Airports and other destinations

Kerima Polotan, one of my favorite Filipino writers, noted that you can find the most passionate feelings expressed in airports. Endpoint of arrivals and departures, it is where hellos are uttered, and goodbyes as well. I go to Cebu every month to visit my partner, and I know these sharp feelings only too well: the knees that turn to jelly, as the pain slices through your chest.

When I was growing up in Quezon City in the 1980s, we would sometimes go the old Domestic Airport that used to be the staging point of international flights as well. There was a well-wishers’ area where we could wave goodbye to our aunts who were migrating to Canada, to uncles who were leaving for the Middle East, and later to my cousins and siblings who were flying to the United States, to live there forever.

I still remember my first flight out of the city, to go to Cebu to interview finalists for an achievement award for young people and their organizations. I liked that writing job because I interviewed youth leaders (and their pushy parents) and checked on the progress (or lack of it) of their projects.

In Cebu I stayed at the old Magellan Hotel, and of Cebu’s roads I only remember the big San Miguel Corporation plant. It was all dust and heat in the early 1980s, when there was no Ceboom yet. I remember how one night how sad I felt, for it was my first time away from my family, and chilled at the thought that, one fine day, I would also leave home, to cross the sea.

I did that in 1989, when I received a British Council Fellowship to take up my M.Phil. in Publishing Studies at the University of Stirling in Scotland. My brother drove all of us in our trusted and dependable blue Volkswagen – my mother, sisters and grandmother. Six months earlier we were also at the airport to send off a sister, a nurse who had landed a job in deepest, coldest New Jersey.

My grandmother was weeping when I left, and she told me that she might be dead when I returned. I dearly love my grandmother – who took care of us when my parents were at work – but the time was ripe to go to graduate school.

My mother patiently rolled all my clothes and made them fit in the big, blue Delsey luggage that my father had sent home from his posting abroad. I told my mother she did not have to do it (I’ve always been a rebel) and I could do the chore by myself.

There were a thousand people saying goodbye to their beloved on that day in August 1989 when I first left the country. But when I landed at Heathrow in London 21 hours later there were no crowds, just a flute of icy wind that followed me all the way to Scotland.

Scotland was so cold such that I asked my sister I wanted to go to New York and New Jersey for Christmas. I applied for a US visa at Grosvenor Place in London, and snow was so heavy that day and our train arrived an hour late.

The consul at the American Embassy asked why I did not apply for a visa in Manila, and I told him, simply, “that the lines were too long.” He suppressed a smile.

When he asked me what would I do if he did not give me a US visa, I said, “Then I would just go to Paris to visit my friend Bonnie.”

His last question was, if you were studying in an American university and they offer you a teaching job, what would you do? I looked at him incredulously, at this young and earnest consul who was asking me such innocent questions. I answered, “Of course, I would take it, wouldn’t you?”

He cackled with laughter, stamped my passport, and that was how I got to visit the USA in the winter of 1990.

It was the worst winter in 70 years and The New York Times said that five people had just died in a home for the aged. When I arrived at JFK Airport it was so cold I thought my ears and other parts of my body would just simply fall off.

I asked a woman where is the exit (I didn’t see the signage) and she briskly said, “Don’t ask me. I’m already off from work.” Whoa, welcome to America then.

I had a problem going back to London because an unseasonable storm had just hit Manila when I was applying for a return visa. The lady at the British embassy said that nobody was picking up their phones in Manila, and I said, it is because of the storm. The lines are simply dead, that is the Third World. She didn’t want to believe me.

She didn’t want to give me a visa until I said that if she didn’t, then she would have to explain why to the British Council. I was also about to tell her that if she was thinking I would go TNT in London then she was mistaken. Then and now, the US had a more robust economy than the UK, so why would I bother to overstay in foggy Britain?

She gave me a visa, I did return to London, and took the 14-hour train to Scotland. I promptly returned to Manila after my scholarship was over. My Scottish boyfriend asked me to stay and I said, “What will I do in your country, cook haggis?”

From Stirling he took the train with me to Edinburgh, where I would take the short flight to London, and then the plane to Dubai, and finally Manila.

I am writing this 25 years to the day but I could still remember the silence between us as we sat in the train, holding hands beneath our long, brown shawls. At the Edinburgh train station I took my blue luggage and was beginning to say goodbye. I had learnt stoicism well from the Greeks, and from my father who was a tough soldier. But my boyfriend uttered a Scottish cuss word, embraced me and began to weep while I stood there, as snow flurries began to fall all over Scotland.

Comments can be sent to [email protected]