Often with no regard to their own financial solvency, Filipinos happily go the extra mile when hosting long-lost friends, vacationing relatives, or the occasional White Person. This extreme sense of hospitality may include slaughtering prized livestock, and giving up the master bedroom or building extra rooms to comfortably house, feed, and otherwise entertain visitors.

Image linked from Flickr user junsjazz

Arguably more prolific in the area of taking and posing for pictures than other snap-happy Asians, Filipinos are innately attuned to react to or effect the click of a camera shutter. From merry family gatherings, rambunctious nights with barkada (“close circle of friends”), benign stand-in-front-of-tourist-landmark opportunities presented by leisure travel, to horrendous privacy-invading moments at places of work that involve the usually unsuspecting but increasingly informed general public, Filipinos are Scout-ready with their cameras to memorialize good times and bad.

A corollary to the practice of respecting elders, the use of endearing titles to address family members abounds in Filipino culture–Lolo (“grandpa”), Lola (“grandma”), Tito (“uncle”), Tita (“aunt”), Kuya (“older brother”), and Ate (“older sister”).

Supposedly possessing a predisposition to heart disease, high blood pressure, and other similarly terminal maladies, the fully aware Filipino forges ahead, particulary in special-occasion family gatherings, with his consumption of Asia’s unhealthiest cuisine– Filipino food.

Over three hundred years of Spanish colonial rule and the Filipino’s culinary ingenuity under these tough times have created the perfect storm of deadly cookery:

• Lechon (“whole roast pig”) and its derivative, Paksiw (“leftover Lechon in sweet/sour sauce”)
• Dinuguan (“general pig parts including tripe in pig’s blood”)
• Tocino (“pork slices marinated in sugar and red dye”)
• Crispy Pata (“fried pork leg”)
• Kare Kare (“oxtail / beef / tripe stew in peanut sauce with bagoong“)
• Bagoong (“shrimp paste preserved with salt”)
• Chicharon (“fried pork skin”)
• Lumpia (“fried egg rolls”)
• Turon (“fried plantain in egg roll wrapper with brown sugar”)
• Halo-Halo (“mixed fruit and ice cream in shaved ice and milk”)

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.

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!

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.

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”).

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.

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.