Astrid Tuminez | Empower Podcast with Ryan Napierski

Thank you for having me.

Yes, and it's funny because before I became president of UVU, Ryan, you may not know this, I only had one green dress in my closet and I almost never wore it. I didn't think it was my color. But then I realized, you know, it opened whole new worlds of green for me.

Yes, yes. So it has been in the repertoire, yeah, but I barely noticed that green.

Absolutely. You were that, and I hope by the end of this podcast you're bleeding some blue as well.

As you mentioned, I'm from the Philippines, and I was born in a small farming village, rice farming village, called Piali, literally in the middle of nowhere. But the location is on the island of Panay in the province of Iloilo, and those listening from the Philippines may appreciate that. My mother was basically a peasant for hire. She would go harvest rice in other people's fields and be paid for that. My father was kind of a, sometimes he had a job, sometimes he didn't, and most of the time he probably didn't. And when I was two years old, my mother decided that her children, she had six at the time, there was one more to come, she decided that we needed more opportunity. And the way that she saw that was for us to leave the farming village and move to the city. So I was raised in the city from the ages of two to 14, Iloilo City, and the only place that we could afford to live in were the slums of Gomez. And those slums are literally on the beach. And so I grew up, it's almost fantastic to think about it now, I grew up in a hut literally made of bamboo and nipa grass. So it's grass and bamboo on stilts, on bamboo stilts, and it's in the water. So high tide, there's the sea underneath your hut. Low tide, it's the sand. And then one more thing I'll mention, I guess, is what changed the whole trajectory. When I was five years old, some nuns from the Daughters of Charity were doing service work in the slums, and they found my family and noticed something in us. They saw potential in us, and you know, they invited us to attend their school for free. So I probably had something in me already, some potential in my brain or whatever you'd call it, but without the schooling that was free that the nuns offered, I would have never known what I was truly capable of doing.

So my mother, who passed away in 2022, oh no, 23, soon, recently, very recently, she actually is a person I would call a striver. So a striver is probably a person looking to empower herself. So my mother was born and raised, her background was even harder than mine. She was born and raised in another farming village on a separate island, and no cash on that island. You never have any money for anything. You kind of eat what you plant or what the fish that you catch from the sea. And when she was 17 years old, she decided that she didn't want to keep eating that same fish, and she wanted cash. And so she ventured off into the big city of Iloilo to look for a job. And she didn't even have a high school degree. She had very little opportunity in life. And I think what happened to her when she saw that she had, you know, at the time five daughters, one son, and I've never asked her about it, but I would imagine that being a striver, she saw that she would be giving us a life, you know, better than hers. We couldn't learn English, we would just be farming, and we didn't have land, so we would be like peasants for hire. And she probably looked at that and said, you know, that's not good enough. And she'd notice in the city there's schools, there's cops, there's electricity, there's cars. You don't see that in the farm. And probably said to herself, this is a risk, but I'm going to take the risk. And my father was the opposite. My father just liked to relax under the coconut tree. And it was my mother who was kind of the machine moving us all to where she envisioned in her head where she wanted us to be. And she was at the time maybe, you know, 30 years old, very young woman. I can only imagine a woman in a rice field picking rice. I don't know how that, you harvest rice, you pull it out, I guess. It's backbreaking labor. And what must have been going on in her head every single minute of every single day, that I need to get my kids a better life. You know, my mom would be pregnant, she would be pregnant eight months, and she would be doing this backbreaking work of harvesting rice. And what it is at the end of the day, they either gave you rice or you could get paid in cash. So just think about that. She knew that that was the kind of hard physical labor that we would have to do the rest of our lives. And interestingly, my mother could speak English and she could write English. Her own mother was barely literate. Like my grandmother could only write her name, and that was it. So if you think of the generations of my grandmother who could, who the only thing she could write really was her name, to my mother who, you know, teaches herself English, to me, I go to Harvard and MIT. Yeah, that's right. The best institutions in the world. So just think about that, how much striving and work and empowerment and decisions people made along the way to put me where I needed to be.

So I'll preface the answer by saying, you know, we are products of our parents, and at different ages in life we may have a different understanding of how our parents influenced us. My mom left when I was five years old. So here, you know, there's the hut on stilts, no money, no food. And so what's a woman to do? My mom actually left when I was five years old and left my father with six children. And my father really didn't know what to do with six children. So this was the point in time he really knew he had to get a job. So he gets a job as a tax collector in the wet market. So whenever farmers bring their produce, their fish, my father would, you know, give them a piece of government paper and they'd pay a couple pesos. And so my father, if I were to think of the influence, if I am a product of my parents, so probably genetically I'm very much like my mother. You know, I'm a striver, I work hard, I am restless, I am eternally curious about anything and everything. And so that's the part of her that I got, like extreme, I would even call it manic, you know, a little bit manic in a good way. And then my father was the presence that was there. So every child needs a presence, even if my father was not actively parenting, because he was orphaned at the age of six. Back then, tuberculosis just killed people in the village. So his parents died from tuberculosis, he was an orphan. But he was that presence that was always there, and you know, you could count on. And I'd go to the market and I'd try to find him, and he was bald and he liked to make his head really shiny, so it was like easy for me to find my father. So he was just that presence until I was 14, then I moved to Manila to be with my mother. So between the ages of five to 14, my mother was absent. But you know, as I've gotten older, the reason I prefaced my answer was I think as I've gotten older, I've come to an understanding that I'm very much like my mother. And she was a woman who really, my mother was restless and never satisfied. You know, never satisfied. It's like that song in Hamilton. And she was always looking to do more, you know, to be more, to improve things, to make your house clean. And so I think I have that. And I had more opportunity, therefore I was able to develop in a different way than my mother did.

Well, again, I think your understanding of it certainly evolved over time. But you know, you have to remember I lived in the slums. Tragedy was a daily occurrence. I saw my first murder victim when I was only 10. Children drowned in the sea. People with the cleft palate, they were bullied and ridiculed and could never have a life. There were stabbings. I mean, so when my mother left, it's really very, very different. You take the perspective of she left and that's what happened. I do not remember as a child being resentful. I did remember not liking other girls who had mothers. I do remember that. It's like Mother's Day, I hate that holiday. People would get up, you know, when I was 18, I came to Utah, and I'd go to church and people would, you know, so in my church people would get up and say something about mothers and Mother's Day. I'd be really unhappy. And I would really be like, you hypocrites, it's not really that sweet. Don't tell me it's that sweet with your mother, you know. So there was a little bit of that, but never, never resentment, because in my culture we are taught to respect our parents. You know, in Asian culture it's a very strong... I have never blamed my parents for anything because I feel that they did the best they could with their circumstances. So I have to respect, I actually have to marvel at like how did my mother keep six children alive when you have no health care, you have no milk. By the way, we don't even feed our babies milk. You know, we feed them the steam from rice. You put all this rice to cook, boil, and you take the water. I mean, it's really bad nutrition. So how did my mother somehow keep all of us alive? To me that's like a remarkable accomplishment.

So when the, so the nuns, and there was really a primary nun whose name is Sister Elira Korea, I am still in touch with her. So when they were doing that service project, they found my family in the slums and they talked to my mother and found that the children were talkative and they probably noticed that, you know, we spoke well. And so they asked my mom, how many do you have? And it was a school for girls. And so my mother said she had five. And the nun said, well, we are starting a new program called the free department. So the school's very expensive and it's mainly for rich girls, you know, who had drivers and maids and uniforms. And they were starting an experiment called the free department across the street. It was a separate building, and this was going to be free for poor kids, for, you know, the indigent. And my mother said, yes, I have five. So I remember the day of enrollment. I don't know what my older sisters did. I think because there was no structure in our family, it was every person to herself. But I remember because I was only five, I obviously didn't know what to do. But I remember my aunt took me, and then my aunt said, you know, I have a nickname, all Filipinos have a nickname. So my name is Bukai. She said, Bukai, what is your real name? So I said, Astrid. And she said, how do you spell that? And I kind of panicked because I didn't know how to spell my name. And I spelled it A-S-T-R-E-D. And that's what we put on the form. So I enrolled. Then later I realized, somebody told me, maybe my older sisters, no, no, no, that's not your name, your name is something else. And we corrected that. But so then I was only treated as a visitor. They didn't put me in first grade because I'd never had any education. And the teacher said, okay, we'll make you a visitor, and if you're good enough this year, you can be in first grade next year. So I became a visitor. And there were six rows of chairs, and the smartest girl was in the first seat, first row. The dumbest girl was in the last seat, last row. Talk about a rank system. So the teacher put me in the last seat, last row. And I remember looking at the girl in the first seat, first row, just with a lot of emotion. You know, I looked at her and I was like, I'm so mad, you know, and I'm so humiliated. But you know, you better watch out, girl, I'm going to take over your seat. So the teacher, Mia was her name, I think, she immediately noticed that I was a fast learner. So definitely, I don't know how many months it took, I definitely made the first seat, first row. And then I skipped first grade. They put me in second grade. And it was for me the very basic of reading, that it was so magical to learn to read. And there was a library in that little school, and I devoured every book. Once I could read, I would just take, you know, I remember to this day how delighted I was with Dr. Seuss, because I think we had a complete set at the time of Dr. Seuss. And I read everything. And I realized, well, language is like that, you can really invent. And so it was from there that I realized, first, I got real skills, right, reading and quantitative literacy, numbers. And then secondly, learning that I had worth, I had value. Because everybody admired a smart person. The rich girls asked me for help with homework. Their parents would trust them to go out as long as I'm with a group, because I was the smart girl. So it kind of shifted everything for me. It shifted the way that I imagined the world. And it put me in contact with accomplished people, and that wasn't part of my farming village or my slums. There were no accomplished people. Suddenly I was around these accomplished people who behaved a certain way, so I tried to pick up how they behaved and tried to mimic it.

No, not at all. I mean, I had no idea. You know, my own parents had no college degree, so I had no idea about what was possible. None. All I knew was that I was envious of that girl. You know, and envy in a positive sense, like how could she be in that first seat, first row? And then there were other motivations. I grew up very, very religious. So I was then raised by these Catholic nuns, and we went to mass regularly. I never missed confession. I went to confession every Saturday and Sunday. I pray the rosary all the time. I actually still pray the rosary today. So the other motivation was, you know, all these people around me that I wanted to be like them. And then religion, you know, this idea that you have to strive because you can be good, and when you're good, you know, God will reward you. So just very basic thinking for a little girl. And of course, back in my head, probably was the thought that, you know, I need money. I didn't even have clothes. You know, there was a uniform, and my blouse would be gray because, yeah, it's supposed to be white, but because I couldn't wash it off enough. You know, I had one pair of socks. It was just crazy, crazy poverty. If my shoes had a hole in it, I couldn't buy new shoes. I would walk in the rain with wet feet. So of course I'm thinking, probably in the back of my head too, I never had breakfast as a child. So I was probably thinking also all the time, you know, hey, wouldn't it be nice someday to like have breakfast? And maybe I should get straight A's. Yeah, and that was not articulated. Yeah. But a child's mind is very active. So if you think about the ages of five to 10, what was going on in my head, you know, a lot of things were going on in my head. And I started reading books about America, and I just got fascinated by the whole world. You know, the whole world was fascinating.

For, I became a Mormon at the age of 10. So there were two Mormon missionaries who came to the slums, and it was high tide. And one of them, so for those who don't know, Mormon missionaries go when they're 19, and they go everywhere in the world. They wear white shirts and ties, and they're mostly from America at the time, not Filipinos. And these missionaries, we call Elders, one of them fell in the water, and the water was our sewage. We had no plumbing, we had no pipe, not that, it's just the sewage as well. So he was so disgusted, they never came back. But then six months later, another set of missionaries came. So I became a Mormon, which changed my life completely. And for those who are not familiar with the theology, you know, it teaches you you're a child of God and you have eternal worth. My Catholicism was a little bit different. It taught me a lot about punishment, going to punish you if you're not good. And here in this new religion, I was taught your potential is actually endless. So there was that whole very liberating shift. Yeah, very liberating theology for me. And so years later, I applied to Brigham Young University. I had already done three semesters at the University of the Philippines. I got a scholarship when I was 15 years old. And I applied to Brigham Young University. It took about a year, year and a half to get a visa, because I kept getting turned down. I was a penniless single female from the Philippines, and it is impossible to get a visa. But I had friends, Mexican Americans, the Gomez family, who lived in the Philippines. They were Latter Day Saints, and they said, we'll help you, we'll talk to the embassy. And so in the third time, they talked to the embassy to say she deserves an opportunity. So I went to BYU. And I forgot your question. What was your question?

The nuns were not just agitated, they were brokenhearted, I'm sure. Our relationship completely fell apart.

I was 10. And the nun who found my family, she, because they moved them around, they're like missionaries, they get moved around. So the nuns who were left behind, we were not as close to them, and we were not as close to them because they were not the nuns who found my family. So basically there was a breakup, you know, a breakup, which was very unfortunate. And sometimes religion does that. Of course, now I'm older, I feel like religion should never destroy our relationships. It destroyed the relationship. And but I can understand why they were heartbroken, because, you know, dogmatic religion tells you you can't be saved over there, you can only be saved over here. And when those types of ideologies clash, relationships break. They break. So the poor, I mean, I've since of course completely healed the relationship with them. They're very proud of me. And the other last week was my birthday, they actually said a Mass for me, a Catholic mass, and they had a party for me in absentia, which was so cute. They sent me a picture.

Yeah, but clearly that was a difficult thing for them and for you.