reinvention

Early on the morning of 8th February 1986, I was going through Immigration at Sydney airport, sleepy from an overnight flight from Manila. The Immigration officer said to me something to the effect that “oh, you’re in trouble now!”, which of course alarmed me — I was indeed in trouble in Marcos’s Philippines, which was why I was in Sydney, running from that trouble. I asked, with a fake smile, “what do you mean?”, and he said, also with a smile, something like “you forgot to vote, didn’t you?”. The presidential election in the Philippines was indeed held on 7 February 1986, and I had indeed not voted. The Immigration officer was teasing me; he did not know that just two weeks before I was being tortured in a safe house somewhere near Manila, and that soon after my release, my father had arranged for me to cool off with my godfather in Sydney. Two weeks after I got to Sydney, Marcos was ousted. I didn’t want to return to Manila just yet as there may have been a change in Presidents but the system in place during Marcos’ rule was basically the same, and the men who abducted me would probably still be around, attending to their business as usual. Its been 24 years since I came to Sydney to cool off for a while. Time flies.