NoyPi

The content of one of the electronic mails sent to me is quite disturbing. This is an open letter via email allegedly penned by a certain Art Bell, said to be a radio talk show host in Nevada, USA.

The email told of Bell as a broadcaster who had "taken advantage of the power and privilege he has when he used hateful words and racial stereotypes that breed further ignorance and intolerance in our society." As a backgrounder, Bell is a radio talk show host who has two programs that he broadcasts from his home in Nevada and that is rebroadcast by 400 stations across the country. He is said to have authored two books, lived in Okinawa, Japan for some years, and anchored a radio program on the English station there. He had been here in the Philippines as he had traveled fairly extensively around the world, and in fact married a Filipina, which had raised brows as to why he had drafted a hate mail against us noyPis.

The hate mail read: "Filipinos make me puke. As we've all come to notice, in the past few decades, Filipinos have begun to infest the United States like some sort of disease. Their extensive involvement in the U.S. Armed Forces is proof of the trashy kind of qualities all Filipinos tend to exhibit on a regular basis. You can see this clearly by studying the attitudes and cultural icons of most Filipino-Americans.

"Are they really Asian? Well, we have come to accept the fact that Filipinos come from a part of the world known as Southeast Asia. But the term "Asia" is used in the wrong way. You may notice that contemporary Filipino-Americans try very hard to associate themselves with groups that we know as Asian. I cannot count the number of times I have seen a 'Third World' Filipino try to connect themselves to the Chinese or Japanese people.

There is no connection and here's why: The Philippines is a third world country. Nothing respectable has ever been created by Filipino people during our entire human history. Young Filipino men in America have become obsessed with "import racing". They have an enormously perverted affection for Japanese cars. It's a common phenomenon. In their minds, these Filipinos somehow believe that they are Asian and that it somehow connects them to Japanese people and Japanese cars. They often take credit for the ingenuity of Japanese people and say how it's an "Asian thing", term derived directly from African American slang "black thang". It's a black thang. It's an Asian thang.

"You can see the connection. It's even funnier that, in Japan, Filipinos are heavily discriminated against. The only Filipinos that can live successfully in Japan are the Filipino prostitutes." (***Ouch!) "Try visiting a young Filipino's web site too.You'll see something called the 'Asian IRC Ring'. It has to do with the chatrooms. The most horrible thing about this is that these trashy people are trying to associate themselves with Asia again and all they talk about is sex!"

Okey now noyPis, hold your cool there! Because however disturbing the attack maybe on us, recent fed information said that this is just a form of smear campaign by a jealous American broadcaster who would want to destroy Bell. And that there is no way Bell would have the heart to initiate a hate drive as such, as he married a Filipina. Nevertheless, there is this touching campaign now to answer Mr. Bell in a civilized manner so as not to make his alleged biases reaffirmed.

A reaction that came in after his email had circulated went: "I find this funny, Bell is right in some ways where we, as Filipinos don't actually have an "identity". I think this is due to the confusion of our mixed races from Hispanic, Chinese, American and Malay origins. I see it in malls, imagine young generations wearing ski caps and ski goggles in a tropical country, baggy low rise pants like that of African Americans living in the Bronx of New York, not to mention endless whitening products being sold at department stores and drug stores. "But his ignorance also blinds him from the other truth. That while we may glorify animé shows and Japanese online gaming, he is not aware that a nameless Filipino may be responsible for some technical aspects of some Japanese software. He is not aware of our contribution to the society in general - in technological advancements that may have aided post war navigations and landing on the moon, that the antibiotic Erythromycin was discovered by Dr. Abelardo Aguilar from Iloilo creating the brand "Ilosone"; and while Thomas Edison may have discovered the electric light bulb and the fluorescent lighting was thought up by Nikola Tesla, the fluorescent lamp we use today was invented by Agapito Flores (a Cebuano named Benigno Flores of Bantayan Island, according to the Philippine Daily inquirer), a Filipino scientist. The Americans helped then-Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay to develop it for worldwide commerce.

"That the personal physician of former U.S. President Bill Clinton is Eleanor "Connie" Concepcion Mariano, a Filipina doctor who was the youngest captain in the US Navy; that a Filipino writer Jose Rizal could read and write at age 2, and grew up to speak more than 20 languages, including Latin, Greek, German, French and Chinese; and that Edgardo San Juan made the prototype of the moon rover or moon buggy used by the Apollo 11 moon landing mission.

"Or that a Filipino genius was responsible for the near hiatus in the Pentagon and White House nearly infiltrating their closely guarded secrets with the "ILOVEYOU" bug. Nuisance maybe, but still one heck of a 'beautiful mind' not to be underestimated.

The reaction came with a punch saying, "Another sad reality that although most Filipinos working overseas are domestic helpers and prostitutes, who does he think educates the toddlers of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Tokyo? Parents of these countries rarely have time spent with their children, leaving them to their Filipino nannies. And with regard to prostitution, Filipinos are not the only ones working as one. Filipinos are hardly seen starring in pornographic movies. There might be a few Filipinos we haven't seen, but most are from Mr. Bell's race."

Well, here now comes the most touching part of the email that prompted me to bring this out in publication so as to correct how some netizens' view about us: "noyPis may not be perfect, but at least we still have values for one thing. We don't put our aging parents in nursing homes because they're simply old and worthless and we don't have as much numbers of single mothers who get pregnant in their very early teens and eventually become parasites of the government for years and years."

Then, an excerpt from the piece of Patricia Evangelista, 19-year-old Filipina, grand prize winner of an extemporaneous speaking contest in the United Kingdom, was underlined that we noyPis may have lost our identity because of various influences and or the matting effect of these influences over our cultural psyche, but "we are the 40,000 skilled nurses who support the UK National Health Service."

noyPis maybe victims of patronage politics that have so destroyed dreams of building a strong Republic, but the borderless world presents a bigger opportunity. noyPis are the quarter-of-a-million seafarers manning most of the world's commercial ships, the software engineers in Ireland, construction workers in the Middle East, doctors and caregivers in North America, and the musical artists in London's West End.