self-portraits

hitting ground head first

We all need a jumpstart in life and if I had a springboard, from where I made a first plunge, head first, before I got to other depths, MSU Marawi would be it.

June 1980, Princess Lawanen Hall. At the receiving hall while waiting for the dorm manager to have myself registered, I was introduced to a bubbly senior girl who was there for a visit and how she talked non-stop about MSU’s glory days. I got to asking about student activism on campus, because a teacher back in Notre Dame high school, who used to catch me at the school lib reading Wakasan Komiks hidden under cover of a newspaper, and who took my defense for insubordination when I talked back to my adviser his wife, had me properly forewarned: Maraming aktibista doon. Baka hindi ka na mag-aral doon, ha. And this senior girl she yapped on about MSU’s activist days until she got to the plane hijackers whom she knew by their first names.

They were their kuyas, she said, they used to serenade her, and yes, those were the days when scholars were truly brilliant, truly good, and these kuyas of hers, oh they just wanted to get to communist China, who was then enforcing a closed-door policy to protect its economy, and so in March of 1971, the six of them took this flight and announced a hijack, two at the pilot’s cabin ordering at gunpoint the captain to land in Canton, while the others did some singing and guitar playing to allay the fears of the shocked passengers. The plane did land in Canton, southern China, of course, and the Chinese authorities let the students stay in the country, and let the plane fly back to the Philippines, and no one got hurt, except perhaps the Marcos government.

That was the first time I heard of that hijack story because in the 70s you really did not know a lot about high-noon leftist adventurism, all your cousins ever cared about was Elvis Presley and the Beatles and that was enough to glue you to their sides. You only realized something was wrong when people started whispering about curfew and Martial Law and your neighbors the policemen came with the Army and made your Grandfather surrender the Carbine and the paltik pistol he took time and trouble to wrap in plastics and bury six feet under because these Marcos guys standing in his backyard were said to have this metal detector and knew there was a gun in the vicinity. So as you listened to this Ate praising her long-gone aktibis kuyas, you remember distinctly that day the Army disarmed your Lolo and somehow you wanted to get hold of something lethal which was nowhere to find as yet on campus. Nine years later, when you would be volunteering for a human rights work seeking the ouster of Marcos, you would tell your senior office manager and political mentor who also happened to be your one-time Political Science teacher on campus about this hijack and because she was from UP, she just dismissed it as one of those tricks the Young Turks pulled up in their time, like in UP, she said, they had these so-called Dilliman Commune. She was oh so austere for those not-so-austere times.