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Sunday, September 11, 2005
Visit to doctor saved Pinay
THOUGH Mary Rose Kang-Lu did not know anybody who died in the Sept. 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack, she still prefers not to watch documentaries about the tragedy.
She also feels weird seeing tourists flock to Ground Zero to have their pictures taken, with the broken cables in the background.
“I wouldn’t want to have my picture taken there. I respect the decision of some people, but for me, so many people died there,” Kang-Lu, 31, tells Sun.Star Cebu.
Kang-Lu was then in New York for eight months to study culinary arts at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.
She now owns Melange, a restaurant at the Banilad Town Center. She has since married and is now a mother of a two-year-old girl, with “another one on the way.”
Kang-Lu was accompanying her sister-in-law to a doctor in New York when a plane crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. When they transferred to another doctor, the second plane crashed into the second tower.
Had her sister-in-law not asked her to accompany her to her doctor’s appointment, Kang-Lu would have gone to the World Trade Center to see the shops on the ground floor.
Kang-Lu only learned bits and pieces about the hijacked planes at the clinics her sister-in-law went to.
It was her brother who was at home at the tip of Manhattan who joined hundreds of people in fleeing from the rubble.
He was told to vacate his apartment, because the building was already shaking.
Kang-Lu recalled seeing her brother covered in dust, from the rubble of the first tower that collapsed.
Although the building where the apartment was in remained in tact, Kang-Lu said they could not live there for about two months because authorities were afraid of the high asbestos content in the air.
So they stayed with relatives in New Jersey and in Queens, before they checked in at a hotel.
“My mom wanted me to come home. But I was more afraid of traveling at that time. There was a time that I did not want to take the subway,” she told Sun.Star Cebu.
Her school was 40 blocks away from her brother’s apartment in Manhattan and with the New York traffic, she sometimes got stuck for an hour.
It only took about 15 minutes by subway, but she feared terrorists would target the underground transport next.
Kang-Lu feels lucky that she did not have to witness the horror of seeing people leap from the building to their death.
But she sympathizes with those who lost their loved ones.
“Especially the firemen. They were going in when everyone was going out. For several months, nearly every fire station in New York had a violet wreath outside,” she said.
Still, she maintains that being in New York at that time was one of the “major experiences in my life” and something she can share with her children later on. (MEA)
(September 11, 2005 issue)
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