9/11: A Fil-Am’s account
Staff Report
September 11, 2001. It was like any other ordinary day for Filipino-American Christela Popu. Until an unexpected horror happened.
In her own words:
"The train ride that 9/11 morning heading to my university campus had everyone seem subdued but I was in my own little world, listening to my discman. I headed to the college paper office where I was a reporter and on the elevator, the girl next to me suddenly just slid down to the ground and started bawling. Hmmm... odd, I thought, but I minded my own business.
"It was in the office where everybody was able to grasp the full extent of what was really happening. My parents were on a road trip with stops in NY and DC at that time and calls to their phones were not going through. Later on I would find out that they were in Niagara Falls during the attack but just the day before were taking pictures at the area of the Towers.
"Dazed and worried and with classes suspended, everybody started heading home. As I walked back to the train station I looked at the beautiful Chicago skyline, focusing particularly on the tallest skyscraper, the Sears Tower and said a desperate prayer for our city to be spared.
"Trains were already shut down so I was stuck in campus until I got a ride from a friend and we all ended up in a bar attempting to drink our emotions away as we watched hours upon hours of coverage on the horror. All those people. All those lives. It was surreal and at the same time, too real.Afterwards, I went home, shut myself in a room and cried my eyes out." Four passenger airliners were hijacked by terrorists and crashed into buildings in suicide attacks—two into the World Trade Center complex in New York, one crashed into the Pentagon and another was targeted at Washington D.C. but crashed into a field. The September 11, 2001 attacks, also known as 9/11, killed almost 3,000 people.
