no merit

i commiserate with the people who suffer on a daily basis because of their jobs. no, not because of hard, forced labor… but because they have to work and pretend they have not known better. they have to work in a place where their talent is wasted. their time. their intelligence. their lives.

it’s sad enough that we have to leave our family and our friends behind, and yet here we are, humiliated some more, subjected to discrimination, to ridicule… and from people who know less than we do. we say so not because we feel superior, but because we know who we are and what we are capable of.

i always struggle with this… keeping my identity. it is so easy to lose oneself in a place where they always need someone Western educated or a native English speaker for that someone to do well in a high-paying, high status job.

we pass ourselves over. we are passed over. for the buck. have we sold our souls to the devil  just like dr. faust? for the sake of earning more than we do back home?

sometimes I whisper to myself, I AM WHO I AM. i am somebody. i was somebody. back home.

here, I am just a faceless asian. unremarkable.  ignorant.  ordinary. invisible.

and so we see hundreds of thousands of us Filipinos scrambling all over to get that elusive American citizenship our forebears could have handed down to us, had we allowed ourselves to continue to be governed by the great USA  a long time ago, just like the state of Hawaii (ironically, most of the people in Hawaii who are non-natives come from Japan and the Philippines – this influx began when the demand for workers to cultivate the farmlands/plantations was high). then there’s  also Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and many others.

i want to go to Luxembourg. hahaha.

in the workplace where we expire in an achingly slow, painful process… we see people getting ahead as they kiss the biggest asses with the biggest pieces of shit in that teeny weeny kingdom where others lord it over people who may be their intellectual superiors, but since they got there first… and never thought of moving (coz they’re so scared of not making it anywhere else after being there for the last 15 years, hahaha :-)) , they are the status quo, they are in power.

It’s not what you know. It’s who you know. add to this your skin color, or, at least, your citizenship… and you’ll probably get way ahead of the pack. latch on like a leech onto the big fat ass of your big fat boss, and you might actually live. bloodsucker.

when I watched THE DARK KNIGHT… i felt a little joker well up inside of me as I mulled over my predicament in this worn out, overdone, made up place they call a city. which city? hazard a guess.

© Lovely Claire Dangalan, 2010