| Tatiana tore up Onegin’s love letter before his eyes, same as when he rejected her, the once ugly duckling now a swan. At this hard and tragic moment of Tatiana’s decision, the full orchestra brought an end to the ballet. When Andrew Simon, the Principal Clarinetist at Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, asked his mother’s opinion of his solos in the ballet, outsiders could barely tell the unbearable hardship this elegant lady, Regina Sinom, had once experienced in bringing up a son as to prominent classical musician and a daughter to a respected judge. Regina was born in Cologne, Germany, and fled to the United States in 1959 as a World War II refugee. Not long after the family got back on its feet in New York, her husband suddenly died from cancer, leaving her with two teen-agers, Andrew, 14, and Alexandra, 13. “He died within six weeks. From one day to another, I was on my own,” said Regina. Her husband had managed the family’s finances. “I had never deposited a cheque until I was 43,” Regina said. “When my husband passed away, I had no credit card, no bank account and no life insurance”. Yet she had to continue paying for the family house and its huge property tax so that both children could go to the same high school, Hastings-on-Hudson, in an upscale community in New York. “The children’s education always came first,” she said. “The death of my husband was completely a trauma, but I wanted to preserve what was left. If I gave up, I would have uploaded the family”. Once an affluent housewife who volunteered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City only out of her interest in art, Regina took up a sales job at a small property agency. When she first began, she was even “afraid to pick up the phone to call people”, but within three years, she became the top sales agent. She said, “I was just being persistent and really worked hard”. Regina made her first sale, in 1976, to a Caribbean immigrant couple. It was of a very little house worth USD59,000, and it earned her USD1,200 commission. “The air conditioner in the office did not work, so I invited the couple to my own house and turned on the air-con so that they would have a nice and comfortable environment to negotiate the purchase”, she recalled. “It was a Sunday. I remember very well”. Regina’s life has always been guided by her own values of being disciplined, honest and hard-working. She said, “I have my goals, and would not give in and go down my standards.” She said to her children, “we are a team and everybody should do (his/her) best”. She worked and supported the children’s education; and the children achieved the best results on class. “I always keep them tight with money, but was generous to pay the tuition”, she said. In the middle 1980s, Regina paid the majority percentage of Andrew’s tuition of USD 25,000 per year at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. When Alexandra applied for graduate law school, the tuition became unaffordable and even the interest rate of the student loan stood as high as 12 percent. Regina then sent letters to every president at eight colleges, marking them as “personal and confidential”, and expressed the need for financial aid. She wrote, “I am an immigrant. My husband passed away. Life is unfair. My daughter is brilliant. And I want her to get the best education”. To her delight, she got seven replies, offering loans with 2 percent interest and scholarships. In 1986, Alexandra went to the George Washington University Law School. However, when both children got married, Regina found her own second marriage a great dismay. “He was a gambler, but the worst thing was that we had nothing in common.” After eleven years, she divorced him. While most people turn to counselors after divorce, Regina threw herself into work, which she called the “love therapy”. To everybody’s astonishment, at the age of 59, she bought an 88-acre farm in North Carolina and worked there for nine years. “I love nature. After a long time of city life, I wanted something new, something completely different”, she said. In the beginning, the farm was in a very bad condition where “only rats and snakes lived”. When she showed up as a lady from city, with a European accent, the local farmers looked at her as if she was from the moon. They bet she would leave in two months. She proved them wrong. By the time she first set her feet on the farm, “all my life I had spent in city, I could not tell the difference between cows and bulls”, she said, laughingly, but soon after, “I was running the farm where were ponds, lakes, woods, and 63 cows. I even had my own sheriff on the farm”. She joked that she had three goats as her pets, “they always followed me, just like dogs”. Moving from an up-scale community in the city, Regina worked day and night with farmers. She eventually transformed a piece of run-down land into the best farm in the region. Since the farm was sold in 2005, a developer has built 110 houses on the same piece of land and it is an upscale development. “Yes, I made it”, she proudly says. “When I first bought the farm, everybody thought that I was crazy; but at the end, everybody loved it,” she says, her face beaming with joy and pride. “In 1999, I had a high school reunion on my farm. Twelve people came from all over the world, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina and the US.” To Regina, life has been unfair. To people, she has always remained strong. She said, “I also had doubts. I also thought of giving up. It took me three years to pick myself up after my husband passed away. (Then), I was like a robot and just did what I supposed to do”. And she is never reluctant to learn and always ready to take new challenges. “When you stop learning, then you are old”, she said. Her life is full of adventure. She has traveled in Europe, Asia, America, and Australia. Her most recent trip was to Indonesia, alone. Her next trip will be to Jordan, Israel and Egypt. “Traveling is the most educational thing. You can learn history, culture, tradition, geography, language; and how to adopt and adjust to local life”, she said. The telephone rang. It was Andrew calling his mother during a concert interval. “The telephone is 45 years old. I preserved it for Andrew. He and his sister were always on the phone when they were teenagers.”She carefully placed the telephone back after talking to Andrew. By next year, Regina will have been in America for fifty years. “What will happen in another fifty years? It will become a different place, I will not see it, but you will see”. |
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