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Barung, swords made in Mindanao. Photo by Jay Ignacio.

History tells us that when Ferdinand Magellan sailed onto these shores in 1521 not all the natives who would later be called Filipinos were impressed at his global circumnavigation project. Nor were they lining up to get baptized. Instead of saying “Mabuhay!” and hanging garlands of sampaguitas around the foreigners’ necks, the tribal chieftain Lapu-Lapu said “Hell, no”, except that being pagan he was not burdened with visions of souls getting stir-fried in subterranean ovens by cackling demons.

Magellan, thinking he was invincible because all the other native chiefs had thrown parties for him, announced that he would teach this Lapu-Lapu a lesson. That didn’t happen. Lapu-Lapu and his warriors beat Magellan’s troops so hard the survivors fled back to Spain and reported that their captain had been eaten by a giant fish. Seriously, why is the first Filipino hero named for a fish (or the fish named after him, with the same effect)? How are we going to instill respect and awe when the mention of his name makes people think of a delicious escabeche in sweet and sour sauce?

Going back to the Battle of Mactan, some believe that Lapu-Lapu and his warriors used the Filipino martial art called arnis to vanquish the Spanish invaders. This information is unverified, but so are the facts in the life of Lapu-Lapu. It is certainly not implausible.

Filipino Martial Arts Grandmaster Dan Inosanto taught Bruce Lee how to use nunchaku. That is beyond awesome. Photo by Jay Ignacio.

The Filipino Way of Whoopass appears in my column, Wide World of Pain, in the November issue of Esquire. It’s somewhere in the middle pages. If a table of contents exists we could not find it.

Jesse Eisenberg, Camille Mana, Remy Auberjonois and Justin Bartha. Photo by Sandra Coudert in Playbill.com.

Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, The Squid and the Whale) has written a play about “a college kid consumed by white guilt, his multiculturalism-obsessed pothead mentor and roommate”, and how “their relationship is complicated by the sudden arrival of Edgar’s new sister-in-law of Filipino descent”. Asuncion opened the other day at the Cherry Lane Theatre Off-Broadway. Of course Jesse plays the kid consumed by guilt.

Read the interview in Vulture.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a former reporter for The Washington Post and shared a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings. He founded Define American, which seeks to change the conversation on immigration reform. He also wrote that New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg that we linked to here.

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant
By JOSE ANTONIO VARGAS
Published: June 22, 2011

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12. . .

Read the article in the New York Times.

Even more interesting than the written confession are the comments posted in the many sites that picked up this story. Snapshot of the American mindset.

One of the narrators of Mona Simpson’s latest novel My Hollywood is a Filipino nanny named Lola.

I take Williamo to the post office, seal the envelope, and send my money home. Four hundred fifty this week. A ticker tape of dollars runs now all the time in my head. Last year, I totaled more than twenty thousand – in pesos, three times what Bong Bong earns, and he is executive Hallmark. This year it will be more because my weekend job. Besides what I send, I give myself allowance of five dollars for daily spending. Twenty five go to my private savings, so when I return home there will be some they did not know. Also, I need my account here for shoes or treats for Williamo or if one of the babysitters gets married. When you are working seven days, you need some your own money.

Read the excerpt at the author’s website.

Pop culture trivia: Mona Simpson’s earlier novel Anywhere But Here was made into a movie directed by Wayne Wang, starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman. Mona’s parents had a child before they married and they gave him up for adoption. The child was Steve Jobs; she thanks him in the acknowledgements. Mona’s ex-husband Richard Appel is a writer and producer for The Simpsons and he named Homer’s mother after Mona.

Photo: The 99. You can download a preview at their website.

At the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi my friend stumbled on an exhibit of a Kuwaiti superhero comic book that is sweeping the Arab world. The superheroes are called The 99, and one of them is from the Philippines. Widad—The Loving.

Budj alerted us to a CSI episode in which Langston refers to a monster out of Philippine mythology.

In the first place it’s pronounced asWANG, not ASSwang. At least he didn’t attempt “manananggal”.

I learned my Philippine mythology not from my folks, other kids, or yaya (Hala ka kung hindi mo uubusin yan, kukunin ka ng aswang), but from a copy of Maximo D. Ramos’s Creatures of Lower Philippine Mythology that I found lying around the house one day. Aswang and their ilk were called ‘viscera-eating monsters’. That book disappeared, or maybe my mom returned it to their school library. I’ve been looking for a copy forever.