ON DISCRIMINATION AND DOMESTIC HELP

I used to travel a lot. When I was still living in the Philippines with my ex-pat ex-husband, we used to go to Hong Kong or Singapore every weekend to escape the Dengue Fever outbreak. My ex is by far the most anal person I have ever met, and he was simply paranoid about germs. When poor little kids started dying from the hemorrhagic fever, he practically imprisoned our son, Max, in our hotel suite. Being held captive at the Mandarin Oriental is not exactly healthy for any 3-year-old, Aedis Egypti notwithstanding. So you see, these little weekend sorties out of the country were necessary to our sanity.

Before one of these trips, my best friend, Coco Q., who was visiting with us at the time, gave me some valuable fashion advice for travel to places such as Hong Kong and Singapore: Don't wear jeans on weekends. Apparently, if you committed this fashion transgression, some ignorant colonial might mistake you for a domestic and insist you press his trousers. It seems that every weekend like clockwork, Filipina maids would swarm to the parks like lemmings, wearing standard-issue denim.

"Believe me," Coco confided with a knowing look, "you'll be treated much better." I shrugged, taking my signature Versace's out of my suitcase. I thought it was curious to hear this from Coco, of all people. After all, I wanted to point out, we both did TV news. Surely, if CNBC Asia and RPN-9 thought we were presentable enough to beam into people's houses nationally (and in her case, internationally), we would NEVER be mistaken for a pair of au pairs! Besides, if some foreigner was thick enough to mistake me for a maid just because I was a Filipina wearing jeans, I'd hit him on the head with my Louis Vuitton bucket!

Unfortunately, such is the stigma of the Filipina. It gets even worse if you're a Filipina married to a foreigner. For some reason, once they think you've joined their ranks, all PC flies out the window. It doesn't matter if you studied at the Sorbonne, speak flawless English and hold two PhD's. Once you start rubbing elbows with them, they think it's their God-given right to enlist your services as a domestic recruiter. The first time I went to Israel, my ex introduced me to one of the most decorated Israeli generals in their nation's history, and all this man could say to me was "could I help him find a really good Filipina maid?"

It wasn't so bad when we were living in LA, where Filipinos occupy all social stratas, and Filipina domestic help was almost unheard of. Our cleaning lady then was, in fact, a Chilean exchange student who was doing houses on the side to earn extra money. When we moved to Miami, where I was the only Filipina I knew of within a 40-mile radius, it was also okay. Over there, most of the domestic help you find is Black/Haitian or Hispanic.

All that changed when we moved to my ex-husband's home city, Toronto. Toronto, like LA, also has a very big Filipino population occupying all social stratas, but a big part of the Filipina population there, like their sisters overseas, gravitated to the "domestic" market like moths to the flame. All my former in-laws had Filipina maids: my ex-mother-in-law, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, and various aunts and cousins now removed, all extolled the domestic virtues of my kababayans.

Okay, okay, I confess, I also had a Filipina maid. Her name was Margarita, and she was an "alajera" in the Philippines. Margarita would sometimes don jewelry that was even prettier than mine, which was a lot to say considering my ex was a diamond dealer! We shared a relationship based on mutual fondness and respect, and I was sad to let her go because we had to move to Europe.

I, of course, have also experienced my share of discrimination. Whenever we took the ferry from Hong Kong to Macau, I would always be "detained" in the holding area while my ex would argue that I was a US resident, etc. etc.,. Of course, I would always be the last one out of Immigration, defiantly meeting the curious stares of my casino-hopping ferry-mates. When I first obtained my Schengenstaten visa (meaning "seven states": Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain and Portugal), I was instructed to go to a police station upon reaching Amsterdam (my point of origin) to "inform the authorities of my presence". I felt really insulted to be told this, just because I was a Filipina. After all, isn't this the sort of thing convicted child molesters are required to do? When I finally got to a police station, none of the officers present knew what I was talking about. They ended up typing something to the effect that on this date, this person was in this police station, etc. etc. (it was in Dutch). Go figure.

Actually, Amsterdam wasn't too bad. You see a lot of Indonesians there, Indonesia being a former Dutch colony, and you see a big representation of this racial mixture in the people. I never really encountered any racism in the Netherlands. In fact, in all the places in Europe that I visited, the pervading feeling of discrimination was directed toward the gypsies, who swarmed to the cities in the summer, victimizing tourists along the way. One of them nearly snatched my purse one night. Lucky my hand brushed against his while he was doing it, and I started yelling up a storm. The guy quickly ran across the street, having the cheek to turn back and face me while putting his finger to his lips, motioning me to be quiet!

So ends my treatise on discrimination and domestic help. As I type this in my family room in Modesto, California, I am reminded of the year we used to live in Cincinnati, Ohio, where notices of Ku Klux Klan meetings were routinely printed in Community Billboards in all the major dailies.

And I thank the Lord for all my blessings.