vive la difference!

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It all began as a lunchroom dispute over a grade 2 student's table manners, but has now escalated into an international cause célèbre with Filipino authorities accusing a Montreal school board of insulting their country's culture. The case of 7-year-old Luc Cagadoc has become front-page news in his parents' native Philippines and a Quebec-based rights group says it will haul a suburban Montreal school before the provincial human rights commission after it repeatedly disciplined the slight, bespectacled boy because he allegedly "eats like a pig." At issue is the traditional Filipino method of using a fork to mush food into a spoon before swallowing the contents.

The Philippines' ambassador to Canada issued a statement of support for Cagadoc's family and Montreal's Filipino community, which he said was rightly offended by the school's reaction to the way the boy eats using a fork and spoon. "The embassy considers the alleged incident an affront to Filipino culture," Ambassador Jose Brillantes wrote. "To assert one's accepted eating practices, which after all are most proper and which have become part of one's cultural identity is, in fact, encouraged under the Canadian immigration policy on creating a Canadian mosaic rather than a melting pot."

School officials contend the punishment — Cagadoc was separated from his classmates and made to eat alone — had to do with disruptive behaviour, not slovenly eating. The Commission Scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys, which operates the École Lalande where Cagadoc studies (and the same school board involved in the "kirpan case" involving the right of a Sikh student to carry his ceremonial dagger on school grounds), sent a letter to his parents last month saying an April 12th "educational intervention" was "in no way aimed at the cultural practices of your community. It was very specifically linked to the way your son was ingesting his meal that day and in no way to the method or utensils used to bring his food to his mouth."

— SEAN GORDON, Toronto Star (2006/05/05)

i was born and raised in the Philippines, and came to Canada when i was 9 years old -- i prefer to identify as a Canadian with a Filipino background, rather than as a hyphenated breed... in many ways, i've disavowed a lot of my own culture's practices, being drawn towards and borrowing from other cultures i've been exposed to (both by circumstance and by choice)... as a result, i've often been referred to as a "coconut" (i.e. brown on the outside, white on the inside) or, worse, "white-washed" or a "sell-out"... in that regard, it may not be entirely appropriate for me to pontificate on this issue...

i don't know if this story has simply been blown out of proportion because of the "broken telephone" phenomenon... it could very well be that the kid, as many 7-year-olds have done from time to time, was simply playing with his food and doing certain offensive things... maybe the parents are the type of people who simply like to cause a commotion about every perceived slight against their culture... then again, this same school board's attitude towards minority cultures has been impugned before...

in any case, it's pretty sad that this situation is going to end up being decided as a "legal" issue, what with the parents' decision to pursue a human rights complaint... of course, basic human rights have to be protected, and where there are gross violations of dignity, litigation should be a viable option... but does it have to come to this? do we have to sue over everything? do we have to frame these issues in the language of "rights", instead of simply addressing them as the larger social-political questions that they are?

maybe what all the parties in this case need to do is to simply talk things over at a working lunch or dinner -- hopefully where everyone could use whatever utensil[s] they preferred... as many a business consultant would advise, sharing a meal together would open up lines of communication and, in situations like this, would likely help clear up any misunderstandings... that would probably be a grown-up solution to what seems to be a rather childish dispute... but then again, maybe that's just the Euro-centric "reasonable person" in me talking (reminds me of Melanie Brouzes’ "A Very Polite Genocide")...

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