Who celebrates the civilisations who gave us pansit and karma, or words like ‘sampalataya’ सम्प्रत्यय and ‘kuya’ 哥仔 hm? Like, it’s not the learning Spanish part that’s bad (it’s not), it’s the “Filipino would be babble without Spanish” part that’s annoying (and wrong).

And even from a purely aesthetic lens, this is just beautiful.

Sure, the Church sucks in many ways, but ordinary Catholics have much healthier, closer-to-nature (read: pagan) ways of dealing with loss and longing. Grief doesn’t magically disappear after a few days—not even after a year. Pieces of it stay with you, and ritual cycles help.

Irl Asia, whilst a Japanese nationalist and a (Han) Chinese supremacist might both view Filipinos and Indonesians as beneath them, they’re also likely to view each other as inferior to the other, and they do this independently. There is no clandestine “East Asian” cabal.

Racism between Asians in Asia is called racism, too, not just colourism (though that also exists). We just don’t perceive race in the same diasporoid way that Americans do. Members of the same “race” can look very differently from each other but still feel racially bonded — see: Han Chinese.

You could say it’s all Christianity’s fault, but it doesn’t even make sense in much of Christianity — the Christian God is not actually some humanoid sky daddy. The common antitheist conception of God is closer to the literalist evangelical kind than anything else.

Or wrong. Indecent. Unethical. Whatever strong condemning word you want.

It seems to be pre-Islamic as it’s practised in different parts of the austronesophone world beyond SEA, but also because it’s treated as a coming-of-age ritual done around puberty and not in infancy as done in the US and other Islamicised cultures.