kungfu fighting dhaba wallah since 1999

Quick one before I jump into a plane –

I was just at a small wedding in Manila. One of my oldest friends in the world got hitched to a lovely Pinoy girl here, and will soon whisk her away to Australia and all that. Great, very happy for the couple; very pleased to see him too, because I only get to see him every few years.

But then I was stuck for a few hours in a small room with two tables (I told you it was a small wedding) in a Chinese restaurant in downtown Manila. At one table was the Filipino family, full of wonderful and lovely people I spent some time with. Present at the other table: the family friends and relations, mostly Hokkien-speaking Chinese people originally from Singapore. The Hokkien-speaking drove me mad (because I speak and understand it quite well and why is it that these conversations are always so inane?), but what really got me was the chauvinistic Chinese Singaporean men and their distasteful ways.

They saw fit to use me as an example of a ‘young Singaporean woman who’s picky about men and who puts her career first and won’t stop until I’m 30 and then by then it’s too late I can’t have a family because I’ve missed the boat’. All that, in the context of how Singaporean women are so picky and Filipino women are not, which is why they prefer Filipino women. For being more submissive.

Wow, that’s a lot of assumption for people who have only met me for 20 minutes. And a lot of gall for people who are guests in someone else’s country to dare to speak of its women in that fashion, with those very women present. Especially when it isn’t true (Pinoy women are FAR from submissive!!). Saying it in a different language doesn’t make it better. It’s not about being picky; it’s that I have taste, career, and choice. It’s not like people who thoughtlessly refer to the entire female species as the “weaker gender” (how old-fashioned) would ever get it.

I spent a lot of time being angry — I know people are stupid, I know it’s pointless arguing. The gall! The cheek! The hypocrisy! (All the MCPs who were going on about female submissiveness were also, in the same breath, discussing the finer points of having more than one family, one in a different country. And then also lecturing me, somewhat, on family values.)

But I’m just reminded of how the reason I never have to tolerate people like that, what more marry men like that, is that I get to choose. And I get to infuriate men like that whenever they appear, because I can.

As the incisive @illyrica puts it: “picky” = “insufficiently grateful that an actual man is willing to bestow validation upon your worthless life by choosing you”

I thank God every moment for the empowerment that is not needing this validation, not needing men, not needing to pick through this garbage, and indeed for not needing to pick. At all.

for more angry feminist ranting: why i am still a feminist

Bah. Manila was great fun (five days so far; more on that city soon), jumping into a plane to Singapore, and then into another one to Bangalore.