Losing Out on Our Women
July 4th, 2008
“Losing Out on Our Women“
Early this year, when our house helper left us in a lurch, we were pressed into taking in a replacement to avoid turning a domestic problem into a national tragedy. I call her spice girl for the very wide array of recipes she can cook. Problem is, she used a mountain of spices in each, taking away any trace of the delectable flavor of the main ingredients.
Except for cooking, she couldn’t do anything much, besides she considered us a half-way house until her American fiancée takes her in for a bride. Half way through her intended tenure with us, we let her go. I hope the marriage between the carpenter and the spice girl has been consummated and (they) are now living happily ever after.
Her case is just one among thousands of Filipinas who have found another passion – getting hitched to a foreigner. Never you mind the personal circumstances of him who finds his way to the Internet or referred, he is still fair game to our women wanting to have a break from the apparently hopeless cycle of misery in our country.
For a long time, our lawmakers were at loggerheads over the medium of instruction to be used in our classrooms Some say it should be English, while others prefer Pilipino or Filipino (they couldn’t even agree whether it should start with an F or a P). A small portion, those locked into their selfish and ignorant regional mind-sets, strongly argued for a mixture with a regional dialect.
Far from the arena of inanity, the little people, specifically the small and passionate Filipinas, are already multi-lingual. Sitting in a coffee shop among Cebu’s posh malls is like sitting on a bench in Battery Park in Mahattan, N.Y. Countless streams of peoples from all over the world pass by in any given minute. The difference is that the parade of nationalities in Cebu is peppered with Filipinas from all walks of life, from a real beauty to purely exotic. Nine out of ten, a foreigner is always followed by or following a Filipina.
Sitting at Bo’s promenade in Ayala is like a front seat in a beauty pageant. Last week a young Korean-looking male with his Filipina escort had a table next to mine. Verily, in an act of gentlemanliness (strange for Korean males whose behave like anything but gentlemanly), he fitted a gold-colored, high-heeled shoes over the girl’s feet. Whatever images of a Cinderella romance I had was totally doused when they left. It was obviously the first time for the girl to wear high-heeled shoes that the guy had to hold her firmly to keep her from rolling down the few short steps to the taxi stand.
The Filipina has never had it so good in the age of the IT. The cell phone facilitates the building of social networks, making prospecting a lot easier. I would not be far off to say that a huge percentage of our telecommunication companies’ earnings are from people who eat not much but text sumptuously. The text time of our current house helper is a lot more than mine and my two children combined.
So where does that leave the discriminating Filipino? To gawk and to have a bad taste in his mouth; green with envy. They either have to be slick or thick to catch the fancy of our local girls.
Foreigners have money to burn and they do to satisfy their libidos. The good looking ones are playing it cuddly with Asian visitors while the exotic (comely to bizarre) are having the times of their lives with less-discriminating Caucasians. In the process, we have become multi-lingual, multi-cultural and, in the near future, more multi-colored people.
And some day too, the Filipino would console himself with the song:
“Where have all the young girls gone?
Gone to farangs, everyone.
When will we ever learn,
When will we ever learn?”
Note: Hope someone corrects for I may be wrong. Farang, if my memory is right, is a Thai word for foreigner.
