Her Heart Is Love

On the cover of her self-published book, her finger is held up against her lips, the upper half of her features cut off to add to the sense of mystique. It only draws a reader further in, as if the title, “You Can’t Tell Anyone”, didn’t do enough of that already. But the mystery is lost when speaking with the author of the memoir, Corinna Yeager, a woman who brings warmth and laughter into the conversation. “Her heart is love,” Marcy Guzman, a friend of Corinna’s, gushed. “All she is, is love.”

Her magnetic, lively personality is a stark contrast to the cryptic title, which turns out to be a bit of a joke. “Every time people ask me what’s the title of the book I go, ‘You can’t tell anyone’”, she explained with a laugh, “and they say ‘I won’t,

She wanted to show others that “there is no such thing as a damaged good” and how God was present throughout her life. “Even when you thought He wasn’t there, He’s always been there. I wanted to show them what true redemption means.”

In her book her journey for redemption she begins it with immigrating to America. It seemed that she knew from a young age she wasn’t meant to live in the Philippines because she distinctly recalled her grandmother remarking, "You better make sure you end up living in the States because that mentality is not for here."

It is hard to imagine young Corinna living in the Philippines and thriving as she is now. Filipino culture is very oppressive to its women, Corinna explained. She admits that the dynamics have somewhat changed with the new generation, but it was difficult for her to enjoy life in her home country because she felt like she did not belong there. She said, “They assign to you what you’re supposed to be and if you don’t, then you’re a bad

She proposed that if they helped her get to America, she would help them deal with handling illegal immigrants. Eventually, she assisted them in one of the biggest immigration cases in Los Angeles, a case that they had been working on for five years. Time and time again, she beat the odds that were stacked against her. From being kicked out of her house for having a child out of wedlock, to running away to a new country and building a whole life from the ground up, her love for her daughter drove her to succeed. She said, “I did it all for my daughter.” “We’re too close,” her daughter, Mary Becker, said with a laugh that, funnily enough, sounds like her mother’s. “When you go through something like that you’re bonded in a way…in a really special way. So, we’re very, very close.”

It was nearly, word for word, the same thing Corinna said when she talked about her relationship with Mary. Although, the similarities are not completely unexpected, especially in Corinna’s case. After all, she did everything for her daughter – and what better way to demonstrate her love for God, for life, and for her daughter than by writing a book, possibly two, declaring it to the