Exactly!
Warning: be prepared to be labeled as another 'mangina' in the near future lol (re your recent female favored comments).
A bit off topic but not totally. I was in Butuan in 2008 and stayed at a hotel there. There was a man sitting outside, just biding his time. I walked up to him and just chatted with him in Visaya. My Visaya is not very good but I can still hold a conversation. Another man passed by and asked him if I could speak Visaya. He turned to him and very unemotinally and as-a-matter-of-factly said : "Visaya sia" ( He is a Visayan). In the Philippine culture, you are the language you speak regardless of skin color. He never called me white or anything like this. Suddenly I was accepted as a member of his ancient ethnic group- I was now one of these- Sri Vijanas:
what tied me to this ancestry was the fact that I spoke in that language
I had never seen anything like this on earth and it was a perfect system- you speak that language- that is what you are. It was like this with many N. American Indian tribes- you spoke Lakota? You were a Lakota. Until these new racist systems started arriving from Europe.
On another occasion I was in Manila and one guy tried to drag me into an alley to, as I learned later, rob me. I spoke to him in Tagalog, asked him for directions and explain that I was lost and needed help. He explain everything to me and as I was leaving I heard him say " Di pwede mag-holdap sa kanya, dahil Tagalog sya"- "We can't rob him because he is a Tagalog". Again, you speak the language- you are one of us- even if you have an accent and are of a different color.
So, I became one of these:
Just for speaking the language. A brilliant and a very humane, socially advanced system. That alone makes me forget anything else about the Philippines that is unpleasant.
No one would be writing the stuff about Asian women in the Philippines like this anywhere.