Servants
On March 27, 2009, former BBC broadcaster and Chinese columnist Chip Tsao wrote a column titled “The war at home” for a Hong Kong magazine. Tsao called it a satire, and said that the Filipinos had no chance of claiming a stake on the Spratly Islands for as long as the Chinese people – himself included – could hold hostage the thousands of Filipina domestic workers working overseas. “There are more than 130,000 Filipina maids working at $3,580-a-month cheap labor in Hong Kong. As a nation of servants, you don’t flex your muscles at your master, from whom you earn most of your bread and butter.”
In his column, Tsao had his imaginary Filipina maid bowing and scraping before him. “I summoned Louisa, my domestic assistant who holds a degree in international politics from the University of Manila, hung a map on the wall, and gave her a harsh lecture. I sternly warned her that if she wants her wages increased next year, she had better tell every one of her compatriots in Statue Square on Sunday that the entirety of the Spratly Islands belongs to China.”
The e-mails flew thick and fast, crowding inboxes with long, angry letters against Tsao. In the tradition of the protests against Teri Hatcher, whose “Desperate Housewives” script had her claiming Filipino medical diplomas were probably worthless, the mob went in for the kill. An apology from Hatcher’s station and the show’s producers didn’t end the fray, nothing short of Hatcher drawn and quartered under a spotlight in Times square seemed to be sufficient.
From March 28 to April 30, politicians slammed, dusted off their soapboxes and bellowed at the Chinese columnist for calling the Philippines a nation of servants.
Malacañang commented on the issue and reviewed the possible actions toward the columnist. Cebu Representative Antonio Cuenco, chairman of the committee on foreign affairs at the House of Representatives, asked the government to send a note verbale to Hong Kong to convey displeasure with the article. Senators Miguel Zubiri and Francis Escudero called on the government to file a diplomatic protest to defend the dignity of Filipinos.
There is, of course, little doubt that the Tsao article was insulting. A satire, after all, is rarely complimentary, whoever its supposed targets are. What is stunning is the outrage that has been mustered against a few sentences written by a lone writer in Hong Kong by a government who has been cutting billion-peso deals with the Chinese government –which is not a problem, of course, as the good President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo cancelled the ZTE project “the moment” she realized there was something wrong.
It is the same government, as blogger Ricky Carandang pointed out, who passed Republic Act 9522, the Philippine Archipelagic Baselines Law that calmly excluded the Kalayaan Islands from the country’s archipelagic baselines and allowed China and Vietnam to exploit oil and gas in the Spratlys.
The Hong Kong magazine apologized for allowing the column’s publication, and pulled out the article from its online website. Tsao apologized to the Philippine government and to the Filipino people, an apology aired over Hong Kong’s ATV. His maid is apparently Indonesian.
The Department of Foreign Affairs was not about to let the issue slide without swaggering in with guns cocked, and declared Tsao persona non grata. Migrant groups were more reasonable – for them, the issue is less about Tsao than about a government persistently using overseas employment to compensate for local unemployment.
If the government, after all, has trouble with an international image of Filipinos as domestic helpers, perhaps it shouldn’t make too much of an effort whoring its citizens to play babysitters in war-torn countries.
On April 1, after its public denunciation of Tsao, President Arroyo approved a proposal to lift the total ban on the deployment of Filipino workers to Lebanon and Jordan, according to Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita – the same day Foreign undersecretary Esteban Conejos Jr. said that “The government maintains and reiterates the ban on labor deployment to these places. We ask the general public to respect the ban. Our purpose is to keep away our workers from harm and avoid further risks to their lives.”
There are some who point to the Philippines’ perpetual national insecurity for its inability to laugh off the moronic comments of a writer who knows no better. Perhaps it is true, but if Tsao did anything for this country, it was this – it brought out the sort of two-faced nationalism that leads this “nation of servants.”
