Category Archives: race

Emil Guillermo: How one couple remembers 9-11 as a day of peace, love and family

 They are the perfect antidote to 9-11.

That’s what I call American Filipinos Sam and Gina C. of California, and their kids Malacas and Pinay. (Of course, names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Sam served in the Navy and both he and Gina come from military families. Their 9-11 patriotism cannot be questioned.  They mourn like everyone else the tragic losses on that day.

But instead of dwelling on the negative which can foment the kind of anti-Islamic sentiment we’ve seen crop up with threatened Koran burnings and the like, they are overwhelmed by a different feeling every Sept. 11.

 It’s one of how global peace , love, and family really can triumph over terror.  Again and again.

They just have to recall how they spent their day, Sept. 11, 2001.

The family was on a plane to New York scheduled to land around 9 a.m.

Of course, they didn’t make it.

Gina recalls how the captain suddenly came on the loud speaker. “He said they were experiencing difficulty and they wanted us to land and deplane,” Gina said. “Usually it’s the closest area nearby. We were over Nova Scotia. They took us to Ireland.”

Fans of geography will note how this is not exactly the ideal path one would take to an eventual destination of California, with or without a working GPS. 

But this was supposed to be a unique journey.

ADOPTED PARENTS

When their trip began two weeks prior from California, Sam and Gina were just a middle-aged couple heading to Moscow. After years of fertility doctors and the pain of trying to conceive, Sam and Gina turned to adoption as their option. Af first they turned to the Philippines. But being an older couple worked against them in finding an infant. Then they found a local California agency that suggested they go to Kazakhstan to find a baby in need of a home. 

Sam liked the idea of Kazakhstan. Pre-Borat, few people had ever even heard of the former Soviet satellite. In Kazakhstan, the babies can look a little bit East and a little bit West. The Asian influence is as strong as the Russian ethnic strain. 

“They sent us pictures and videos,” said Sam. “And we could choose the baby we wanted.”

The couple, in their 40s at the time, liked the Asian look of the babies. That was important to them knowing the child would be given a Filipino upbringing.  They felt  it would help the transition in becoming a real family.

The process took less than eight months, and as they went through it, it was too hard to just adopt one. 

They took a pair: Malacas and Pinay.

They call them their Kazapinos.

THE FLIGHT BACK

But getting the newly minted global Pinoy family back to their home in California would be no small feat. Just going from Kazakhstan to Moscow was far from easy. By the time they were on the Moscow to New York leg, crossing the Atlantic, the family thought they were home free.

But then the message on the loudspeaker came on.  And without an explanation they were headed the reverse direction— to Ireland.

Picture this: You are travelling internationally in a cramped space with two kids, ages  3 and 5, one of whom is vomiting intermittently on you.  You don’t speak Kazakh or Russian. The babies don’t know English or Taglish. But their cries and screams are universal. 

Is this not the definition of terror?

When they landed in Dublin, the chaos ensued with hundreds of people scurrying, struggling with their bags. Sam and Gina had their kids.  Nothing made sense until they overheard a reservation agent say the words, “Your country has been attacked.”

“I said, ‘What did he say? ‘“  Sam recalled. “It was crazy. As the news unfolded. I thought, ‘This can’t be real.’’

Then he saw a woman crying uncontrollably. She was on the way to visit her son who worked at the World Trade Center.

“She was hysterical,” said Sam. “All I was thinking was, this can’t be real.”

The shock was tempered by the genuine hospitality they found in Dublin.  If you have to wait out the world’s confusion, there are worst places than Dublin.

Within a few days as the airports in the U.S. opened up, Sam and Gina were headed to Atlanta, one of only two airports opened.

There they spent a few more days, before getting the first flight back to California on the 17th.

But something had happened. Amid the terror and the chaos, a real nuclear family was forged

Today, Malacas, now 12, is malacas (big).  “The doctor’s say he’ll be 6 foot 5 inches,” said Sam, who is about a foot shorter than that.

Pinay, is now 15 and was a local beauty queen winner.

Both she and her brother embrace their unique “Kazapinoness.”

Their parents beam with pride over their kids. And they’re glad they made the step to adopt. Filipinos don’t often choose that option. Some think it’s too hard.
“When we hear that, we tell them our story, “Gina said.

Sam and Gina found something unique in their quest for family. They made the world a little smaller by adopting orphans from a far away place. And on a day that terrorized the world, they forged the strongest gesture of peace, love and family imaginable.

9-11? They know what it means.

“The power of God protected this family,” Sam said. “We’ll always remember it.”

California nurses call for investigation of alleged discriminatory hiring practices against Filipinos at SF’s St.Luke’s hospital

If you don’t think racism and discrimination still exists in our era of diversity, consider this:   A  de facto ban against hiring Filipino nurses at the St.Luke’s Campus of Sutter Health’s Calif. Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) appears to be policy in San Francisco.

No Filipinos, as blatant as that.

Just like the old sign that the Filipino National Historical Society displays, the one from the 1920s that reads, “Positively No Filipinos Allowed.”

You can take that sign and stick it on the door at St.Luke’s, right now, says the California Nurses Association, the nurses union.

And now it wants to do something about it.

At a press conference on Thursday, the union will call for the San Francisco Human Rights Commission to investigate the hospital. The union will also announce its intention to file a class action grievance against Sutter and CPMC.

The union provided compelling evidence which included signed statements by former managers and current job stats, that  suggests Filipinos are being unfairly discriminated at the St. Luke’s campus.

From numbers provided by CPMC, the numbers are revealing. Before the take-over of the hospital in 2007 the Filipino RNs at St.Luke’s were 66 percent of the nursing population.

Between 2007 and 2008, just 48 percent of new hires were Filipino.

From Feb. 2008, when the nurses union and the community organized to stop the closure of St.Luke’s, to the present, the percentage of new RN hires who were Filipino dropped dramatically to just 10 percent.

They didn’t all just give up their RN credentials and take jobs as Wal-Mart greeters.

Nato Green, the labor representative who works at St.Luke’s said it’s no coincidence. “I believe this reflects Sutter’s decision to use race to divide workers and stop collective bargaining activity,” Green told me. “ Going from 66 percent to 10 percent (of new hires) is a fairly remarkable coincidence.”

It all comes after the union forced Sutter to keep St.Luke’s open. The nurses union expected some push back, but not this.

“CPMC and Sutter have chosen to retaliate by carrying out a punitive, illegal and immoral campaign of discrimination,” said Zenei Cortz, the California Nurses Association president.  “There is no excuse for racial or ethnic discrimination. A hospital should be a center of therapeutic healing for patients, not a model for bigotry.”

The union also produced affidavits signed under penalty of perjury.  Ronald Rivera, a former nurse manager, who worked there from April 2006 to April 2010 when he resigned on good terms, provided his testimony.

“One day I spoke with Diana Karner (VP of nursing) on the phone about hiring new RNs,” he attested.  “Diana said to me that we probably should not hire any more foreign graduate nurses. She explained that patients complain because “it is hard  to understand them and be understood by them.”

Another signed affidavit came from Ronald Villanueva, who actually was sitting in and overheard the conversation between Karner and Rivera. “I was shocked and I wondered if she knew I was a foreign graduate nurse,” he wrote.

A third declaration came from from Chris Hanks, who was the Director of Critical Care from 2008 to 2009 and reported directly to Karner. Hanks was alarmed when told point blank “you are not to hire any Filipino nurses.”  Hanks challenged Karner at their weekly meetings, until he was Karner told him, “The Filipinos are always related , or know each other, and that’s not good. You’re not to hire them.”

Karner the VP of nursing didn’t return my telephone call.

Kevin McCormack, of CPMC’s media relations said she was out of the office and unavailable. What did he think of a ban on hiring Filipino nurses? “That would be illegal,” he said. “You can’t ban hiring specific groups.”

He called it “ridiculous” and implied it was a stunt by C N A to fan the ongoing labor dispute with CPMC.

“We have a long history of hiring Filipino nurses on all our campuses, including St.Luke’s, and we are still hiring them,” McCormack read from CPMC’s official statement. “We have many RNs at our St. Luke’s campus who are Filipino and know how extraordinary they are. To say we are imposing quotas on them is outrageous.”

It is outrageous, but the numbers don’t lie.

The Filipino nursing staff at St.Luke’s is shrinking and it is such a precipitous drop that it can’t just be by accident or happenstance.

Note from Emil Guillermo: Help,I’m a pioneer!

AAJA, the Asian American Journalists Association has figured out the best way to get back at me after all my years of being a bickering member.

It’s honoring me.

On Wed., Aug. 4, I’m being honored among 150 others as an Asian American pioneer in  U.S. journalism. (Yes, Tritia Toyota and Connie Chung are on the list too. But so ae lots of others who were founders and original members of AAJA).

How’d that happen?

It’s just a citation for being old and one of the first Asian Americans to consider journalism instead of medicine, the law, restaurant ownership, or investment banking  for a career. 

At this point in time, I’d have to say, choosing journalism may not have been the best choice.

 But it was my choice. And I’m gratified that someone noticed that I was the first Asian American male and first Filipino American to host a national news program when I was senior host of “All Things Considered” in 1989.

I hope that doesn’t become the headline in my obituary someday.  It’s not over yet. (I can’t even withdraw from my IRA without a 10 percent penalty).

I’m still a pioneer who hasn’t quite reached the promised land.

Sherrod story a racial speed bump, but shows Obama’s preferred passive stance on race

The road to freedom will be much tougher if we all get tossed off-kilter by the road bumps put in our way by conservative media.

FoxOpinion (it is more opinion than news, isn’t it?)  and blogger Breitbart should be ashamed of their tactics.

But the Obama adminstration suffered from a little post-racial knee-jerking, too.

First, assume the truth from FoxOpinion  is always dicey. More so from a conservative blogger. So why  couldn’t someone at the FDA verify the facts with Shirley Sherrod?

 Sure,we want to get to racial nirvana, but it doesn’t have to come at the expense of the truth?

This embarrassment is more on USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack  than Obama, really. Vilsack should know better, but  so should the pres.

I’ve always called Obama the big “race avoider. He doesn’t want to deal with race as an everyday agenda item unless he’s dragged into it and issues are made of his pastor, Skip Gates, Shirley Sherrod.

Obama wants to take us to the next level by  forgetting about race. His is the passive approach. The less he deals with race minutae, the more people see the big picture:  There’s a black man in the White House. Racism? Get over it.

That’s how he wants to drag us to the promised land. But people on both sides don’t want to budge.

The racists are vested as are the race-based. 

Ann Coulter/Jesse Jackson are self-cancelling.

Post-racial thinking?  Race politics in America won’t change until we’re all on the same page.