Illuminati: The Manifold Pinoy

By Krip Yuson

The state and stats of our modern-day diaspora stare us, and many other people in the world, very much in the face. Roughly a tenth of our population reside abroad. That’s about ten million Filipinos. We seem to be everywhere.

At sorry news of any catastrophe occurring in our planet, the question is whether any Pinoy is in the casualty list. We breathe a sigh of relief upon hearing of the irregular fortune that we’re not represented in the tragedy.

We have been called names, or spawned insulting terms — given our color and presumed characteristics,even to a brand of chocolates in a country that had colonized us. We expect no apologies. Not for that — “Filipinos” as a brand of sweets, brown on the outside, white inside. But when the Greeks use “Filipineza” as a synonym for domestic helpers, we do raise semi-official objection, albeit not to much avail.

Yes, we have been stereotyped in Europe and the Midde East, mostly, even in parts of our own larger region of Asia. The taglines have turned into epithets that we then do our best to discard. From “Pearl of the Orient” thence “Showcase of democracy in Asia,” it became “the basket case of Asia.” That last has been turned around, to a certain degree, largely with thanks to the level of diaspora that translates into foreign currency remittances.

Back home, middle-class villages sprout in former farmlands with such community gate tags or slogans as “Katas ng Saudi.” The OFW has for at least a decade provided the highest revenue for national coffers.

And abroad, while the Filipino is still often mistaken to be but a domestic if female and a seaman if male, many other roles have been filled as to help us escape such narrow profiling.

Long after mass migration early in the previous century filled Hawaii with our sugarcane field workers, California with farmhands and Alaska with salmon factory labor, many young Filipinos joined the US Navy as the predecessors of the modern-day seamen the world’sshippers trust so much today.

When we first went out to the rest of Asia, from the 1950s onwards, our musicians became the so-called “soul brothers”of the region. Eventually it became advertising and media professionals that sought employ in neighboring foreign cities, as writers, editors and creatives, from cartoonists to graphic designers, architects to landscape designers.

It wasn’t until we neared the end of the millennium that the outbound traffic was dominated by domestic helpers, plus what were eventually also typecast as Japayuki. Then the exodus to the Middle East and Europe began, all the while that the continuing pursuit of the green card was conducted in EstadosUnidos.

Now we have many nurses in the U.K., au pairs all over Europe, all kinds of service personnel, office managers, engineers and construction workers in Dubai and the rest of the MidEast, doctors, educators and students in the USA, Canada and Australia, reputed economic migrants everywhere, from New Zealand to Greenland. We are least represented in Latin America, Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, and war-torn regions.

Our yayas and caregivers are sought after, so that a fantasy future drives the imagination of our perceptive writers, the way Jessica Zafra often injects humor in the prospects of our eventual world domination. Indeed, it’s often been reported how kids growing up in Arabian royal families have been taught to eat adoboand other Pinoy cultural practices by their beloved Filipina yayas.

In the rest of the world, especially the Western part, those who are more enlightened do go beyond the profiling and stereotyping by becoming aware that Filipinos aren’t only seamen, boxers or domestics, but that we have world champions in other sports other than Manny Pacquiao — today the best-known Filipino.

They’ve heard of how Paeng Nepomuceno used to rule the bowling lanes, and how Efren “Bata” Reyes was “The Magician” over the pool table, and now, how our Fil-foreigners such as Jason Day and Jordan Clarkson have excelled in golf and NBA basketball, respectively.

The culturally inclined and hip are familiar with the rest of our growing pantheon of world beaters, e.g. Cecile Licad and Lea Salonga, the techiesaboutchip-maker Dado Banatao in Silicon Valley, the fashionistas of our lingerie and bag designers, and up-to-date Netizens of our outstanding heart surgeons, furniture artists, champion choir groups and Dragon Boat teams, and of how a Filipina is presently the master chef at the White House.

There is actually no end to excellence with competitive Filipinos. But of course the overwhelming perception is that we’re still a struggling Third-World country that has to send a tenth of our population abroad just to keep their families afloat.

Only recently, our President verbalized the opinion that not all OFWs are driven desperately to work abroad. That for many, the prospects of doing so are simply an option for a different lifestyle.

Some of us who take local lore seriously might tend to agree: that the Pinoy usually has a mole in the sole that suggests a travel itch. We point out that Enrique, Magellan’s slave, was actually the first circumnavigator of the globe, since his wanderlust first took him from the Visayas to Malacca, from where he went on to complete the epic voyage by ship around the world.

In 2003, an 18-year-old Filipina student, Patricia Evangelista, emerged as the champion speaker from among over 60 competitors in the International Public Speaking Contest in London. Her five-minute speech championed the hopes, wishes, fantasies and vagaries of the Filipino. She also advanced the fanciful proposition that Filipinos may be said to be the modern-day Hobbits — adventurous and eager to leave the shire for experiences well beyond home, but also inclined to come back to share all the wealth of discovered learning.

Indeed, this could be so. And the world, for all its slimy parts, may well be said to be our oyster.

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KRIP YUSON

Krip Yuson will soon have his third novel published, titled “The Music Child & the Mahjong Queen,” a follow-up on his seventh collection of poetry, “Islands of Words & Other Poems.” In this issue, the Palanca Hall of Famer writes about Filipinos in diaspora, and how our nomadic ways have reshaped our national identity.