Bull

If you're a foreigner in Japan, you'd most likely be stared at, looked down upon, considered stupid, talked about, and always considered an outsider. When you are another Asian (especially brown-skinned ones like me), or when you are black, then the intensity of those treatments I mentioned above gets doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled!

Now, I am naturally oblivious to most things happening around me. In other words, unless they don't parade their racism in front of my face, I don't care. (In other, other words, I am a snob. :P) But if a compatriot tells me that they have been abused, misused, and all those other bad forms of the word use, then my blood will boil--which is why I am writing this entry. Because my friend, April, has been the recipient of very bad use indeed.

I have a feeling I'm starting to sound patriotic here (and that worries me, because I'm not patriotic), but then again, Filipinos do really get icky treatment here. Ever since we arrived, there have been many times when we just feel that we don't measure. But April's most recent experience was the really, erm, disappointing one. Why? Because this person is our friend, supposed to be very educated, and not even Japanese (but still Asian).

Here are the comments:
- When your senior came here [another exchange student in the past], I thought: this girl must be rich because she can afford to go to college.
- At first, I thought you couldn't speak English, too.
- [And then, upon finding out that we do speak fluent English...] Why do you always speak English? You should be proud of your language.

Frankly, people's ignorance can be disappointing. If they were the kind who hadn't gone even to elementary school, I would understand. But that's not the case. I'm tired of this language crap, too. Before I came here, I never knew English was such a big deal! In the Philippines, it's just there! We don't exactly think about it as a foreign language anymore. After all, why do Americans, Australians, New Zealanders, speak English? It's because of England's influence on these countries. Well, we have also been influenced by an English-speaking country (America, of course) for over a hundred years. Why does that not give us a right to be proud of our English (although admittedly, sometimes, we tend to speak Carabao English)? True, I'm not exactly proud of Tagalog, but I don't hide it in shame either. And I'm proud of my English because I have literally spent ages trying to perfect it.

Yes, the Philippines has a lot of faults, but just FYI, here are a few statistics:
Adult literacy rate, year 2000: Male - 95%, Female - 95%
College enrollment rate: 27% (4th in Asia, next to South Korea-55%, Taiwan-38%, Japan-29%)

So, there! We're not all completely uneducated fools.

There is a silver lining behind all these crap, though. 'Coz now I have acquired the experience and can surely tell you: If you hate your country, move to another place for a while. Then you'll love your country and be proud of it.

Carabao - a water buffalo in the Philippines
Carabao English - a term for English with a lot of grammatical errors