What Did You Do in the War, Mommy?
/Every Ounce of Courage: A Daughter’s Reflections on Her Mother’s Bravery
by Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino
(New Jersey: Besa Quirino LLC, 2023)
“Every Ounce Of Courage” (Photo by Tim Quirino)
In the genteel Manila high society of the 1930s, Lulu Reyes was a shining star; a beautiful socialite who was a constant in the society pages of Manila publications. Yet when WWII happened and the country suffered under Japanese rule, she unhesitatingly committed herself in the service of the thousands of Filipinos and American soldiers who were incarcerated.
Lourdes "Lulu" Reyes Besa - humanitarian aid worker, WWII heroine, one of the first Filipina recipients of the US Medal of Freedom (1947) from President Harry Truman. (Photo By Bob Razon)
Along with her friends who remained in the country, she gathered donations of food, relief goods and much-needed medicine and brought them to the many detention centers under the watchful eyes of Japanese soldiers. How she managed to get past the often-illogical restrictions imposed by the imperial invaders is a story – or many stories – told in this compelling memoir by her awe-struck daughter.
It took Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino 20 years to complete the research and writing of Every Ounce of Courage: A Daughter’s Reflections on Her Mother’s Bravery. An award-winning food writer and cookbook author, Besa-Quirino was once an advertising copywriter, a background that shows in how she structures the chapters in this book to draw the reader into the drama and keep on reading. Chapter 1 is almost cinematic: the pandemic lockdown; she, a passionate cook/baker in the midst of baking ensaymadas, looks back to a similar baking spree at a late hour more than two decades previous. That was the night she got the phone call that brought forth this book.
A certain Robert Dow was calling, who told Besa-Quirino that he found her through Nini Quezon-Avanceña, her godmother and her mother’s closest friend. “Your mother saved my life when I was a POW… Because of her, I have had a wonderful life.”
Thus began a 20-year odyssey for Besa-Quirino. Along with running her New Jersey household with her husband Elpi, parenting their two sons, writing stories (she’s one of the regular contributors to Positively Filipino), compiling recipes and publishing three cookbooks, and producing cooking vlogs that she posts in https://thequirinokitchen.com/, she assiduously researched her mother’s life. What she unearthed (because her mother never talked about it) was jaw-dropping. The woman she called Mom, who filled their family home in Tarlac with love and the aroma of delicious dishes, who loved to entertain hordes of friends, and who was a loving sister to her three younger brothers, was the same Lulu Reyes often mentioned in first-person accounts of WWII prison survivors and history books of the era.
Besa-Quirino knew she had the materials for a consequential book. Her now-friend Bob Dow was strongly urging her to write it. Yet she didn’t want to. In the first chapter, she wrote: “My friends had long urged me to write about my mother’s life, and yet I always hesitated. To be honest, I was afraid it would be too bittersweet to sift through the archives of my memories….” In our email conversation, Besa-Quirino explains, “I was afraid of the pain I would feel when I remembered how much I still miss her and my father. I was also afraid I couldn’t do justice to how beautiful Mom was, or how amazing her life had been. I feared I was inadequate. And I feared the tears that would come with the writing.”
What made her change her mind? The COVID lockdown which gave her the “gift of time to cook [her mother’s recipes] again, to prepare the traditional, slow-cooked dishes that went all the way back to my grandmother and even my great-grandmother. And so I gathered all of my mother’s timeless recipes, and I cooked and baked each one for the next fifteen months.”
Every dish Besa-Quirino cooked brought back memories of her mother’s presence. And every memory prodded her towards writing this book. “…as I brushed melted butter on the ensaymadas and showered a confetti of grated cheese on top, I realized if I didn’t write her story, who would?” Like her mother who never stopped volunteering for humanitarian deeds even after the war, Besa-Quirino looked beyond personal glory. “If I could tell people about how she found the courage to face every trial and tribulation life threw at her, then maybe it could inspire another to do the same.”
Mother and daughter, Lulu Reyes Besa with Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino.
Besa-Quirino reveals that more than half of the information she unearthed for the book was new to her. “My parents were very cryptic whenever they talked about the war. They did not dwell on the negative aspect nor discussed it in detail. It was part of their being protective parents I guess, to shield my sister Isabel and me from the horrors, to hide from us how cruel a person can be to other people. I knew about the awards my Mom received but she never went into details as to why she was a recipient of the US Medal of Freedom, twice in 1947.”
Writing a book is never easy; writing Every Ounce of Courage, which combines history (both a nation’s and a family’s), personal reflection and cooking (it includes 20 heirloom recipes), took a giant toll on the author. “The most difficult part of the process was not crying through the writing. With every word, phrase, and sentence, the tears came gushing through. When I had to rewrite paragraphs, my heart was heavy, and the tears would not stop. Even after the book has been published, and I read every sentence, which I have memorized by heart, I still cry. A lot.”
Elizabeth Ann Besa-Quirino, at her high school graduation, with parents Gualberto and Lulu Reyes Besa in Tarlac.
Every Ounce of Courage is well worth the author’s agonies though. It is a compelling read, a valuable account of a painful chapter in Philippine history, a tribute to a remarkable Filipina and, best of all, a love story. What greater proof of love, after all, than a daughter telling the world that her mother wasn’t just a hero to her but to the country as well.
And the recipes Lulu Reyes-Besa bequeathed, they’re just as important a part of her legacy as her deeds were.
[Ed note: see this issue’s Happy Home Cook feature for the recipe of Pinaupong Manok.]
To buy the book:
Amazon.com: Every Ounce of Courage: A Daughter's Reflections On Her Mother's Bravery: 9798987555002: Besa-Quirino, Elizabeth Ann: Books
