Just so everyone knows—I am not the kind of person who likes to think or talk about interracial tensions. In fact, I delight in the idea of interracial harmony. I also enjoy reading and viewing fiction about interracial romances such as in Save the Last Dance, The Joy Luck Club, Othello, The Last of the Mohicans, Spanglish and Legacy, among others. At present, I am writing two.
So I don’t like these stories (real or fiction) about Filipinos being bullied outside this country; but neither do I like hearing Filipinos complaining about it with unnecessary pride and passion. As a Filipino myself, I understand that my people have been treated unfairly in the past, and it’s a cause for some righteous anger. But I think it’s no reason for us to be unreasonably angry with our ex-colonizers OR revere them for a reason that I totally do not know.
Growing up in a country where colonial mentalities remain to be the diseases of society, I am extremely thankful that my family and I do not have the same perceptions about foreigners, especially white Americans. But to our disappointment, the residue of such behavior could still be observed in the people around us. We don’t want to say we are ashamed to be Filipinos, but we see that there isn’t much to be proud of either, because the pride that some of our countrymen is showing is confused with vanity and arrogance.
I am not going to talk about how many Filipinos brag about how we are the best. I think too many foreigners and some intelligent folk from this country have already complained about that so I leave it to them.
But let me share you three events that my family experienced recently: two were my father’s personal experiences, and one was my sister’s and mine.
In a not-so-distant past, my father was boarding a bus home. The bus wasn’t full, so he spotted many unoccupied seats there. When he chose a good one, somebody in the bus told him to get another seat because “Americans are sitting there.” My family—we don’t think of people of other colors that way. To us, people are people. If somebody—regardless of race—leaves a good seat in a bus vacant, we would gladly take it unless the person previously sitting there made it clear that they don’t want anyone else sitting there (e.g. leaves his bag there). But the “Americans” just left the bus to buy something and left the good seat vacant, so my father sat there. “So what?” my father said. “Did they tell you to keep this seat empty? This is a public place; I can sit where I want.” The person who told him to leave the seat spoke no more. The two “Americans” did not complain when they returned. My father was even more annoyed that the two Caucasians were actually French (or perhaps French-speaking Canadians).
In a more recent event, Papa was temporarily assigned in Clark Air Base when his international and domestic flights would be from Clark and back, not Manila. Cebu Pacific arranged with the local Holiday Inn to accommodate Cebu Pacific pilots. Being a former US Air Base, Clark still has a large percentage of Caucasians in the population. But my father noticed a peculiarity in the behavior of the employees of Holiday Inn: at the dining area, when the guest is a foreigner, especially when white, the employees would be warm, greeting the guest with a ready smile, even guiding the guest to his table without being asked. My father wasn’t treated the same way, although he was as much a guest as any big white American in the hotel. “What kind of training are you giving to your employees?” he asked the manager irritably when he complained about it. The manager, a Filipino, graciously thanked him for the comments and promised to do something about it.
About two weeks or so later, Papa was assigned in Clark once again. This time, he took Mama, my little sister Coleen and me with him.
On Wednesday, June 10, 2009, our second day, my sister and I went to the pool in the back of the hotel. The shallower end of the pool was full of people; since we were used to swimming in a pool with only our relatives, we chose to step into the empty deeper end, which was just four feet deep. To our surprise, the employees who are watching the pool guests told us to join the other guests in the shallow end, and we obeyed. I speculated that they were going to clean up the surface of the water at the empty end, but they did nothing anyway. My sister and I aren’t rule breakers by nature so we stayed with the strangers.
Then, about half an hour or so later, a brown-haired white man entered the deeper end of the pool with his kids, and nobody stopped him. I don’t understand it—why were my sister and I told to join the strangers and not that guy? But this gets worse: his son, who must be about eleven years old, handed him a glass of mango juice while he was still in the water—food and drinks are not allowed in the pool. Again, nobody stopped him.
My sister, who is a passionate anti-racist, was fuming.
But we didn’t tell this to our parents, because we knew that it would be our father who would complain. We didn’t want our father to get a reputation at the hotel for being such a frequent complainer. Besides, it wasn’t that big a deal; there could a good reason why we weren’t allowed in the deeper end of the pool. Maybe there was a schedule, I dunno…
Anyway, regarding all three instances, we all have the same thoughts: Why do Filipinos tend to be so nice to foreigners and not their own countrymen? If we want foreigners to respect us as a nation, we should start respecting each other and ourselves. I think the reason why foreigners think we’re slaves is because we act like such—putting Caucasians on the pedestal as though they’re so much better than us. I don’t believe they’re not, but us treating them with unnecessary reverence gives them an impression that we don’t value ourselves as much. And now, it’s becoming too real. We don’t value ourselves properly anymore.
Seriously, I don’t know where our society’s going at this rate.
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