I've been sitting here for the past hour or so combing through various e-mails by my readers.  Most have been questions, a few conversational, and others are encouraging.  A few, my favorites, have been from teenage Asian girls, some Filipino, thanking me for speaking out on many things that they consider to be important and of substance.  Obviously those e-mails give me a big head since that (empowering young girls) is obviously one of the goals of my site other than business contacts and networking.  Others are negative, but they usually are pointless.  The one today from an individual named "Peter" was classic.  I'll reprint it below:

Hi Dear

Congrat to Your web page, and even mor to your super English text, to good.

First i dont get the point of your web page, wat you want, or wat you want
to say........but afer reading all your ( wat i dont beleve) text, i get it.

The same as all the other nice Hukers,   M O N E Y        Diba


I leave 4 Years beseid the City Hall.......and  never heart about this in
the Philippines, They are open on Sunday, my dear


Sory for you

My response is probably what you might think from me...a combination of tongue and cheek with a smidgen of sarcasm.  Rather than printing my response in its most raw form, I'll analyze it in a way that I've learned to do over the years of chatting and researching online.

My first guess is that this individual is Filipino.  But then again, I'm not really sure.  He says that he lived "beside" City Hall for 4 years.  But in what city within Metro-Manila?  Each sub-city has its own City Hall with its own schedule of operation.  There's one in Pasay, Manila, and Makati, for example.  In my case, I went to Manila City Hall on a Sunday.  Hey guy, am I so stupid not to think this was unusual too?  It was open then due to the fact that the city is in desperate need to collect taxes.  That's what the OIC told me.  Indeed when I went there, viola...it was open.

So is he a foreigner or a Filipino?  I honestly can't tell.  In all of my years answering e-mails, I've found many Americans or other native English speakers whose written English was worse than what is written above.  In fact, many Filipinos I know write better than I do.  Anyone who has read "The Star" or the "Philippines Enquirer" can attest to this.  Are these newspapers outsourced and their offices just full of people who answer telephones?  Give me a break buddy.

So either he's a Filipino who is incredibly ignorant or a foreigner who is incredibly racist.  An ignorant Filipino thinks that just because his handle on the English language is beyond reproach, everyone in the country must be just like him.  Even though he sees all of the English publications written here on a daily basis, he probably opts for the local Filipino gossip pages written in Tagalog with a sexy star on the cover.  These newspapers are all of 6 pages thick with about as much quality writing on them as the instructions on a bundle of toilet paper.  Go ahead guy...remain ignorant...see if I care.  Maybe I'll sound arrogant by saying this (I don't really care), but you can just stay the way you are.  You can spend the rest of your life sleeping on your guard duty.  Or you can take my advice...educate yourself and join the rest of the world in expanding your opportunities.  Yea right...

Case two is that he's an incredibly racist foreigner.  Throwing in a "diba" for credibility is a common tactic used by foreigners who want Filipinos think that they "walk the walk".  I'm not usually one to play the race card, but when somebody implies that just because I'm Filipino and it's impossible for me to be fluent in two languages, you can draw your own conclusions.  'Nuff said.

That was fun...who's next?

May 12th, 2005

Due to (surprisingly) popular demand:  How you can contribute to my website.