Maria Ressa, Duterte critic and ‘guardian of the truth’, says journalists are under attack
- The editor of online news site Rappler and a Time magazine person of the year in 2018 talks to the Post about holding the Duterte administration accountable
A new life I was born in Manila in 1963. My mother was only 18 when she had me. My father died when I was a year old. My mother was then pregnant with my younger sister, Mary Jane. After my father died, she went to the United States, where her mother lived, and my sister and I stayed with my father’s family.
My mom would fly back and forth to see us, but it wasn’t a good relationship between her and my grandmother. She got remarried to an American-Italian she had met in New York and they came back to the Philippines and essentially kidnapped my sister and I from school. When we landed at JFK (John F. Kennedy International Airport, in New York) on December 5, 1973, it was snowing. One life closed and another opened.
A league of my own My parents worked in New York City. They didn’t want us kids growing up in an inner-city school, so they bought a house in Toms River, New Jersey. They commuted two hours to New York City and two hours back each day. My sister and I went to a public school in Toms River. I was one of five kids in my graduating class from high school to go to an Ivy League school.
For my senior thesis at Princeton University I wrote a play, in part to understand the early part of my life. It was about a child who was a Filipino figure, a mother who was the Aquino figure and a grandmother who was the Marcos figure. It was a political allegory. The narrative of the fight between the mother and the grandmother over the child turned out to be great symbolism but was also very personal. We staged it in Princeton and took it to the Edinburgh Fringe.
When People Power (the 1986 revolution that led to the ouster of then Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos) started, in my senior year of college, I wanted to know what being Filipino meant. I got a Fulbright Fellowship for political theatre and went back to the Philippines. It was the first time I’d been back since I was a child. It was an exciting time, one of rebuilding a society that had lived under Marcos for 21 years.