Filipino women as domestic workers in Hong Kong/ 3 Jun 2014.

SABBATICAL NOTES. 3 JUNE 2014. TUESDAY. N1.
Reinforcing stereotypes, sweeping facts under the rug.
Or, a lesson on realism and on the need for the Philippines to tell the truth.

THE COAST is as clear as the Honolulu blue heavens in the summer. 

Filipino women workers are being depicted as domestic workers on a textbook used by Hong Kong students. 

Some sectors are crying foul and they are right in so many ways. The reasoning is that this reinforces stereotypes. 

There is a fallacy here: it is that hasty generalization of all Filipino women in Hong Kong. The fact of the case is that there are other Filipino women working in Hong Kong, and these women are not working as 'esclavas' in the households of the more well-to-do HK residents. 

But there is that fact of the case: that so many, if not most, of our Filipino women in HK are working as DHs, and are working like slaves, and this fact we must also understand. 

We cannot keep on denying the fact that most of our sisters and mothers and relatives there are doing exactly the same thing that many others are doing: work starting early in the morning, and then work some more until the boss comes home in the late evening hours. 

Check the facts of the case in HK, and if there is a reason for this textbook to have this matching thing on its page, we must come to grips with that fact of life. 

Scrutiny leads as to something even as we must cry foul to this representation that does not do justice to what we are as a people. But denying some truth to this hasty claim will simply reinforce the romanticization of what DH life is all about in that place.