My Lola Helped Change the Course of WWII
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Emma Unson Rotor (Photo from the Unson family)
In the fall of 2021, as the world was slowly emerging from COVID lockdowns, I was in the middle of a family research project and did a quick Google search for “Emma Rotor.” Nothing. The only results were of Arturo Rotor, her husband. I should not have been surprised. He was the famed writer, doctor, musician, and botanist. Search results included multiple pages on him, including dissertations written about his short stories.
I was aware that Lola Emma had been in Baltimore during the war because Lolo Arturo was the personal secretary to President Quezon in exile. I knew that she was a brilliant mathematician and physicist and, until the 1980’s, a much loved professor and also academic dean at Assumption College (which was also the school I attended until Grade 7). Rumors about her working on the Manhattan Project circulated widely among her students, but she never talked about it herself. I couldn’t reconcile the mild-mannered lola I knew with the mad scientists I saw on TV that were making weapons of mass destruction.
She enjoyed puzzles. She enjoyed her daily 1.6-km walking commute from Urdaneta Village to the college in San Lorenzo. She enjoyed playing tennis and golf with her husband. She loved animals. Most of all, she loved teaching, and her students loved her back. I know, from the times I would sneak over from the grade school bus stop to the college and hide behind her skirts while her students would squeal about the “cute little kid” in the classroom.
I was frustrated with the interwebz. Why is it that I can find stuff about my neighbor’s sister’s dog and absolutely nothing on a woman who crossed an ocean and a continent to attend graduate school in STEM in the 1940s, who was married to an internationally recognized writer, who was the daughter of the former Philippine Secretary of Finance? It was like she never existed.
I wanted her to be remembered!
This was a woman who was at home in herself. She radiated a groundedness that made people seek her wise counsel or, at the very least, her calming presence. Despite all the personal and political turbulence of Manila in the 1970s and ‘80s, I knew Lola Emma’s house would always be a sanctuary. I could spend a few hours drawing in coloring books, sprawled on her cool tile floor and playing with her dogs, and all the world would disappear.
As I continued my research looking through the family archive of photographs, I stumbled upon a picture of her. In this studio shot from the ’30s, Emma is maybe six or seven years old. She leans her arms on a large parasol with her signature smile. I started collecting more pictures of Lola Emma in a digital folder labeled “Maalala” (To Remember). How could I honor this woman, one of the most brilliant women I knew, who seemed perfectly content to live in the orbit of her husband’s star?
Emma Unson Rotor (photo from the Unson family)
She may have been content with that but I, for one, was not. She had a whole story of her own, I was certain, but there were no children and no records to tell it. Lola Emma and Lolo Arturo did not have any biological children, although they had a hand in raising many of her brothers’ children. Several nieces and grandnieces lived with them when they came from Negros to Manila to study. In her later years, she developed dementia and went to live with those same cousins back in Silay; but when I asked my family questions about her life, they too, knew very little. It seemed the story of Emma was destined to be lost to us, like her own memories were lost to her.
Emma and Arturo Rotor (Photo from the Unson family)
Then one day, while rummaging through boxes in storage, I found the portrait of her dog. Ah, yes! I may not have the facts or her life story, but there was something I could do: paint her portrait. So I did.
I painted “Eminence Grise” in a book, writing her back into the pages of history, if only symbolically. Her image, in gouache, supplanted the story I did not know. I painted her signature smile among the orchids named Vanda merrillii var. Rotorii (named for her beloved). I also made another spread of the book that partially obscures her portrait with symbols of Arturo’s narrative so that one must intentionally turn the page to reveal hers.
Study for “Eminence Grise” by Ria Unson
When it was complete, I gave the painting to my aunt, Delia Unson, who was very close to Lola Emma. And that was that. Or so I thought. Until Delia received an email from an unknown sender with a question in the subject line: Are you related to Emma Unson Rotor?
(Left to right) Daisy Ochoa Unson, Emma Unson Rotor, Ria Unson, photo from Ria Unson
The email was from ER Tiongson, a professor at Georgetown who said he was currently doing research on Emma. He went on to explain that he found amazing archival materials about her, ending his note with “your aunt -- I think she was extraordinary. And I would love to share with you what I have found about their life here in DC in the 1940s.”
Thus began a two-year correspondence with Dr. Tiongson, who wrote an article that was subsequently published in Science News on September 12, 2023, titled, “Filipino math teacher Emma Rotor helped develop crucial WWII weapons tech.” He discovered that Lola Emma worked on the proximity fuze, a technology that changed the course of World War II. As Tiongson explained in his article, “She became a key member of a government division that developed an early version of the proximity fuze, the mechanism that makes a shell or bomb detonate when it gets close to its target rather than on impact.”
Tiongson also learned that Emma was hired as a physicist and tasked with experiments that would lead to new weapons. In the records he found were notes from Lola’s supervisor who wrote that Emma was “one of the most valuable individuals in the present project.” Along with the family photos we sent Dr. Tiongson of Emma, “Eminence Grise” was also included in the Science News article.
The rumors were true after all! I was filled with equal parts pride and resentment, learning that Lola Emma was one of the many women and Filipinos recruited to work on weapons technology and in the U.S. war machine; pride at her obvious brilliance but also resentment that such brilliance was extracted from the Philippines (at the time, still officially an American colony) and then having her service and contribution promptly forgotten. If her project was as important as the Manhattan Project, and as her supervisor said, she was one of the most valuable individuals on the project, why was she not publicly recognized? Where was she in the Oppenheimer movie?!
It’s been two years since my original online search. Today, the results look very different, only because of Dr. Tiongson’s persistent and diligent research. I wanted her to be remembered. Now, Emma Unson Rotor has her own orbit—and the place in history she always deserved.
Ria Unson is a Filipino American visual artist and speaker based in St. Louis, Missouri. Through her art practice and speaking engagements, Unson expands the collective archive to include stories about Filipino and American history that have been historically erased and/or excluded.
