Yes, we – American

Yes, we – American or Filipino – can objectively say that if a person’s dating to a household is often one among offering service, then that person have to be furnished clean terms of employment, truthful and regular repayment, and appropriate operating conditions, just as any employee has a right to. But a good way to impose that and make it what it have to be, a essential issue of the tradition, more than one different essential additives of Filipino way of life – the expectation that everyone is obliged to take care of anyone else, and the consequent dwindled significance of “self reliance” in someone’s man or woman – want to be undone. Because so long as those parts of the Filipino way of life persist, the connection between family and servant will usually be murky, and not easy to outline as both “worker” or “family member.”

For the Philippines, disposing of those elements of Filipino man or woman would be not anything less than undergoing a cultural lobotomy; knowing that regardless of how nicely I recognize this culture, I will usually have a transplanted Western attitude, precludes me from sharing my own personal judgment approximately whether or not this is essential.

Tizon defined his lola Eudocia’s function in his household as a slave, and telling her story was, because it became out, his deathbed confession (he died in March) of his guilt for being a slaveholder. He changed into proper, no longer always because this is how one set of mores or another defines it, but because this is how he described it.

As tons as his closing paintings has encouraged a much wanted public debate, it’s also a extraordinarily personal story, which reminds us that the issues of ingrained classism, entitlement, cloth poverty and poverty of the spirit are non-public, too; coming to terms with it, becoming better human beings, and creating a better nation and international is not going to be clean, or solved with a hundred and forty-man or woman Twitter debates or “hearings in useful resource of regulation.” THE late journalist Alex Tizon’s shifting and very private account of “his circle of relatives’s slave” – the home helper who served three generations of his own family for 56 years – published in The Atlantic this week, has spark off a typhoon of discussion, cultural recriminations, and, one might wish, a bit of national soul-searching. That is on both the a part of the Philippines, from wherein both Tizon and his utusan hailed, and the USA, where they lived and worked.

The reactions to Tizon’s confession can be summed up in 3 approaches. The US target audience, for the most part, has answered with righteous indignation, a good deal of it directed at Tizon, but extra directed at Filipino tradition, in which memories like that of Tizon’s “lola” are common. The response from the Filipino target audience has been mixed; a few take offense at American judgment, others express some degree of agreement with it.

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