MISS SAIGON AND THE
FILIPINO WOMEN'S AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
"Staging Miss Saigon at a time of war, poverty and strife poses for
young
Filipino women a lucratively packaged but highly perilous
alternative."
This was the statement released by GABRIELA-Youth at a press conference
today along with with Concerned Artists of the Philippines and Sinagbayan.
Gi-an Llagas, GABRIELA-Youth spokesperson explains that amidst poverty and
the ongoing war in Mindanao and the countrysides, "mbutbutore young
women are compelled to embrace the exploitative sex trade, and desperately
grope in the American Dream, their coveted future."
Miss Saigon is highly romanticed and deceiving. It re-ignites in the
impoverished Filipinas the American dream. A dream that has left thousands
of Amerasian children in Olongapo, a dream that has made prostitutes out
of children, a dream that is in fact, a terrible nightmare.
GABRIELA-Youth also says that Kim, a young Vietnamese woman portrayed by
popular actress Lea Salonga, "dangerously romanticizes women,
justifies and worse, glorifies prostitution. It even reinforces the
present feudal-patriarchal view that at a time like today, where there is
poverty, the Mindanao war and the VFA, women become mere diversions for
battle-scarred soldiers. An extremely low regard for women that is
patronized and promoted no less by the AFP's commander-in-chief, and now
the presidential son in Bayang Makulay.
"It is at a time like this when women are being attacked not just
economically and politically but by the proliferation of an anti-women
culture that we should become more critical, that we should further unite
and consolidate our ranks.
GABRIELA-Youth calls on Filipino women, who like Kim will undoubtedly be
willing to "give their lives for their children, for their
futures." But let us be women, sisters and mothers who will defend
ourselves and fight for a future unmarred, untarnished by the American
nightmare that has long plagued and exploited women.
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