The Best Day of My Life (So Far): Seniors telling stories

When I was small, I had to serve two mothers . . .

With these bewildering words, 85-year-old Mei Chiu spoke for the first time to Benita Cooper, her granddaughter, about growing up in 1930s Hong Kong.

Cooper listened, aghast. A Harvard-educated architect, she had just moved to Philadelphia with her husband. She hadn't called home to Seattle in a while, she was homesick, and, wanting a conversation that was more than a status report, she says, "I asked my grandmother to tell me about her experiences growing up."

When I was a baby, about the time I was just learning to walk, a widow woman befriended my mother, Chiu told her in Cantonese. At first the widow saw my mother in the market and approached her, saying nice things about her lovely baby girl. Then she joked about wanting to take the beautiful child.

More and more the widow imposed her unwanted attention, until one day, the widow took me from my mother's arms and announced that from then on she would be my mother.

How could this have happened? What strange power did this widow have over the child's natural mother? Questions flooded Cooper's mind. She asked how her own aunts and uncles had reacted when Chiu told them her story.

Her grandmother's response was even more stunning, Cooper said.

"No one knows any of this," Chiu said. "No one knows because no one asks."

Why had no one ever asked? Hers was an extraordinary life - born in a tiny village in China, moved to Hong Kong when it was a budding British colony, survived a world war, raised 11 children, then immigrated to Seattle. How many other older men and women had similarly great untold histories?

"I realized it was my responsibility to record her stories. Somehow. No matter how imperfectly."

"And as my telephone friendship with my grandma deepened, I became more aware of the seniors around me," says Cooper, now 29. "As I passed others in their 'golden years' in grocery stores, on buses, or just on the sidewalk, I began to wonder what stories they had to tell."

Thus began The Best Day of My Life (So Far), a multimedia storytelling and writing project at the Philadelphia Senior Center on South Broad Street.

Cooper, who has her own design business, started the program there as a six-week experiment in September 2009. By popular demand, it has become ongoing.

She set up a Facebook page with photos and stories so participants' children and grandchildren could comment (thebestdayofmylifesofar.blogspot.com).