Remembering John Victor Morais 18 Dec 1910 – 6 March 1991

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” 

That was the motto of Anderson School, Ipoh, Perak where an eager  16 year old transplant from Kerala, educated up to that point in Malayalam,  started his adventure in what was then British Malaya. It was a motto he quickly embraced for his own life. It was a motto that spoke to his intense drive and determination to build a better life. For it surely took a lot of striving for this young man, raised by his widowed father, a sacristan and resourceful “Chutan Maistry,” or Jack of all trades, to head for a place that to his youthful imagination seemed like “a land of milk and honey;” a place that promised far better prospects for a better life than he believed could be found in India. That teenage immigrant was my father.

He was forever grateful for the patronage of his eldest brother, John Manuel Morais, a Normal-trained Geography teacher at Anderson School who helped him make the transition from eager schoolboy to young cub reporter; from the constrictions of life in Kerala to the opportunities his British schooling in Ipoh unlocked.

Leaving for America, one of a group of Southeast Asian journalists, at the invitation of the State Department of the United States in 1958.

On March 6, 1991, he left us for his final journey home.  But not before he had launched us on our own journeys. By his example, his strength of purpose and his sense of connection to those around him.

He liked describing himself as a self-made man. And he was. The lack of a college degree did not keep this immigrant from becoming the managing editor of the local edition of The Malaya Tribune, a leading English newspaper headquartered in Singapore, at the age  of 27.

I don’t know if he was aware of the saying often attributed to St. Augustine, that we should “pray as if everything depended on God, but work as if everything depended on us.” But that pretty much sums up the faith and willingness to work hard that defined his life. We were blessed to learn from his example. He taught us, not just how to pursue our goals, but how to remain forever grateful to those who helped us along the way. And then to pay it forward. We had so many advantages he did not have, and yet anything his children might have accomplished pales besides the courage and sense of purpose it took for my father, as an adolescent,  to imagine a life an ocean away and make that dream come true. In so doing, he made possible our lives and our dreams.

We pray he continues to move from glory to glory in God’s nearer presence…and in the company of his wife, Gladys Vaz Morais for whom the angels came on Nov 8, 2015.

We remember and are grateful, today and always.

In a submarine at Pearl Harbor.

At the start of the tour of the United States in 1958 with other Southeast Asian journalists,  he spoke on behalf of the group at a luncheon hosted by the Press Club of Washington at the Mayflower Hotel in D.C. He said: 

“The saga of America has impressed the world. It is the saga of a land where distressed and hopeful peoples of other countries come to find new homes. They have added their blood and their strength, their tears and their hopes to make the great American dream what it is today.” 

Decades later, I can only imagine my father’s  response to  the predicament of Dreamers today.