Filipinos still believe in “forever.”

I agree with that - many Filipinos are hostile to black people and to Indians ("Bombays") - they say that they smell, and so on.

The Indians (very often from the Punjab and very often surnamed Singh , i.e. Sikhs) are said to have made a corner for themselves in "five and six" moneylending, which would account for them experiencing the sort of hostility that was shown to the Jews in medieval Europe for the same reasons. There is no equivalent basis for the hostility to black people, so this may be an attitude that has been picked up from contact with white Americans or from the pervasive American media. However there is a definite attraction to black American culture, and perhaps this is a case of "parallel evolution" of the American black underclass and the Filipino "masa" underclass... At this point the discussion moves beyond my pay grade!

On the uselessness of many Filipino men...I have quite a number of friends who fall into the category of "Filipino men". Besides putting up with me, they have some other traits in common - a novelist, a photographer, a newspaper columnist, a news editor, a TV producer, a graphic artist who now writes his own graphic novels... One common element is that they all are "in the media" and others are they are all members of the cultured urban middle class and they are all "self made" - they hauled themselves into the world of the comfortable middle classes by very hard work and using the good intellects that they were born with, rather than inheriting a social position. These men are very far from "useless" - they are people whose opinions I value, whose judgments I respect and whose conversation I enjoy.

Three of them are the sons of Chinese immigrants who married Filipina girls - in years gone by single Chinese men (usually from Fujian - the province that exports more people than anywhere else in China) would arrive in the Philippines more or less illegally in search of work and would marry a local girl to acquire some legal standing. (The citizenship of the Filipino-Chinese was eventually settled by a decree law under Marcos. The tendency to arrive from Fujian explains why most Filipino-Chinese speak Hokkien - a language in which the President is fluent, incidentally... ) These men show the characteristics of the second generation immigrant anywhere in the world - their parents believed in education and in hard work and they absorbed these values.

Looking more generally yes, there are a goodly number of men who are quite useless and I need look no further than my nearest brother in law to find one. He is three years older than K, drifted to Manila after school where he worked as a waiter and now works as a "security guard". The only thing I can say to his credit is that so far he has not fathered any brats, to my knowledge. This was probably because he was for nine years the kept toy boy of an older and very "go ahead" Filipina whom I also count amongst my friends - he was unwise enough to cheat on her once too often, so he has fallen back into poverty, where he will remain.

He is extremely good looking, spends long hours in the gym and on the basketball court and hanging with his barkada... and that's it. Complains that women want him for his body but they never want him as a father for their child - I wonder why? His older brother was by accounts equally feckless as a youth, fathering one illegitimate child, and taking drugs, but he was scooped up by a plain but sensible woman who sorted him out.

Just so.

I was solemnly told by the female friend I just referred to that "K may suit you, but that is because you are a foreigner - she would never appeal to a Filipino - she is too dark!" K is a little jealous of an older sister who is pale skinned - there is a Spanish great-grandmother in the family background, which may account for the pale skinned sister and for K's freckles and rather fine hair.

My wife also is asked fairly often if she is our (very pale) baby's nanny... when visiting her relatives at a very upmarket subd. in Paranaque. We do have a good laugh about that.

I have gone back to the original post. I have a good deal of respect for SWS - they cut their teeth reporting voting intentions before and during the Marcos snap election, and the publication of their results led to the EDSA Revolution. This is a polling agency with a track record to be proud of.

At the anecdotal level, K really has trouble with the fact that I have been married before. This is quite hard for her to get her mind round; she clearly worries that I cannot be serious about her. Serial monogamy is WASP idea and an alien concept to Asian Catholics

Whether most Filipinos really believe in fidelity in marriage may be quite a different question.

K is the youngest of five sisters and two brothers. It is fair to say that the whole family, including both parents, were, and are, better than average in the matter of looks. She was the only girl to make it to 21 without getting pregnant. She achieved this by the simple device of remaining a virgin, as there was, and indeed there is, nowhere within twenty miles of their home where contraception could, or indeed can, be obtained.

I think this, combined with the inevitable adoption of "more modern" ways of behaving, accounts for the rise in single motherhood .

There is another point - a generation or two back, the girl still got pregnant, but a shotgun wedding was organised - nowadays the girl's parents are more likely to (correctly) identify the sperm donor as a waste of space, and tell him to beat it, whilst encouraging their daughter to bring up the child on her own.

I hope they do Andrew or a lot of us here on the forum are going to be in the s**t

I couldn't bear to be shafted again in my latter years.

They may be only 2% Chinese colonised by the Spanish their names, personal names and placenames, are Spanish, but they still have the Asia culture, of concubinage and non-fidelity.