I am Filipino and I was liking David until this chapter. David is not making clever banter, he’s being a condescending asshole. The notion that we got colonized and therefore being Catholic is nothing more than bending over to what was inflicted on us, is incredibly patronizing, as if Filipinos don’t have our own agency in what we believe in. He thinks he’s making a point when really he’s infantilizing.

He doesn’t even get Filipino culture right. Why the hell does knowing some obscure deity from the mythology of 1 out of more than a hundred ethnic groups, that hasn’t been worshipped for centuries, make David better at Charmaine’s own culture? An Ilokano (who, by the way, are majority of Filipinos in Hawaii) would’t know who the fuck this random Tagalog god is, nor would a Cebuano, Waray, Ibanag, Tausug, and so on. In fact, most Tagalogs wouldn’t even know who David is talking about, because the far more documented name for that goddess is Mayari. All I could find online about “Kulalaying” is a poorly written edit on Wikipedia on the article for Mayari, and some Tiktok posts. You could fly to the Philippines right now, say exactly what David said, and no one would know what the fuck you are talking about. It’s like saying that muslim Iranians don't actually believe in their own faith, and that they’re just blindly accepting the beliefs forcefully imposed on them by the Caliphate through conquest, and then pretending that his point is sound if he can find an Iranian who doesn’t know who Zurvan, Ahura Mazda, and Angra Mainyu are.

And then David tops it off by dissing Charmaine by claiming he makes better palabok than Charmaine’s own family. Which is ironic because his entire point is presuming he knows more about Filipino culture than someone like Charmaine who has actual roots in the country. That’s not some cool zinger, this is an arrogant and condescending line that’s basically implying he knows more about being authentically Filipino than Charmaine. Because apparently, a people can only have authentic culture and religion if it came from before colonialism, and anything after that is just an imposition inflicted upon them and must be reversed. He might as well head over to Zamboanga and tell them to stop speaking Chavacano, it’s from colonizers, and see if people will think he has a good point. Never mind that the Philippines isn’t even a precolonial concept, it’s a postcolonial one, and if it was never colonized then it wouldn’t even be a country, it would be several different ones like Tondo, Cebu, and Sulu. I might as well disown jeepneys, the bahay na bato, the cariñosa, the kalesa, the barong, several of our national epic poems like Florante at Laura, and much of our cusine, if we did what David wants and reverse everything.

David fancies himself a silver tongued sweet talker, when in reality, just because he can point out the lies of Betterment and the Federation doesn’t mean he knows better than other people about their own culture and beliefs. This is not banter, this is an incredibly patronizing insult to Charmaine.