Pinoy pride, food-bitching and the grateful foreigner

She would rather go hungry than eat Filipino food again, this was what the Polish travel and food blogger Agness Walewinder declared in her blog. 

And for this she reaped a whirlwind of negative Internet traffic coming from enraged Pinoys, nearly akin to the reaction to  Claire Danes when she ranted about rats and cockroaches infesting Manila some years back.

Some might call it a false sense of nationalism.  Others would even deride it as a misplaced sense of Pinoy pride.  

But Pinoys simply cannot take an insult coming from a foreigner sitting down, even if some of us quickly criticize this as over-reacting and too defensive.  After all, these Pinoys would say that these unsatisfied foreign visitors are simply expressing their honest opinions, and are just too frank to tell us what we ourselves will agree with.  

Indeed, I would personally agree with Ms. Danes that there are really rat and cockroach-infested and filthy places in the metropolis, and these are not just limited only to the seedy places and slum areas the poor inhabit, but would even include high-rise condominiums where the middle to upper classes live.  I would know.  I used to live in one somewhere on Vito Cruz which was practically a breeding ground for cockroaches.

Indeed, Agness Walewinder is probably right that there are many places in the country where food is horrible, unsanitary and which I myself would not dare touch with a ten-foot pole. It is also true that some people get sick from eating food bought from public outlets.  I suffered a serious bout of typhoid fever some years back after eating liver steak sold in a carinderia in a public market in Bohol.

But the anger at Ms. Danes and Ms. Walewinder is due less to the truthfulness of the allegations, even if it may seem to be an unfair generalization based on a limited window of experience.  And it is not even something that is uniquely Filipino.  I have seen dirty and seedy places in some parts of Paris, Bangkok and Honolulu, and I had a very bad case of food-poisoning in Bali. 

The anger stems more from the betrayal felt by a people who have shown so much hospitality to them, and their cohorts, only to be slapped back by an insult.

And the anger and hurt are even more pointed when other Pinoys who should know better would not understand that, and easily take the side of the Pinoy-bashing and food-bitching foreigner.

You see, we Pinoys would even go to the extent of spending beyond our means, or of borrowing money, just to impress a guest, more so if that guest is a “Kano”.  

While some can call this as a remnant of colonization, an attitude of a servile native impressing the colonial master, and would propose that we exorcise our consciousness of this demeaning trait, one can also view this from a different perspective.  

A different way of looking at this could reveal a celebration of “pakikipagkapwa,” the very foundation of how we become a people for others, of how we manage during times of need to transcend our personal pains and limitations to serve the interest of the collective.  To kill and excise this attitude of serving the foreign and white “other” can also put at the brink of being debased the very nature of our inner strength as a people who place other Pinoys before the self during times of crisis.

Our tendency to treat our foreign guests with extra care and hospitality exists in a continuum of cultural constructs whose ultimate source is deeply rooted in our sense of community and “pakikipagkapwa.”  The way we celebrate our sense of community is to transcend the boundaries that divide ourselves from our “others.”

Being one who once had the tendency to drift away from our cultural roots, I used to criticize the seemingly irrational manner by which hard-up Pinoys would even borrow money just to celebrate any occasion and entertain guests.  It is only when I took the perspectives of the ordinary people that I saw a different logic.  For those who could not understand the logic of the “masa,” it was all calculations of expenses, of videoke machines rented, of food prepared, of balloons bought, of alcohol purchased.  But to the ordinary Pinoy, it is the sense of community that is celebrated when we sing and play music, eat food, drink, and converge and commune in a place.  It is not the food and the place that matters, but the company.  

After all, the bottom line is always the community.

I have said this before, and I am going to offer it once again for us to reflect on.  I suspect that this is precisely why there are no fine-dining Pinoy restaurants abroad, even as there are fine-dining Asian restaurants in the major capitals of the world.  This is because we eat our food not as a taste to be savored and perfected, or a work of art to be presented with elaborately-carved garnishes and elegantly placed in fine china.  It is not the food that matters, and it is not the ambience of the place that counts.  It is the company that we are with when we enjoy the moment we partake of the food wherever we may be—in homes, in street corners, under a tree, in our workplace, beside a pig pen, or inside a well-decorated hall.

It is in this context that a guest to the party endures the lack of quality of the voices that are belted out by trying-hard singers, the lack of culinary delights and sophistication of overcooked spaghetti over-extended with tomato catsup, or of a place that is hastily organized but one can still smell the odor of a pig-pen nearby or see some rats and cockroaches still crawling on the floor.  For us, we do not simply mind this. It is the celebration of the community and the friendship that counts.

And this is the point which Agness missed in her food blog, and which Ms. Danes earlier missed too when she overlooked the smiles and just saw the filth, when she was blind to the children wearing those smiles and only saw the rats and cockroaches that fester on the streets they play on.

This is what drew the rage of the Pinoys.

This rage against the ungrateful foreigner is no longer in the mold of a servile consciousness that characterized our post-colonial identities, when Pinoys would have simply bowed and took the insult, and just winced and cried silently at the collective laceration that our places, our culture, and its cuisine received from Agness, the rat and cockroach-hating Claire and all the many more foreign guests who inflicted insults upon us.

In fact, it is those who take the side of these foreign bashers who are guilty of a colonial-mentality that make them not only accept, but even validate the insults.  My social scientists gut-feel, by just going through the content of the comments in the social network sites of those who defend Ms. Walewinder, make me suspect that many of her apologists are even elite Pinoys, and those who have gone abroad, or are already abroad. 

Unlike them, and instead of bowing, ordinary Pinoys rose up to defend our cuisine, our culture, our people and our country from unfair generalization.

I, too, felt the rage when I read Agness' blog about Pinoy food.  I, too, had to express myself in my status in FB to give her a piece of my mind, even to a point that some of my friends called my attention, both publicly and in private, for me to “calm down” and “chill,” and just respect Ms. Walewinder, as she is entitled to her opinion.  I retorted that indeed she is.  But I am also entitled to my rage, and to express such.

We are not a selfish society.  This is why we project on our “other”—be it foreigner or other Pinoys—our self-affirmation, from helping them to serving them to pleasing them.

And the ultimate affirmation is when our guests would overlook our flaws, which we ourselves know, and would show their appreciation by thanking us.  We may know that our spaghetti sucks, and that our place smells like a pig-pen.  We are not dense not to know that.  But surely, it is pure joy to receive words of gratitude from someone who, despite the soggy spaghetti and the smelly place, simply appreciated us as a people.

This is precisely why while Agness Walewinder is now the personification of the ungrateful house guest.  Another travel blogger, Nathan Allen, has become a darling of the Pinoys when he took up the cudgels for us, to defend not only our cuisine but our totality as a people. 

It is also pure joy when we see other people celebrating our music, singing it as best as they could, some even at their very finest.  I felt a blissful joy when I saw on video several of our folk songs and musical classics being sung by foreign choral groups. 

And this is precisely why the contestants in the noon-time variety show Eat Bulaga, in its recently concluded “My Foreignoy” and the currently running “My Foreignay” segments, have endeared themselves to the Pinoy “masa.”  Watching these foreign guests try their best to speak in our language, dance our dances, and be one with us struck a sensitive chord in our collective consciousness as a people.  They become representations of how the foreigner has affirmed our culture, our cuisine and our place beyond the bad food that we know exists, the bad characters that sometimes prey on them, and some of the dirty places that we know would turn them off.

When Agness Walewinder food-bitched our cuisine, she was coming from an experience that was probably real in her own frame of mind.  We could not deny her that.  In the same manner that we could not deny Ms. Danes the validity of her rage at the rats and cockroaches that fester some places in the metropolis.

These are realities that some of us may know and experience.  And these are things that we, as a people, should collectively address, not to please foreigners but to improve ourselves.

But this does not mean that we are not entitled to rage against foreigners who make their own personal experiences as a template to demean us, our cuisine, our culture and our people.

Nathan Allen, he who defended us from Agness’ Pinoy food blog, was also critical of our culture in one of his blogs, but he had a way of saying it that resonated with those who agreed with him.  It was frank, but not brutal.  It was critical, but honest. It was meant to help, and not to put us down.  

The beauty of his critique was precisely because it came from a foreigner who had a sense of community with us, and not just as a tourist visiting only for pleasure.  Thus, he was not just interested in the place and the food, the sights and the sound.  He was here to be in communion with us.

In the final analysis, the rage that people felt about Agness and Claire was not about a false sense of nationalism or misplaced Pinoy pride.  It was simply a reaction to insulting speech meant to hurt and put down not only our bad food and filthy places, but also our collective sense as a people. 


Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of this website.