Remembering Queena Lee: Mathematician, Psychologist and Teacher to All

(SPOT.ph) Queena Lee-Chua was one of my best friends at Ateneo de Manila University, where I taught full-time from 1986 until 2008. After she published her columns on Mathematics, Dr. Doreen G. Fernandez and I pushed her to compile them and give them to Lory Tan of Bookmark. The result was her first book, a bestseller titled “Why Be Afraid of Math and Other Essays,” with a lovely cover design by Joanne de Leon. I was then the Editorial Director of the Office of Research and Publications at Ateneo, and we co-sponsored her book launching. It was a major event, where her friends, readers, and admirers flocked to the Social Development Complex of the university to help Queena launch her writing career.

In the early 1990s, Alan Robles invited Queena to write for his science and environment page at the Manila Chronicle. He said he found in her “a brilliant, lively, vivacious and lovely young woman interested in many things, mostly about science and business.”

Queena was the original Kuwatro Kid at Ateneo, where a Quality Point Index (QPI) of 4.0 was the highest a student could work for. I remember that, as a young teacher, I would go to the bulletin board that had the names of the Dean’s Listers. And Queena’s name was always on top, with a sterling perfect grade of 4.0.

There was a big buzz when she graduated summa cum laude and the Mathematics Department quickly hired her to teach. I immediately liked her when I met her. We always had long and happy conversations. She was in the freshman honors class of Dr. Doreen G. Fernandez, along with the poet Angela Narciso Torres, who remembers Queena as a smart and humble classmate whose smile could light up any room.

Doreen told me that Queena already wrote well as a first-year college student. “She just needed some structure. So I gave Queena a metaphor: I said her writing is very good but they are like stems with flowers in a glass vase. They can be clustered together to form some shape. She immediately understood what I meant, and from then on, she submitted compositions that were not only elegant but also finely shaped.”

“She wasn’t at all intimidating,” Alan recounts, “although she was clearly several galaxies (maybe several alternate universes) smarter than I was. Much later, when I visited her home, I saw a room with all its walls lined with all of her trophies, awards, and achievements, all carefully collected by her mother.”

Her mother would die early. I was walking in Greenhills a day after my arrival from graduate school in the U.S. when I saw Queena. She looked sad and lost. She told me her mother had just passed. I held her hand and she told me how her mother died of cardiac arrest in the hospital the day before.

Our favorite hangout at Ateneo was the old Faculty Lounge, on one small wing of the college cafeteria. It had free-flowing coffee, cold water, and the company of the brilliant minds of Ateneo, now mostly gone. I told Queena that when I came to teach at Ateneo in 1986, I was the youngest teacher in the Faculty Room, at 23.

Then she taught with us a year later, and she was the youngest. Later, we would laugh when we both entered the spanking new Faculty Lounge at the bigger wing of the cafeteria—and hardly recognized anyone. It was full of newly hired teachers, in their early 20s, which was our age when we first taught at our alma mater.

One day, Queena told me that Harvard University had accepted her application for an M.S. in Mathematics, on her way to taking her Ph.D. in Mathematics at arguably one of the best universities in the world. However, her parents frowned upon this plan since, as Queena recounted to me with a smile, “my parents were afraid that I would marry a white American and never return to the Philippines!”

Remember that this was the late 1980s, when the Edsa Revolution had just happened, and we were all trying not to leave the country on fellowships and grants. We wanted to stay in the Philippines to help in rebuilding the country.

Queena had legions of admirers. I teased her about them and she said she found them either too bland or “not interesting enough,” her shorthand for guys who don’t have much between their ears. Queena was brilliant but always humble. There was no mean bone in her body.

She wrote a much-followed science column at the Inquirer, for which she received tons of fan mail. One day, she told me about this persistent, old man in Ilocos who wrote her every week. He said she should wait for him because he was coming to Manila to marry her! I laughed at her recounting, but I could see Queena shuddering as she recalled it. I teased her that she should get a driver and a bodyguard, now that she was famous, to keep the wolves at bay.

We were happy when she told us that she had finally met a nice and bright guy named Smith. He was an acquaintance of Queena before and they met again in New York City. They talked for long hours, met for endless lunches and dinners. They got married and had a son named Scott, who later began to write fiction and nonfiction as well. Queena encouraged his writing, and he even won some national awards for his work.

Because she could not study overseas, Queena took her M..A. and later her Ph.D. in Psychology at Ateneo. She taught at both the Math and Psychology Departments, a true example of interdisciplinary expertise in academe.

She is the renowned author of an auditorium of books on Mathematics, Science, parentings, and education. She also wrote “Successful Family Businesses: Dynamics of Five Filipino Business Families,” “Bouncing Back: Life and Learning in a Time of Crisis,” and “Leadership with Father Ben,” all for Ateneo University Press.

The eulogy from Ateneo reads: “She was a proponent of problem-solving in Mathematics from the basic education to college levels, a mental-health advocate, a good listener, columnist, writer, and an outstanding teacher [a Metrobank awardee], with a larger-than-life presence both inside and outside the classroom. She will be remembered for her rich legacy and deep impact on her community.”

Anvil Publishing also came up with several books by Queena, some of which I reviewed for two national newspapers. She read the reviews and always thanked me for finding time to read her books.

When I left Ateneo to work for the United Nations, Queena met up with me. She was worried that I must have left because I was unhappy at the university, or there were anti-gay people who didn’t like my LGBTQ advocacy. I said it was neither: I had to leave because the UN required all its officers to resign from their current jobs, and focus exclusively on their work with the United Nations.

Queena also encouraged all my other activities: from gathering books for donation to the flood-stricken schools in Bicol, to the national campaign of Ladlad Party List, which I founded in 2003. She was supportive and kind, her face wreathed with a smile, talking in her mile-a-minute manner.

We were together in many committees at Ateneo. I remember one was the Admissions committee. We read tons of essay applications but Queena and I always selected the ones written by applicants who wanted to enter Ateneo on scholarships. The poor bright ones who wrote well always got two votes from Queena and I.

We believed that education lights up a path. Queena Lee-Chua, teacher extraordinaire, was one of the brightest lights in that path.