A Filipino Reflection on Apollo 11

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. There has understandably been much media attention to what that historic event, when humankind finally reached the moon, has meant for the world.

I myself was five years old in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their first steps on the moon. I remember watching, with much excitement, the blurry black and white TV footage of the landing.

Many years ago, a writer also skillfully and boldly pondered the significance of the Apollo mission—to the Filipino experience.

Gregorio Brillantes’s “The Apollo Centennial” is undoubtedly one of the best Filipino short stories in English ever written. Academic Timothy Montes called the story “the first successful science fiction story written by a Filipino.” I may be accused of bias, of course, since Greg is an old friend and my former editor.

“The Apollo Centennial” is not the typical science fiction tale. As Montes pointed out in a 2000 lecture, Brillantes does not tell a story about high-tech gadgets or the anticipated Space Age future.

Instead, the story is a critique of Philippine society during the regime of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos—and a meditation on the economic and technological chasm between the First World and the Third.

The story is set in the year 2069. The world is commemorating the 100th anniversary of Apollo mission, and the celebration extends to a troubled rural community in the Philippines. There, Arcadio Nagbuya, a poor farmer, is taking his children to see an exhibit of the Apollo centennial. It’s not an easy journey, for they have to wait for a makeshift raft to cross a river, and then take a bus that must pass through military checkpoints where soldiers are on the lookout for rebel guerrillas. The security forces even have fighter bomber “helidiscs” patrolling the skies in the hunt for rebels.

At the exhibit, Cadio and his sons marvel at the photos of the historic event and the taped voice of Neil Amstrong repeating his famous quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” As Montes writes, “The juxtaposition of the poor farmer and the technological feats of the past creates a Twilight Zone effect because the man is twice removed from reality.”

The Twilight Zone-like society Brillantes paints probes a major fear of many Filipinos in the 1970s and 1980s: That the dictator would be with us for a very long time. For instance, in Brillantes’s Philippines of 2069, people speak Tagilocan. Society is so repressive that the other regional languages are on their way to being made extinct.

On the trip back from the exhibit, Cadio and his sons briefly run into his cousin, Andres, who is part of the rebellion.

Brillantes writes: “His cousin clicks off the flashlight and speaks to him, not in Tagilocan, but in the old language…and the tender fluid accents of their fathers’ tongue, unheard for so long yet never quite lost nor forgotten, bring a swift rush of pride and love that pushes back the enclosing dread.”

It’s a simple, yet moving, scene, one that I have enjoyed rereading through the years.

The grimmest aspects of Greg’s bleak vision of our future did not materialize, of course. The dictatorship is gone, after all. Still, one can’t deny the prescience of Greg’s story.

Forty years after the moon landing, many of the ills Philippine society was struggling with in 1969 are still here—the poverty, the brutality, the mind-boggling underdevelopment. Despite the technology revolution, underscored by the cell phone culture that has radically changed our society, deep chasms remain, and many would argue that they are growing wider, more oppressive.

Sixty years from now, when the world commemorates the centennial of humanity’s first lunar visit, what kind of society will we find? Will there still be the glaring disparities in affluence and power?