Ninoy: The First of First Impressions

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Manila glistened unassumingly in the cool, but muggy January night as my Cathay Pacific flight approach Ninoy Aquino International Airport. I had just finished a meal of what looked like adobo chicken with rice, which was a significant improvement over the food from the Chicago to Hong Kong flight. This, while watching an episode from Season 2 of House, one where I remembered getting the diagnosis of black plague as soon as I saw the pitch black aspirate from an axillary bubo.

One scene haunted me as my plane landed—the memory of the footage of Ninoy Aquino, sitting on the plane on the tarmac of that very same airport. He had just returned from political exile in the United States, and calmly told the reporters crowded around him on the plane that he knew how dangerous it was for him to return to the Philippines, as Marcos’ chief political opponent and denouncer of martial law. Offhandedly, he commented that he was wearing a bulletproof vest, so that the only way anyone would be able to kill him was to shoot him in the head.

Minutes later, on the tarmac of the Manila Airport, someone did just that.

The 1983 assassination of Ninoy Aquino was the flashpoint, the beginning of the end for Marcos. That single, horrible event was arguably the most formative event of Philippine politics for the past quarter century. All this to say, even the simple landing of my flight at the airport—now named for the martyred and beloved Ninoy—even that was filled with meaning, because ever since I was very young, I was fascinated by the 1986 People Power Revolution, and all the events leading up to it.

I am in Manila, I am safe and enjoying my adventures. There are pictures which I hope to post soon, depending on whether I can get a USB port or not.

For now though, farewell. I am off to visit Quezon City with my family. There we will see the resurrection of my father’s fraternity, a fraternity he founded at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos for students of agriculture. We will even meet the President of the University of the Philippines, so for the avid reader, there is more to come.

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