Techno-phobia
Grrrrrr! I just found out why they used up so many rice cookers there at my girlfriend’s house. I saw the rice cooker with starchy rice water running all over the sides so I asked what’s going on; it never does that for me. The girlfriend says the maid put in too much water. Ah ah ah. . . like the instructions are pretty basic, ain’t they? For each scoop of dry rice you add one cup of water and the sides of the bowl are clearly marked in half and one cup increments. Just how much intelligence does one need to operate a rice cooker? It turns out that she’s been guestimating the water just like Filipinas do when cooking rice over a fire. It has something to do with dipping your finger into the water and seeing at what joint it reaches. Goodgawdawmighty! If she messes up this rice cooker I ain’t buying another one. We’ll eat peanut butter sandwiches for all I care. The last time I was in the house I saw at least three non-working rice cookers with all kinds of crusty starch crap all over the exterior, including the electrical stuff. You know we from the US live in a pretty tech-savvy world, where even kids can program cell phones and TVs but here I am with folks who can’t even properly operate a rice cooker.
It’s not just the Philippines apparently because a friend with a Mexican wife tells me the same. Third World women just don’t want to adapt to modern technology. The amounts of water and dry rice must be precise because the rice cooker shuts itself off automatically. And that means starting it and leaving it alone to do its job. . . a u t o m a t i c a l l y! But my friend’s wife keeps going back and “checking” the rice by lifting the lid (it’s glass!) which releases steam and messes up the cooking time.
The scariest case of non-technical thinking I witnessed was the time I flew with the old Soviet airline Aeroflot. They had a daily Moscow-Tashkent-Delhi-Singapore run. On arrival in Singapore the plane just refueled and turned around with a fresh crew. So those arriving commie Russian crews must have loved to fly that route, getting a 24-hour stopover in capitalist Singapore. When I was checking in at the Changi airport in Singapore for my flight to Delhi I found myself right behind the crew members who were going to fly us. They were in the check-in line with us passengers because of all the loot they’d accumulated there in Singapore: cameras, boom boxes, electronic keyboards, etc. I suspect those socialist comrades had some decadent capitalist tendencies and were reselling that stuff back in the Worker’s Paradise. Ok, so I’m right behind this guy in an Aeroflot uniform who can’t figure out how to operate the luggage cart. It was one of those with the automatic brake which stayed locked unless released by squeezing the lever on the pushbar. But he was unable to get it to work right and was forcing the cart forward with locked wheels. And this is somebody who’s gonna either fly the plane or is gonna organize an evacuation in an emergency? Wowser!
99.5% of Filipinos will steal!
The place where I buy my bottled water is only 100 meters from my apartment. When I first moved here I’d call and have it delivered but then I’d often be forced to adjust my own schedule while waiting for the truck. So now I just walk down there with the empty, have them fill it, then carry it back. Mission completed in 15 minutes.
The owner is seldom there because she has several other locations but when she’s in we often have pleasant conversations. One time while her attendant was cleaning and filling my container I asked her how she can be certain her employees are not stealing from her when she’s not there, since, after all, her only raw product is tap water.
She said that when she first opened the business she was kind of green and didn’t know all the tricks to protect herself. She had employees selling off her water coolers when they are supposed to be leased, and no record found of who had them. And she had no inventory control over the amount of water filtered until she installed meters on the lines.
She told me she has to be continually alert because “99.5% of Filipinos will steal if there’s an opportunity!” Take note here that those were HER words, not mine. A Filipina said it, not this foreigner, eh!
Alright. So I found that amusing to hear from her, which confirmed what I’d already suspected but was too polite to say in her presence. While we were speaking I handed her a 50 peso note and she walked back to the desk, got a 20 peso note for change and wrote out my receipt. Then returned to the counter where our conversation continued uninterrupted. She handed me the receipt but I noticed that the 20 peso note stayed in her hand. I guess she assumed I was too animated in conversation to pay attention. As we talked the note, little by little, slipped further and further into her palm, until it was no longer visible. I found this very amusing since we in fact were discussing thievery and the innate dishonesty of Filipinos.
Had it been under other circumstances I’d have called her on it but this was too good, too ironic a situation to spoil. So I let her keep my 20 pesos and walked away with my water container, secure in the thought that I’d made a most fascinating discovery that day at the cost of only 20 pesos.
Gay Filipinos
I’ve encountered many gays in my lifetime. Many of them you wouldn’t even know were gay if they didn’t reveal it to you. That was in the USA where the gay culture blends in quite well with the greater society. I once had a co-worker with whom I often interacted at work as well as in meetings related to our union activity. We were friends as well and sometimes met socially. It was only many months after the friendship began that I discovered he was gay. By that time it didn’t matter to me and I was not repulsed by it, and we remained friends. Just friends, okay?
But gays in machista cultures like Mexico and the Philippines really tend to be flamboyant and do everything they can to stand out in the crowd. It might be due to their rejection by society and so they feel the need to lash back. In American society they are accepted without too much disdain and therefore feel part of the greater society itself. Not so here in the Philippines.
Many of the gays I’ve seen here are just plain nasty. They seem to have a need to be obnoxious in public places, as if they want to give us good reason to reject them. And while they dress in feminine clothing they are not exactly cross-dressers in the true sense of the term. They don’t dress to trick us into thinking they are in fact women; they dress in feminine clothing in part but it’s nearly always obvious that they are in fact men. It’s as if they define themselves as a third sex, neither fully male nor fully female. I asked one who had been taking hormones so he’d have breasts why he didn’t shave his legs as well to augment the aura of femininity. He replied “Oh no, we gays don’t do that; it’s a matter of pride to have hairy legs in a race where men are less hairy than Caucasians. If you have enough hair to display, then you show it.” I simply shut up at that point, seeing that his fuzzy logic was not going to change by anything I could add to the argument.
I wrote in a previous entry about how deceitful Filipinas are and this trait is apparently amplified in the baklas, the pseudo Filipinas. If the women here are deceitful then the baklas are even worse. When chatting with one of them it’s so obvious that he (she?) has no intention of being honest and straightforward with you. It’s as if lying is a compulsion for them.
I try to be egalitarian and accept people of all races and cultures and ideas but I must say that I have no patience with the baklas here in the Philippines. And to illustrate my point that they, as well as the real Filipinas, are deceitful by nature, here’s a news item about how one of them actually married a foreigner while pretending to be a woman. Ugh!
Pussy, pussy, pussy!
Filipinos often use a quaint form of English, some of it apparently dated from 1930s and 1940s movies with dialog that Edward G. Robinson or Buggery Humpfart might have used. The press frequently uses phrases like hatchet job or demolition job to mean a negative statement about a public official, and rubout for a mafia-style killing.
The other day I was relaxing at home and heard in the background somebody yelling “Pussy, pussy, pussy!” There are always people around us here in the Philippines, on our streets and on board buses, selling a wide variety of items. I’ve just learned to tune them out but this call was very hard to ignore; if this vendor was offering what my mind was telling me she had to sell, well then I was certainly very willing to look over the merchandise.
Yes indeed! So I quickly put on my slippers (I was NOT going to waste valuable time with shoes and laces on this call!) and ran outside only to find a Filipina trying to coax her cat down from a tree.
Culture clash
There was a great story in one of the local newspapers about a Frenchman who came here to marry a Filipina. She told him the reception cost 100,000 pesos and he willingly gave her the money, only to later discover that the real cost was just 37,000. Refusing to marry a liar he called off the wedding and returned to Paris with his parents. But that was only after a nasty scene in which he had the help of the National Police to retrieve his passport from her house.
Are Filipinos deceitful? Of course they are, from our point of view. But not from their’s; it’s just part of the culture. To them it’s normal and expected; to us it’s a violation of the rules of basic human interaction.
When Filipinos speak of “my family” it does not include us as their mates and husbands. Their birth family has and always will have a Filipina’s primary loyalty. We foreigners exist only to aid her to help “her” family. Jane, the woman in the above story, saw an opportunity to spread around her good fortune in having snared a foreigner.
She may not have done this willingly, however. Even if she had felt some loyalty to her fiance she would not have been able to defy the wishes of her own family. Elders have a lot of power in this clan culture. A Filipina has no option but to obey the expectations of anyone older than her, not only her parents, but also her own elder brother, kuya, and elder sister, ate. Disobedience is not an option; if one of her elders suggested she inflate the price of the reception, then it was so. Period.
Another aspect of the local culture that we foreigners struggle with comprehending is the interior debt, utang na loob. Once a favor is accepted, the borrower assumes the role of inferior. It’s more than just lending money or an object; it’s about social status as well. Calling in the debt is then at the whim of the lender, and no matter how inconvenient the situation, saying no is not an option. Every kid in this country knows of cases where a student fails a test because a classmate, to whom utang na loob was owed, asked to borrow a textbook the night before the test.
The independent character which we westerners pride in ourselves, is not seen as worthy of emulation here. It’s in fact a pretty scary idea because it means being cut off from their extended family/clan/debt networks. Dependence is instead encouraged; it is a form of social security to Filipinos.
Filipinas are probably the sweetest and most beautiful women on the planet. That’s why we foreigners love ‘em. But they don’t, and indeed can’t because of cultural restraints, approach relationships with us on the terms we would expect. One time a girlfriend asked me for something and I suggested she ask her granddad; she replied she didn’t want to do that because she’d then have utang na loob with him. What this really meant was that we foreigners are not part of their culture and therefore repayment and, indeed gratitude, to us is neither expected nor given.
I have a foreign friend here who owns a business. He passed on to me a hilarious series of text messages he’d gotten from a Filipina he didn’t even know. She got his phone number from an ad for his business and began texting him repeatedly asking for 6000 pesos to pay her rent. This was not a request for a loan, nor was she offering anything in return; she was simply asking for money with the expectation that he’d give it. He received dozens of text messages over a two-day period, ending with one saying she’d been locked out of her apartment by the owner and begging my friend to send her money by Western Union.
One time I met a girl here who seemed nice so we exchanged phone numbers. A few days later I got a text message from her saying simply “Give me load”. Assuming that she forgot to add the word “please” to her message, I did send a modest amount, 30 pesos I think, to her cell phone account to test her. I waited patiently for a half hour without getting a thank you but I finally sent a nasty message about basic courtesy when requesting and receiving gifts.
I thought that my angry diatribe would put an end to further requests but over the next few days she sent a few more messages. I ignored them until, confused and exasperated, I sent her a message asking what she really wants from me: friendship, marriage, or just money. She didn’t even have the intelligence to lie to me; she simply said “money”.
We foreigners are merely the well from which Filipinos draw money. . . errr. . .water. We are not part of their clans nor do they want us to be part of them. We who live here have learned to enjoy relationships with them while recognizing that’s just how they are. That poor Frenchman, however, learned his lesson in an all too accelerated and expensive manner.
Language skills
I spent the weekend in Cebu City , taking advantage of Cebu Pacific Airline’s new direct Clark-Cebu flights, paying just P1600 each way, including taxes. How about that? Much better than the old way of losing four hours just to go from home to the Manila airport, and then have to hang around for a flight out of that decrepit old terminal. Clark’s airport is just 30 minutes from my apartment.
My reason for going, other than just to get out of town for a while, was to meet up with a girl I’d met on a previous trip. That didn’t work out however because she’d moved back to Leyte and I was not really keen on taking a ferry boat to her town. But I’m not disappointed at all; I met some really nice folks.
Besides, Cebu city is a pleasant place to hang out. Unlike Manila, the taxi drivers are courteous and honest, jeepney routes are sensible, traffic flows fairly smoothly, and the locals are friendly.
While walking a downtown street and passing three girls our eyes met in that look that says “hey, might be fun to know you.” We winked and flirted a bit but I refused to stop near them because of the presence of a hooker and some rough-looking guys. Instead I said “let’s move on down a bit” and I walked about 20 paces then stopped. They didn’t seem to be aware of those people at first but eventually realized what I was doing and we got together, later ending up in a Jollibee to talk. . . and talk.
They are really three of the nicest and sweetest girls I’ve met in this country. And I had an important learning experience with them. I’d gotten kind of jaded here, uncomfortable and even a bit bitchy at times about the level of communication here, making friendships and even commerce difficult in the worst case, merely amusing otherwise. But not all Filipinos lack these basic communication skills. These three girls, at 19, 20, and 21 speak English like you and I do. We were able to all talk as fast as we wanted as well as instantly catch each others’ jokes. Damn! Where have they been all this time?
At one point one of the girls was telling about eating balut , fermented chicks right from the eggshells. Filipinos really seem to love ‘em. She was very animated and exaggerating all the slurps and nibbling on the semi-formed beak and saying they eat them at night so they don’t have to see them. I was also exaggerating my disgust and interjected with “Well don’t think I’m going to be kissing you now!” Then the second one laughed and immediately jumped in to say SHE doesn’t eat balut so I told her okay I WOULD kiss her. Then the third one made sure I knew she didn’t eat them either. When you can laugh and joke and play with language like that you KNOW you’re communicating the way folks should.
We agreed to meet the next day, having another long and fun gab-session. Living in the Philippines would not be so isolating if there were more people like these around. I hate it when I have to slow down my speech, repeat myself, and dumb it down for local comprehension. I’d gotten to the point of believing that Filipinos must communicate well among themselves and the problem was my foreign accent. But meeting these three girls totally disproves that. Besides, I have a very neutral accent and it’s probably one of the easiest to understand of all native English-speakers. If I have trouble communicating here imagine how the Aussies or Germans do it!
Sad to say I could only stay two days in Cebu. Monday was Independence Day and hotels were full up. I almost didn’t get a room as it was. Also the big city was jammed with shoppers getting things for the new school year, probably lots of provincial folks in town for that. But even the foreign zone was packed so I bought a ticket to come back after just two days there. That’s okay though. Next time I’ll make sure I have hotel reservations and plan it all a lot better. Gonna go back soon I hope. Don’t want those girls to slip away from me.
Oh, the learning experience I spoke of? Shiela, the girl I was going to meet, the one the trip was originally all about, well the reason I was attracted to her was for the same language skills. She was just so articulate and intelligent and fun to talk to when I met her. But Shiela and the new girls I met have something in common. . . they are all from the eastern side of South Leyte province. Now that’s a really remote region of the country, has no cities or towns to speak of. But yet the small communities there seem to produce some great communicators.
I wonder how and why that happens. The Ifugao people in Ifugao province have better than average language skills in English also, noticeably better than most lowlanders. A hundred years ago they were running around in loincloths and killing each other in tribal warfare. . . for good reason they were called “headhunters”. While the Ifugao are good, the people of South Leyte’s eastern side, those who live east of Sogod town, on the peninsula between the Pacific Ocean and the eastern shore of Sogod Bay, are without doubt the best I’ve seen yet.
