If you were brought up in a similar environment you know what I mean. If you weren’t, then you won’t ever understand.

The point is, he’s no worse than me and my people.

A couple months after the Philippine trip she went to Thailand. I just had to ask her what she looked like as a result of her Bangkok weekend. “What else but a prostitute”, was her answer. Hilarious. So…what’s worse? None of our Thai friends freaked out about her very public comment, just like I didn’t freak out about her “maid’s tan”.

I’m not in any way defending Tsao but I think it must be pointed out that Pinoys have been reacting so strongly to what he said in one article when the snobbery at home, here in the country, is just as, if not more intense. It’s certainly ubiquitous. I’m sure some of you were discouraged by your parents to be behavioral equals of your household help. Who here wasn’t raised to be more educated, have better table manners, speak better, in general not act like maids? Who here isn’t guilty of ever thinking, “she looks like a maid/he looks like a driver”? Seriously. Does it hurt more when a non-Filipino speaks of our realities?

How about the uproar over that actress who, after filming in the country, commented that Manila was “filthy, polluted, a slum city”. Some of the indignant people were a bunch of my Mom’s friends, upper-class, educated, ersatz aristocrats. Mom and I couldn’t figure out what their problem was. Were they contesting the fact that Manila IS filthy, polluted, and slummy? Can ANYONE deny it? Or were they pissed off because some foreign cunt vocalized these truths? It’s as if this actress (who she is is completely incidental) was violating a gag order by describing the city.

What I think is that we as a people are pathologically melodramatic; it cripples us. So much time and energy are wasted wallowing on shit that at best gives our realities a cheap, trivial, and temporary varnish and at worst keeps us just the way we are. Sinking.

From a Filipino who lived in Hongkong for more than a decade and yet do not understand the disincentive Hongkong policy to set a higher wage minimum for foreign workers. The local protectionist policy is taken literally as protection of foreign workers as opposed to employing its own citizen from mainland China without any minimum requirement.

His “love of satires and hate of hypocrisy” is a better cover to his misguided subservience to a foreign country for its mistaken policy. He described in detail everything wrong with Philippines, subtly speaks his own inferiority complex ready to laugh at his and his own country’s expense.

If that is not enough already, he offered his low self-esteem and self-inflicted injury that “the reason there are no Filipina domestic servants in the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and similar First World countries, is not because the Philippines does not want to export its servants there but because they do not accept Filipinas as servants.” The true reason for not having a Filipina as servants has nothing to do with particular race but there is just no employment petition category for foreign domestic helper.

People start at misconceptions and assumes them as gospel truth.

Starting with James Fallows’ 1987 Atlantic article, “A Damaged Culture,” Filipinos have been thrust (often by their own intellectuals) into a sort of national inferiority complex by the foreign press. These protests were step in the right direction.

As a long-time foreign resident, I am actually quite proud of my adopted countrymen’s refusal to sit back and take it. God bless Pinoy pride.

Weldon McCarty
Manila, Philippines

Ramrod, you wanted us to look at reality and yet you and others (like http://streetstrategist.blogspot.com/) failed miserably to grasp the economic reality of between Hongkong and Philippines in terms of earnings and so the wide disparity in countries’ ability to pay corresponding wages. In addition, you are imputing that such low scale ability to pay in the Philippines is maltreatment. Perhaps, the treatment is better left at Mandaluyong mental to which you were very familiar with.

The bottomline, economic difficulties in the Philippines is not a reason to fall silent and accept human indignities from a foreign writer. In essence, you believe that a poor person has no human dignity to begin with until he can succeed. It is clearly wrong and lacking maturity either.

How would any decent domestic here and abroad take this uproar in their defence seriously? Lets look at reality here? How much are we paying our domestics locally? slave wages right? how much are the HK domestics being paid? In my opinion, these so called defenders are hypocrites. Can we honsetly say we are treating our domestics better here than abroad? Can we clean up our backyards first before commenting on others’?

On being insensitive to other races? Have you ever been in an elevator with Filipinos and Indians? Almost always you’ll hear snickers from our Pinoys, as if its not obvious that they are poking fun at the unique aroma coming from some armpits, even daring to talk about it in tagalog for all to hear.
Observe a person with polio walking, almost always you’ll see/hear a fellow Filipino make fun of him.

Insecurities are for people with egos small enough for others to step on, thats where the childish tantrums or outcries come in handy. We can take the high road, shake it off, and work harder, work better, smarter, and quietly succeed…do a better job than anyone else to make way for fellow Filipinos…
If we listen to these pretenders/hypocrites, we’ll never mature, as someone pointed out we will always be “a nation of hecklers.”
Deeds count more than words…