#6 Pointing out how fat you are

Image linked from FunXite

Common mostly to the older Filipino generation and perhaps recent immigrants, this habit of unabashedly making pointed comments about a complete stranger’s weight is indeed strange, particularly when the Filipino making such comments is himself or herself two potatoes shy of a full sack.

#5 Pinoyspotting

Image linked from IMP Awards

Like the black community’s enthusiasm to claim Tiger Woods’ blackness (no such love from the Cablinasian), Filipinos have the urge to assert the Pinoy-ness (Filipino slang for “Filipino”) of any celebrity with even a minute amount of Filipino platelets. From older stars like Phoebe Cates, Lou Diamond Phillips, Lea Salonga, and Rob Schneider, to the younger Enrique Iglesias, Vanessa Hudgens, Jasmine Trias, Paolo Montalban, and Michael Copon, Pinoy celebrities are everywhere and taking over the world!

#4 Beauty Pageants

Image linked from Flickr user kehena

A legacy of barangay (“village”) festivals, the beauty pageant has persistently proven itself subservient to Filipino vanity. Pageants at every level are held regularly by Filipinos and Filipino-Americans alike with much the same pomp and lack of meaning as those of its Western counterparts, sometimes with similarly awkward moments.

#3 Working abroad

Image linked from sulit.com.ph

A lack of jobs in the Philippines that pay enough to support a modestly sized family often forces the Filipino husband, wife, or both to leave their friends, family, and sometimes children, to earn money in faraway places like the Middle East, the United States, and everywhere in between.

Away for extended periods, or at least long enough to save for a trip back home, overseas Filipino workers endure the pain of separation from their loved ones but quickly make friends with everyone they meet, including other Filipinos in similar situations.

Often toiling in low-wage jobs, Filipinos faithfully remit their earnings back to their families in the Philippines, and make sure to get pasalubong (“gifts” or “souvenirs”) for everyone when it’s balikbayan time (“return home”).

#2 Singing

Imaged linked from Flickr user Monica’s Dad

Filipinos love to showcase their singing ability at wedding receptions, birthday parties, or other family gatherings. Picking mostly romantic, sentimental, or otherwise slow songs like I Did It My Way or The Greatest Gift of All, the average Filipino vocally expresses with unrequited passion the longings of the human heart, in a musical key suitably provided by the karaoke machine, if one is available.

#1 Rice

Image linked from Peace Corps Online

For the hungry Filipino, a meal is not a meal without rice. Not the Uncle Ben’s-separated-grain-sometimes-with-margarine-who-eats-this-crap kind of rice white people like, but the Milagrosa-sticky-enough-for-school-projects kind of rice.

From generation to generation, the elusive art of cooking rice with just the right amount of stickiness was passed on with the one-knuckle rule, although this never works because knuckle length varies in the human population. A better way is the one-to-one-cup plus one-and-a-half-cup rule; for example, three cups of rice to three plus one-and-a-half cups of water.

Rice by itself is bland, but it’s healthy and serves as the perfect blank canvas for all the greasy, salty, and generally artery-clogging foods that Filipinos like to pile on their plates at family gatherings. For abjectly poor Filipinos, salt or soy sauce substitute for such foods.