they were leaving soon—and for good—much to the disbelief of their peers at the University of Santo Tomas Hospital. “Are you crazy?” the wife remembers one doctor asking, echoing the prevailing sentiment among friends and relatives.
They probably were, considering the tough life that would eventually greet them during their first few years in Chicago and later in Los Angeles. But that was just part of the Nemy and Pearl saga in America.
The couple today have more than what they had wished for—a classy two-story dream home in Los Angeles, nice cars, stable careers and retirement opportunities they most likely would not have had if they had chosen to stay in the Philippines.
And that’s just the material side of the story. The rest of it is known only to people close to the couple – how they kept the faith, held on to each other and survived America.
“Everything was in control because we knew that God was watching over us,” Nemy, 58, says in an interview at the couple’s residence in Eagle Rock, LA.
It was Pearl, not Nemy, who was dead-set on settling in the US. She left him with no choice when she sold all their belongings within a week after they got their visas. She knew her children stood a better chance in the US.
Armed men at checkpoint
One afternoon in Parañaque, for instance, the couple and their 3-year-old son Marco ran into a supposed government checkpoint. Also in the car were their long-time friends Rene and Susan Villanueva and their first-born Irene. Before they knew it, Armalites were pointed at them.
Several anxious moments later, the four men manning the checkpoint let them go. “There are kids,” one of them was heard as saying. “Let’s not proceed with the plan.”
Whatever the “plan” was the family could only think of the worse. It didn’t take much convincing later on for Nemy to share Pearl’s American dream.
The family found instant accommodation in the Windy City where Nemy’s parents owned a three-door apartment. Pearl found work in three weeks at a nearby nursing home. Nemy got none.
Chicago’s biting cold kept him home most of the time, leaving him to tend to the children. By then they already had their second son Marlo.
In-law troubles
In one of those days when the weather was unbearable, father and his two boys woke up to the smell of French fries cooking at the Burger King joint next to their apartment. With Pearl’s salary barely enough for the family, Nemy bought his kids a quarter’s worth of fries, their dad’s best “treat” for months to come.
“That was when I was struck by self-pity,” he says. “I couldn’t even buy my children a decent meal.”
Pearl’s in-laws didn’t exactly make things easier for the new immigrants. To begin with, they didn’t like her, a provincial lass from Zambales. They felt their son deserved better, someone like this Chicago-based doctor they had been pairing him with for years.
“We didn’t come here to break up,” he told his parents each time. “We came here to improve our lives as a family.”
Then thanks to a rumor-mongering in-law, the immigrant couple’s American dream almost vanished. The relative spread the word that Pearl was having an affair with a co-worker.
Pearl found peace in her innocence, saying not a word when the entire Legaspi clan in their Chicago apartment confronted her. One of Nemy’s brothers even poked a finger at her face.
Told about the rumor, Nemy was incredulous, knowing too well that his wife was incapable of such a thing. This wasn’t the Pearl who had single-handedly protected him from a group of fratmen that nearly mauled them in UST a few years earlier, he remembered.
Fightin’ Pearl
With the couple surrounded and outnumbered, Pearl raised her fists, jumped to her toes and began circling her boyfriend to the surprise of their foes. The fratmen backed off and were literally kneeling before Pearl, one after another, at the hospital a few days later.
The fratmen, all medicine students, needed her forgiveness to avoid expulsion from UST. They never messed with the tough nurse or her boyfriend since then.
“That was one of the most embarrassing moments in my life,” Nemy recalls. “Imagine having your girlfriend protecting you with her bare fists? I was stunned myself. I realized then how brave she was and how much she loved me.”
So the rumor could not have been true that Pearl had gone astray, he told his parents in Chicago that evening in 1982. To clear things up, he went to the alleged lover and asked him to enlighten his folks. It turned out that this was the same guy the rumormonger had asked to walk Pearl to the subway every now and then.
“She told me to accompany Pearl because she’s new in the city,” he told Nemy. “I can’t understand why she would spread something like that.”
In the evening, the guy went to the Legaspi apartment and confronted the relative. Pearl was vindicated but knew it was time to go. She didn’t sleep in the apartment that night. The family packed for LA the following day, carrying only $300 max and expiring tourist visas.
Welcome relief
The City of Angels was a welcome relief for the weary couple, its moderate weather more to their liking. Away from his parents’ prying eyes, they started anew with Pearl finding another job as a nurse.
Nemy remained unfortunate. He would spend eight hours, job-hunting on the streets of LA daily but still finding none. Dental clinics shunned him for lacking local experience. It didn’t matter to them that he was an experienced dentist back home.
Pearl remained the sole breadwinner for the next year or so, taking home a monthly salary of $500. Much of it went to their small apartment’s rent downtown, leaving only $120 for the rest of their expenses.
Nemy the house husband would buy one whole dressed chicken that usually lasted them a week: “I would cut it into four and make a variety of dishes out of it.”
Young Marco had his contribution, too. He would take home juice packs that came free with his meal ration in school so that daddy would have something to fill their empty refrigerator with.
All the while, Nemy’s parents knew nothing about their suffering in the West Coast. The couple purposely stayed under the radar when told that his folks wanted them deported. They would later realize that it was probably yet another rumor unleashed by their in-law.
“The news we were getting was that my parents were angry,” he says. “They supposedly wanted to punish us for being ungrateful.”
As if their condition weren’t getting any worse, Pearl came down with a serious lung problem in 1983. The best place Nemy could take her to was the emergency room of a government hospital. There he realized how low they had tumbled.
He says that in the company of stab victims and penniless patients, Pearl became a virtual specimen for group upon group of medical students.
But she got a clean bill of health two weeks later. The hospital discharged her, too, charging her not a penny of the entire $16,000 bill. Nemy’s prayers were answered.
Healing wounds
Fortune began smiling for the hardworking couple in 1984. She passed the nursing Boards; he finally got a job as a dental assistant in Torrance. Later he would become a long-time dental consultant in a private clinic now owned and managed by his son Marco.
Pearl’s nursing license got her a job at the prestigious White Memorial Hospital where she was later promoted to unit manager. She moved to Cedars Sinai Medical Center years later as coordinator for rehabilitation. The probinsyana was made.
By 1986, the couple decided it was time to surface and face his angry folks in Chicago. On their way home from an affair in Indianapolis, the Legaspis detoured to the Windy City and stopped by their old place. The sight of a long-lost son and his family finally paying his parents a visit healed all wounds of four years past.
“Where have you been? We’ve been looking for you for so long,” Nemy’s mother told his family. Her embrace had never felt that good. Healing had begun.
The timing of their reconciliation would later prove propitious when Nemy’s mother phoned him in LA. She was crying. Her other son and daughter-in-law—the same woman who had spread that ugly rumor against Pearl years ago—had transferred ownership of the Chicago apartment to their name. The in-law brought her side of the family in, took charge of the house and confined the old folks to a single room.
‘Good soul’
Among all her children in LA, Nemy’s mom contacted him, saying she was most “at ease” with Pearl. She described her as a “good soul.” “I told you so,” the son told himself.
The couple helped his folks get started and later found them a decent place a few minutes away from their house at Eagle Rock. Last year, they brought them to Encenada in Mexico, their first-ever luxury cruise in all their years in America.
“Son, we didn’t know it was this good,” Nemy’s mother said. “Thank you!”
All’s forgiven
The Legaspis also made peace with the daughter-in-law. She paid a visit one day, apologized for her big mouth and the lives it almost wrecked. Nemy says she had been forgiven long before that.
All these are but stories the couple hardly talk about nowadays. They’ve made it in America. It wasn’t a crazy idea after all.(related by Christian Esguerra; INQ.net)
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