NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Saturday, March 14, 2015, 9:35 PM
Susan Watts/New York Daily News
Hanna May’s parents fled religious and political discrimination in Northern Ireland when they were 18.
Here is an Irish New York story that defines St. Patrick’s Day.
Because of religious and political discrimination, Hanna May’s mother, Susanne, had to drop out of high school in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during “The Troubles.” She wed at 18 and fled to America with her husband, Robert May, to become a nanny.
In June, American-born Hanna May will graduate from the Loyola School, a Catholic high school in Manhattan, with a full-ride pre-med scholarship to Wellesley College.
“I am my mother and father’s American Dream,” Hanna says. “My father also had to flee Belfast because, as a Catholic from a neighborhood called the Short Strand, which was completely surrounded by unionist Protestants, he could never find work.”
Born a month apart in 1965, Hanna’s parents grew up to the nightly rumble of car bombings, internment without trial, non-jury courts, barbed-wired checkpoints, streets patrolled by armed British troops in armored cars and the taste of tear gas in the always damp air of a divided city. The unemployment rate for Catholics was 40%. When Robert May finally did land a job at 18 at a Catholic-owned supermarket, he received an anonymous phone call in the night saying, “If you show up for work tomorrow, you will get a bullet in the head.”
“That was the last straw,” Hanna says.
The young couple, who had fallen in love at the age of 14, joined the Irish diaspora that had brought my own persecuted Catholic parents from Belfast six decades earlier to find new lives and noble work in New York.
Susan Watts/New York Daily News
Hanna May, a senior at Loyola School in Manhattan, will attend Wellesley College on a full scholarship in the fall.
“They settled in Jackson Heights,” says Hanna. “My dad worked as a bartender, paying his own way through Fordham University, studying economics at night because as an undocumented alien he wasn’t eligible for financial aid. My mom worked as a nanny for a banker. After they became citizens, my dad was hired by the banker my mom nannied for at Morgan Stanley.”
She says her parents, especially her mother, placed a fierce emphasis on education.
“Not to shortchange my dad, but my mom is the smartest person I’ve ever met but she was unable to finish high school in Belfast,” Hanna says. “So she pushed me and my younger sister, who is a freshman at Loyola, to excel in school. She told us education was the great equalizer and that we could have all she never had back in Belfast here in America.”
Hanna maintained a 95 average through Loyola, scoring an amazing 2190 out of a possible 2400 on her SATs.
“This year I received an internship with the chief of neurosurgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, where I worked 10-hour days, five days a week in July. I observed surgeries ranging from brain tumor removal to complete resectioning of parts of the brain. I actually shadowed neurosurgeons through these brain surgeries, watching brains exposed and pulsating in operating rooms. Before this amazing experience I’d always considered being a doctor. Interning at Mount Sinai I witnessed a human miracle every single day performed by amazing doctors whose lives were dedicated to saving the lives of others. I decided to become a doctor, although I want to be in OB-GYN.”
She applied to Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
I try my hardest in school, not only for myself, but to honor them for all the sacrifices they made.
And then one day a few months ago, the first American-born daughter of a brilliant lady who had to drop out of high school and a father who was threatened with a bullet in his brain if he took a supermarket job opened an envelope in the family’s home in Jackson Heights. Hanna learned that she had won a full scholarship to a great American university.
“The Irish rarely show affection or display emotion,” Hanna says, laughing. “But my parents couldn’t conceal their joy. I try my hardest in school, not only for myself, but to honor them for all the sacrifices they made for me and my sister. My parents never had the opportunities that I have. So I feel it’s my responsibility to take full advantage to not only make them proud, but to live the life they worked to give me.”
This is the kind of Irish/New York tale that helped build this great city of immigrants. A story of war, death, discrimination, immigration, poverty, struggle in the shadowy netherworld of undocumented labor, and finally thrilling triumph for their children born as Americans in the golden light of Lady Liberty’s lamp.
“This will be a great St. Patrick’s Day for my parents, who came here so that their kids could have more in life than they had,” Hanna May says.
Slainte.
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