Global but alienated Pinoys

BY ANTONIO CONTRERAS       MAY 30, 2019

THE Filipino diaspora scattered us to many places in the world. We leave our homeland to serve. We sweat and toil in the sands of the Middle East, building vast financial empires drawn from oil. We rock the cradle of the children of the world’s richest, from the Sheik in Saudi Arabia, to the Sultan in Brunei, to the banker in Singapore. We have a daily exodus of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) leaving through our airports, of mothers bidding farewell to children they have to leave behind to assure their future. The irony is never lost on the attentive. Women leave their babies to the care of their mothers to take care of the babies of other mothers.

And we bring our songs and our dreams not only to sing lullabyes to foreign babies, but to bring joy and pleasure to their adults. Our entertainers are everywhere, singing in posh cruise ships, performing in ritzy hotel bars, and yes, in brothels in Europe, Southeast Asia and Japan.

All in the name of loving the family, and of loving the homeland. Remittances from OFWs are a reliable source of cash inflow for our economy. But for the OFW, it is a means to survive the hardships of life which their families face. It means funds to school the children, matriculate siblings, and maintain the health of the sickly elderly and the frail young.

We celebrate the OFW as modern-day heroes. They are always on hardship assignments. Many of them are exposed not only to the extreme heat of the Arabian desert or the biting cold and giant waves of the Arctic Sea. Others face the risk of abusive employers and the men who rape or sexually molest them.

But the Filipino diaspora is not just about OFWs who are on a tour of duty away from the homeland. Eventually they will come home. The other kinds of global Pinoys are those who have emigrated to other countries, those who for many different reasons decided to swear loyalty to their host countries as their naturalized citizens. Yet, despite losing their right to carry our passports, these Filipinos are very much part of the global Pinoy community. Much as they have lost their Filipino citizenship, the Filipinos overseas will never leave their hearts and minds. And in fact, with the passage of the law on reacquiring Filipino citizenship, many of them have since regained their right to carry Philippine passports.

Global Pinoys remain linked to their Philippine homeland. Our connectedness to relatives and kindred spirits are so strong that there are no strangers when two Pinoys meet abroad. Each one always finds time to stretch every bit of possibility to make a connection and find a commonality, no matter how contrived.

The Global Pinoys, in the eyes of their hosts, are seen as a ready smile and a readiness to enable and serve. Conscious of the fact that we are different in a land that is not ours, we never assert. Instead, we adapt to and embed ourselves into their cultural constructs and habitus. However, while this attitude may have given us some leverage, it may also have caused us to lose the opportunity to make our presence felt in other countries beyond the smiles we offer and the services we render.

An observant traveler would notice that while places serving Asian cuisine, from take-out counters to fine dining restaurants, are now part of the food landscape of all major capitals, Pinoy cuisine appears to be rarely present, if at all. I was just in Auckland, New Zealand, recently where there are now 65,000 Filipinos in a country of 4 million inhabitants, and where we are the fastest growing immigrant group. In my three-week stay there, I have seen many Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Thai restaurants serving food which they tried to be as authentic as possible. And I saw only a couple of Filipino restaurants, with one even serving what it labeled as fusion cuisine that looked and tasted different from authentic Filipino food.

Perhaps, the reason behind this is that global Pinoys would rather cook and eat our food in their own homes, and not in restaurants. When friends come and visit, we rather hold a potluck affair than take them to a Filipino restaurant. This reasoning, however, misses the point that the foreign restaurants in cities all over the world do not cater to their compatriots, and are in fact effective windows for other nationalities to have a taste not only of Thai or Vietnamese or Ethiopian cuisine, but also the symbols and signs that represent them. We, in self-deprecation, reason out that our cuisine is bland or not spicy enough. We simply fail to assert ourselves and lay claim to a space in our vast diasporic footprint for people from other countries to see us beyond the hands that rock their child’s cradle, or work on their oil fields, or teach English in their schools.

This is our tragedy. We have a very large diasporic presence, but because we serve our employers and please our clients, we never assert to evince our cultural uniqueness, and we remain symbolically invisible. The signs that make us a people is hardly noticed. Thus, while we see Chinese, Japanese and Indian scripts even in Paris and London, and Thai motifs are seen in Thai restaurants even in Manila, we pride ourselves for speaking fluent English, the language of our colonizers, ready to serve. We are so pleasantly versatile that we end up being easily absorbed.

Meanwhile, our Supreme Court has driven the final coffin that sealed the fate of the Filipino language as no longer a required course for college students. This further made us the only country in the world where the national language is just a mere option, producing Pinoys that are ready to serve the world, in English.

https://www.manilatimes.net/global-but-alienated-pinoys/561991/