Comments by "Angry Kittens" (@AngryKittens) on "Asian Boss"
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@arbs3ry That's my point. People who don't speak a lingua franca tend to be more isolated from the rest of the world. English, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, and Russian have the largest "reach" of speakers outside of their original country.
It enables them to form connections outside their borders. While monolingual countries whose languages are not spoken outside their countries tend to have a smaller, inward-looking worldview.
Your country, whether you admit it or not, has an authoritarian government. And authoritarian governments, in general, WANT that smaller inward-looking worldview. Which means either they physically limit interactions outside their countries (like North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, etc.), and/or they control the media and communications (like China, Brunei, Saudi Arabia, etc.).
Note that I'm making a distinction between the Chinese people and Beijing. What you're doing now, may not be what Beijing wants in the long run. Especially under Xi.
When you and I talk, as citizens of different countries. We recognize we're both just people. Even if I don't exactly like your current government. For the simple reason that we CAN communicate. Even though English is NOT our native languages.
Now ask an average North Korean on their ideas on how the outside world and outside people are. And they'll likely say foreigners are all devils who want to destroy them and eat their babies, because that's all their government tells them. And they CAN'T communicate with the outside world to see for themselves. And that's exactly what the Kims want, so they can justify and hold on to their absolute power. It's why even just listening to K-Pop or watching K-dramas is a crime punishable by death in North Korea.
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@longjunbai1337 "not allowed" = illegal. Just this year, your beloved government removed all VPN apps from China's Apple Store. They may not act on it now, but you and everyone else in China know that you can only use VPN because your government choose to ignore it... for the meantime. But you know they are watching all of you. Everything you do online.
At any time, they can decide to shut down the Great Firewall and isolate you and everyone else from the outside world, like they did before VPNs existed. You only see what they want you to see. To the point that they can wipe out entire topics from your domestic internet and media (poor Winnie the Pooh). Which is why most of you seem completely ignorant of the actions of your government and its effects outside your country. Like a herd of sheep.
I know plenty of Chinese people and Chinese-Filipinos. Again, I have no problem with the Chinese, you're just people, like everyone else. I have a problem with China, the country. Of course, you'd deny your country is totalitarian. You don't want the Chinese secret police to take you down or lower you "social credit rating". lol
And spoken like someone who has never been free. Money gives you financial freedom, but that is not the same thing as personal freedom. It is not something you can appreciate unless you've experienced it.
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Taku Morisaki. Right. I'll remember that next time a Japanese person says "konpyuta" (computer) or "sarariman" (salary man) or "toraburu" (trouble). LOL. Chinese, Vietnamese, and Thai have a ton of loanwords from English. Especially for technological and scientific terms. You just don't recognize them because they're spelled natively. The only reason they don't code-switch is because they don't speak English widely.
Meanwhile, Taglish is just a code-switching dialect. Similar to other code-switching dialects in Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, India, Hong Kong, etc. where mixing native languages with English is also very common. Are you also going to accuse them of not having a native language? LOL
Similarly, there's Tok Pisin of Papua New Guinea. Which is basically pidgin English. And you know why they speak it? Because there are 832 languages in PNG. The only way they can understand each other is with a common language. And the easiest is a variant of English.
If you're curious, the Philippines has more than 170 native languages. Tagalog is NOT even the most widely spoken native language. That's part of the reason why English is popular. It's a common language that transcends ethnic groups.
In contrast, Vietnam only has like 9, and virtually everyone speaks Vietnamese. Chinese has around 300. But given that Chinese has a system of writing that can be understood without having to speak the same language, they do not need a real common spoken language. Regardless, minority languages in China are dying because Mandarin is slowly killing them. And yet you accuse us of not having our own language. lel
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@L L And forcing us to speak in Tagalog isn't? As I've mentioned, most Filipinos (around 70 million people) are not Tagalog. For most of us, Tagalog is NOT our mother tongue. The decades of Tagalog being taught in Filipino schools is actually the main reason for the erosion and even extinction of some of the native languages in the Philippines, not English.
That's the reason in the first place why so many Filipinos eventually came to prefer English. As a sort of protest against the imposition of Tagalog over our own mother tongues.
It's similar to the situation in Indonesia, where many of the minority languages are slowly dying as Bahasa is imposed over them. Or in Japan, where languages like Okinawan are the last of the languages to die as they are replaced by the overwhelmingly more prevalent Japanese. Or Vietnam, where Vietnamese is similarly well on its way to erasing all other other minority languages. And so on and so forth.
As a foreigner, they will all sound suitably "Asian" and "beautiful" to you, so you won't even realize that it's happening. As far as "killing" mother-tongues go, English is far from being the deadliest in Asia. I'd rather we speak "ugly" if it means we retain our diversity, than speak "beautiful" but end up becoming a monolingual culture.
Code-switching is not pretty, but it allows the continued use (and thus survival) of minority languages. A non-Asian example of this is the use of Spanglish among Chicanos in the US. Sure it sounds weird, but it means that even if they've become very much Americanized, they still speak their native Spanish in addition to English.
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@erls5206 Why would anyone make statistics for that? Let me put it this way, as I've said in another comment, I know around 20+ women personally in my immediate circle of family, friends, and acquaintances who married foreigners.
Almost all of them are financially stable professionals, and come from middle class families. The majority of them also didn't meet their husbands online, but in person while working or living abroad.
Despite what you see on networks like CNA or videos like this one, the vast majority of the population of the Philippines are in the middle class. They're neither struggling nor that desperate to marry the first foreign guy that proposes to them.
They're the ones who have ready access to things like online dating or traveling/working abroad, not to mention, the ones who are educated and fluent in English. Which means they're the ones who usually end up marrying foreigners.
You can see it for yourself among Filipino celebrities. Quite a significant amount of them are married/engaged to foreign spouses or are children of intermarriages. Eugene Domingo, Nadine Lustre, Rachelle Ann Go, Isabelle Daza, Iza Calzado, Glaiza de Castro, Solenn Heusaff, Lovi Poe, Bianca King, Ate Glow, Cindy Kurleto, Pia Wurtzbach, etc.
The sheer frequency of intermarriages in the Philippines (around 3% each year) across all classes means that the reasons for why it happens goes much much deeper than the absurdist simplification that they're all just predatory money grabs.
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@Himanshu_Doi Still doesn't make it a betrayal though. If anything, diasporas end up helping the economies of the mother country by bringing in future investments, remittances, as well as new ideas. In the Philippines for example, the overseas workforce constitute a very large part of the economy, and has enabled families to rise up from poverty. You see new houses and new businesses being built every day now, fueled in part by the money being sent back, as well as second generation immigrants abroad investing more money on local businesses. Then there's new ideas as well, both received and sent out. You learn new things from other people in the same way that other people learn new things about your own culture.
How would any of those be considered "betraying" the mother country or being "ashamed" of it, I don't know. It lifts everyone up. The only downside to it is the brain drain. As long as your mother country and your adopted country don't end up on opposite sides of a war, there's no conflict in terms of cultural pride and national pride.
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"Negro"/"Negra" in the Philippines is not a racial slur. The words are Spanish originally. They mean "black" and is used in exactly the same way as "black" is used in the US. The word is also used in Latin America and Spain with no negative connotations, unlike in the US.
"N***er" however is derogatory, but given that the Philippines has no history of African slavery, it's merely a "borrowed" slang street kids get from American movies and hiphop culture. They have no idea about the history behind that word. Merely that it's something white Americans seem to like calling black people to make them mad. So they do it. Kids are cruel that way.
Adult Filipinos (generally) do not do that. Because most people are aware of racism in the US, and there are a few half-black celebrities in the Philippines (Jaya, apl.d.ap, etc.). Plus the general non-confrontational culture of the Philippines. In contrast to China for instance where grown-ass people will literally touch your skin to see if the color comes off, or people will run away when they see a black person, because they have very little knowledge of what goes on in western countries.
She's a Filipino who grew up in the Philippines. Her own perceptions are that of Filipinos, not of Black Americans, hence why she doesn't really get that angry about it. It's no worse than being teased by other kids for being fat or being poor, etc. It's sad, but it's really not a racial thing. There is no malevolent intent behind the words, in contrast to when you hear it in the US. It's just kids being cruel to kids who look different.
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