A friend from way, way back was seeking my professional advice (via Zoom) how she could jumpstart her business development work for an advisory firm in Singapore since my job runs alongside hers. I am very familiar with her line of work even though she is in the legal sector. I gave her the step by step how she should do the three prongs under her departments. (Maybe I should do this for a living 🤔)

Long story short, she told me she was getting a lot of resistance from her subordinates, like they don’t believe in her. She had to assert herself to her subordinates and told that she is a lawyer, a CPA, and and MBA holder who graduated from one of Singapore’s top schools and that she has every right to be in that firm.

I told her the ugly truth: Singaporeans look down on Filipinos and they think you should not have been in your position. Then I saw in her face that it finally dawned on her what that was all about. Like it finally made sense to her why she is receiving this kind of hostility from rank and file staff. They only view us as maids and office cleaning ladies. I get that all the time, I told her. And if I tell them I am Filipino, they would insist I must be part Chinese. An ex-colleague in Hong Kong said the same. Then a Singaporean challenged me, my editing, my English… I just let it go. She didn’t last because she couldn’t cope.

So I told my friend that is the reason why I always had to assert myself, that I am as good, if not better, than others. Most Filipinos in our big company (there were only a handful of us) are not just rank and file; in fact we hold key positions. The head for Asia Pacific (before she left last year) was Filipino and we were contemporaries when we were still with local media. We almost had the same background. We are not mediocre. And when an editor from far away accused me of plagiarism because she could not believe an Asian, much less a Filipino, could write very well in English–and a technical finance article at that–I pushed back. I didn’t back down and gave a good fight. It reached headquarters and in the end she had to apologize to me.

As I wrote here before, J did not understand the hierarchy even among Southeast Asians. That we are the wrong kind of Asians so we always get the shorter end of the stick. I told J before that he won’t feel it because he is the “right” kind of Asian.

So I told this friend that she has to brace herself (she’s new in SG and her entire year she was at the university where the environment is more forgiving) because she will get a lot of that treatment so she has to fight her way through.

I guess I also have to fight my way through all the time.