Davila erred when she ate Cheap Chow

March 30th, 2009 @ Ricky Rivera

13


That Hongkong magazine where Cheap Chow writes regularly, has issued a formal apology. They taken out the despicable article from their website and even issued that apology in their printed magazine. The question is—will we move forward after this apology?

No.

The core issue is Cheap Chow’s racist remarks. Apart from referring to our country as a country of slaves, he likewise tried to bully us by writing those condescending remarks. We, Filipinos, will not allow a shock jock like Cheap Chow to do that.

We hate being bullied. When the Spaniards bullied us with their forced labor laws, we militated and kicked their butts out of our beloved land.

When the Japanese did that to our forebears, the collective consciousness of the people was roused and we struggled to oust them from our land.

When our fellow Filipino, the late Ferdinand Marcos bullied us for twenty years, we finally found the courage to oust him through that glorious revolt.

Now, this chap.

Karen Davila, the broadcaster of DZMM, failed to grasp that. She was sympathetic with Chip Tsao, without even understanding every word that that chap wrote online. She even concluded that we should respect his right as a journalist, since everybody, as she mistakenly believes, has a right to exercise self-expression. It took a cause oriented person to remind her that every right has an attendant responsibility. That right ends when racist remarks begin.

Let me remind Ms. Karen Davila that:

1. Chip Tsao was never accurate when he described us as a country of slaves. I looked at the Labour migration stats of the ILO and at no instance in our history where the Philippines became a slave/domestic servant market. Domestic servants account for a measly 17% of the entire OFW population. Even in the world, the Philippines is NOT a prime exporter of domestic servants. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka ranked first and second, respectively. Philippines is not even close.

So, Ms. Davila, Chip Tsao is not, I say again, writing accurately.

2. Chip Tsao wrote beyond the borders of decency when he wrote something about his domestic assistant. That is not fact-based writing nor a painful satire, as Ms. Davila described. It was pure and simple racism.

Lastly (3) Chip Tsao was writing from the vantage point of a person who perceives himself as above the rest. Chip Tsao, if you checked, came from an impoverished family. There is a possibility though that one of his forebears even worked as a domestic in the Philippines. He just did’nt know it. (in the 1920s and 1930’s, majority of maids employed in the Philippines came from Hongkong. They are poor Chinese. They were fired for cooking cheap chow.

Tags:  , ,