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I've been sitting here for the past hour
or so combing through various e-mails by my readers. Most
have been questions, a few conversational, and others are
encouraging. A few, my favorites, have been from teenage
Asian girls, some Filipino, thanking me for speaking out on many
things that they consider to be important and of substance.
Obviously those e-mails give me a big head since that (empowering
young girls) is obviously one of the goals of my site other than
business contacts and networking. Others are negative, but
they usually are pointless. The one today from an individual
named "Peter" was classic. I'll reprint it below:
Hi Dear
Congrat to Your web page, and even mor to your super English text,
to good.
First i dont get the point of your web page, wat you want, or wat
you want
to say........but afer reading all your ( wat i dont beleve) text,
i get it.
The same as all the other nice Hukers, M O N E Y Diba
I leave 4 Years beseid the City Hall.......and never heart about
this in
the Philippines, They are open on Sunday, my dear
Sory for you
My response is probably what you might
think from me...a combination of tongue and cheek with a smidgen
of sarcasm. Rather than printing my response in its most raw
form, I'll analyze it in a way that I've learned to do over the
years of chatting and researching online.
My first guess is that this individual is
Filipino. But then again, I'm not really sure. He says
that he lived "beside" City Hall for 4 years. But in what
city within Metro-Manila? Each sub-city has its own City
Hall with its own schedule of operation. There's one in
Pasay, Manila, and Makati, for example. In my case, I went
to Manila City Hall on a Sunday. Hey guy, am I so stupid not
to think this was unusual too? It was open then due to the
fact that the city is in desperate need to collect taxes.
That's what the OIC told me. Indeed when I went there,
viola...it was open.
So is he a foreigner or a Filipino?
I honestly can't tell. In all of my years answering e-mails,
I've found many Americans or other native English speakers whose
written English was worse than what is written above. In
fact, many Filipinos I know write better than I do. Anyone
who has read "The Star" or the "Philippines Enquirer" can attest
to this. Are these newspapers outsourced and their offices
just full of people who answer telephones? Give me a break
buddy.
So either he's a Filipino who is
incredibly ignorant or a foreigner who is incredibly racist.
An ignorant Filipino thinks that just because his handle on the
English language is beyond reproach, everyone in the country must
be just like him. Even though he sees all of the English
publications written here on a daily basis, he probably opts for
the local Filipino gossip pages written in Tagalog with a sexy
star on the cover. These newspapers are all of 6 pages thick
with about as much quality writing on them as the instructions on
a bundle of toilet paper. Go ahead guy...remain
ignorant...see if I care. Maybe I'll sound arrogant by
saying this (I don't really care), but you can just stay the way
you are. You can spend the rest of your life sleeping on
your guard duty. Or you can take my advice...educate
yourself and join the rest of the world in expanding your
opportunities. Yea right...
Case two is that he's an incredibly
racist foreigner. Throwing in a "diba" for credibility is a
common tactic used by foreigners who want Filipinos think that
they "walk the walk". I'm not usually one to play the race
card, but when somebody implies that just because I'm Filipino and
it's impossible for me to be fluent in two languages, you can draw
your own conclusions. 'Nuff said.
That was fun...who's next?
May 12th, 2005
Due to
(surprisingly) popular demand: How you can contribute to my
website.
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