“Ang ganda nga niya eh. Ang tangos ng ilong niya, parang may
lahi.” – Jay complimenting my niece.
“Ang cute nga niya eh, para akong may Korean na anak” –Mom
to Bea
“Mukha kang taga Middle East. Ang ganda kaya ng race nila.”
–A friend to me.
We are all guilty of inferiority complex and we all believe
that other races are superior to ours evident in how we compliment our fellows
and how we feel when the compliment is directed at us.
I am guilty of it and I don’t feel proud about it.
Can’t we just compliment our fellow Filipinos by saying that
they look beautiful period. I long for the time when it would be the norm that
Filipinos would use adjectives instead to express their liking for an
aesthetically pleasing face.
“I like how Noah looks because his sleepy eyes are always
mysteriously expressive. I never know what he thinks from his eyes except that
he avoids mine especially when we have more than 30 seconds of eye contact. I
also like his particularly small mouth that when he leaves open reveal his
perfect teeth and I am guilty of thinking what it would feel like to kiss him.”
Okay, well not everyone can produce such words to another
individual they mean to compliment especially when they do not know the person
much. Plus the fact that a person gets more beautiful the more we get to know
them.
I do appreciate compliments like, “Ang ganda ng face niya.”
Simple. No bullshit. The person may be being very up to the point or maybe
having a difficulty in being intricate but at least that person didn't associate beauty to a foreign face. Maybe it’s just that, sometimes we
associate beauty to foreign races because it is the surest way of being
persuasive so that the compliment can be accepted easily. Because they have that
misconception that ideal beauty is anything but Filipino beauty. Colonial
mentality will always be deep-seated in our system and it’s just sad.
