Home » Blogs » benc's blog

Filipinos in Fiction

Starting today, I'll record here the instances where Filipinos are featured in works of fiction. I've been meaning to do this, but always got sidetracked.

I have this small theory that Filipinos are very slowly taking the limelight in international media. (The Chinese are very well-known the world over and so are Thais. Filipinos are now slowly getting in the radar.)

I'm sure I missed a lot of other Filipino citations in the list below. If you have encountered movies, tv shows or books that mention Filipinos, please post a comment or email me at rubencanlas(at)gmail.

  • CSI. Season 8 Episode 168: "Go to Hell".
    The victims of a gruesome crime are members of a part-Filipino family
    (surname: Macalino). While processing the room, CSI discover what look
    like entrails on the kitchen floor. Warrick identifies the mess as a
    Filipino delicacy, explaining that his grandma has Filipino friends.
  • Simpsons: "Thank
    God It's Doomsday    ".
    After Homer watches the movie "Left Below" (parodying the hit
    rapture-inspired book/movie Left Behind), Homer
    begins to see signs that Doomsday is indeed approaching. He creates a
    formula to estimate the number of days before the end of the world.
    Part of the formula is "number of Filipinos mentioned in the Bible."
  • Cryptonomicon,
    by Neal Stephenson.     Stephenson shows an affinity for
    Filipinos by mentioning them in most of his books (like SnowCrash). Cryptonomicon tops
    all of these because most of the novel is set in the Philippines.
  • Numbers.
    In one episode of Numbers,
    a seafarer goes to the FBI to report the abuses of their ship captain
    who is also trafficking humans. The seafarer switches between Tagalog
    and English.
  • Her Alibi.
    In the movie Her Alibi starring
    Tom Selleck and Paulina Porizkova, Selleck has a Filipino housekeeper
    who starts yelling at Tom in Tagalog.
»

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Gladwell calls these things

Submitted by Adamparkar on Wed, 12/24/2008 - 19:17.

Gladwell calls these things social epidemics and compares this phenomenon with how health epidemics (Dissertation Writing) happen: from a gradual rise to a critical mass that eventually lead to the "tipping point", (Custom Term Paper) the point where the epidemic spreads.

»

Great comment!

Submitted by benc on Mon, 12/29/2008 - 11:23.

Thanks, Adamparkar, for the thoughts and the links!

»

The Night Market by HOLLY BLACK

Submitted by ulan25 on Thu, 09/11/2008 - 13:39.

Holly Black's short fantasy story "The Night Market" features a Pinoy protagonist, and it's also set in Alaminos. Stuff like lambanog and paksiw na pata and balut appear in the story, also engkantos, etc.

The author is married to a Pinoy, and according to her note at the end of the story, she bugs her mother-in-law for help with Tagalog and Pinoy elements hehe.

"The Night Market" is one of the stories in The Faery Reel: Tales from the Twilight Realm (Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling - editors)

=)

»

Reader contributions, 2

Submitted by benc on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 03:00.

From steph:

I just learned that there was a Filipino houseboy in James McCain's "Double Indemnity" who was not in the movie, and thought about you.

See
[http://journals.sfu.ca/philjol/index.php/KK/article/view/50/0]

»

Reader contributions

Submitted by benc on Sat, 07/05/2008 - 02:56.

Here are a couple of contributions from readers. The first one is from Kin Enriquez, who happens to be my former student.

Hi Sir, here are my contribution to your list:

  • The main character of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Rico, is a Filipino. They changed him into an Argentinian in the movie version (starring Casper van Dien).
  • Alex Garland often mentions the Philippines (and Filipinos) in his fiction The Beach (made into a movie starring Leo di Caprio). The setting of the book is Thailand but Garland got the inspiration from an island he visited somewhere in the Philippines. Garland also wrote a book Tesseract, the setting of which is the Philippines
  • The novel Shockwave Rider by John Brunner mentions the Philippines having its first woman president
  • The possessed girl in Keannu Reeves' Constantine is a Filipina
  • The villain Psylocke in X-Men 3 is a Filipina
  • The TV crew in The Condemned (starring Stone Cold Steve Austin) are Filipinos
  • Manila was briefly shown in a news shot in Superman Returns
  • There is a movie starring Jean Claude van Damme where the opening shot is a Philippine Airlines plane landing in an airport
  • The character of Richard Gene in An Officer and a Gentlemen came from Subic Bay naval base (he mentioned it in the movie)
  • Rudyard Kipling wrote the poem White Man's Burden as a ode to the conquest of the Philippine by the US

Thanks, Kin! Might I add, many Chuck Norris and Van Damme films were actually shot in the Philippines. And don't forget Garland's "Ghost of Manila" book :)

»