Aung Lin-Week 10-Blog 10

I will write this week’s blog on McKay’s article “Filipino Sea Men.” He mentioned how Filipino labor diaspora is the largest in the world. These Filipino workers are in 140 countries and sending 10 billion dollars back home each year. I was pretty shocked by how much money they sent back to their families and very proud of these Filipinos. McKay also talked about how there are many Filipino nurses in US. I work in an office in a county hospital in Martinez, CA and when I first started I kept seeing hundreds of Filipino nurses and didn’t understood why until I took ASA 150-Filipino American Experience class with Professor Rodriguez. I also have many relatives that work for Kaiser and they talked about how there are way too many Filipino nurses in their hospital and I explained to them why. And then McKay talked about Filipino sea men and how they’re smart and hardworking and other sea men were jealous so they called them feminine and gay. I learned from this article that Filipino sea men and oversea workers are smart hardworking people trying to support their families back in Philippines. I now know why there are many Filipino nurses at Kaiser. Also in class we talked about how much Filipino workers in the US send home in terms of remittances and the numbers are scary. Their families back in Philippines should be proud. 

Question:

McKay said in 1960, only 15% of the world’s sea men were Asians. By 1987, it went up to 67%; mainly from Philippines. How did that happened? Why did many men from Philippines joined seafaring labor force? Is it because they want to send their families lots of money?

Work Cited

Steven McKay. “Filipino Sea Men: Identity and Masculinity in a Global Labor Niche.” 2007. Asian Diaspora. 

California: Stanford University Press. 

Filipino Seamen 

Filipino nurses working together in USA