The Philippines has been a recent target of a snide remark from a pea-brained Hongkong journalist who described the country as a “nation of servants.”
In a magazine write-up entitled on March 27, 2009, “The War at Home” Chip Tsao mockingly wrote that he told his Filipino maid she’d lose her job if she won’t tell her countrymen that Spratly’s islands for which the Philippines has long-standing ownership claim, belongs to China.
Tsao allegedly asserted that the Philippines’ claim on Spratlys was “reproachable,” adding that “as a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.’”—-GMA TV News. (03/27/09)
This is again an insult that parallels the “Desperate Housewife” episode when Fil-Am doctors where maligned as incompetents in a US soap-opera. Some years ago, there is also that dictionary that equated “Filipino” as a synonymous to maids. The disparaging comment of Tsao is certainly foul—another insensitive verbal abuse that could only come from a loose cannon.
Susan Ople, a former labor undersecretary said the Chinese columnist must be declared “undersirable foreign employer” for his racist and arrogant remark. Such can be a weak retaliation to a blistering insult. She also needs to stress that the country must find ways to make jobs available at home and curb the sending of Filipinos abroad. In the long term, the deployment of maids to foreign countries is exploitative, unsustainable, and bad for national pride. (Photo Credit: MattViews x 2) =0=
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