Filipino writer Isabel Escoda has spent years documenting the lives of her fellow countrywomen in Hong Kong - yet many of them still mistake her for being Indian or European.
'The trouble is I am a mongrel,' said Escoda, who has lived in Hong Kong for nearly 30 years. 'I'm mestizo [an individual with a non-specific ethnic mixture]; my mother is half-Spanish, my father is mestizo.
'So every time I turn around to talk to fellow Filipinos they say, 'Oh you're a Filipina'. Then I have to explain.
'Once I was talking to a group. One girl asked her companion, 'Why does she know Tagalog?''
Escoda's new book, Pinoy Abroad - A Perspective on Philippine Life in Hong Kong - is a collection of her columns and some historical sketches that have been published in a monthly Hong Kong-based Filipino newspaper of the same name. Her book will be launched tomorrow outside the main HSBC building in Central.
Asked why she wrote about her compatriots, Escoda said: 'I am Pinay and I live here.'
Filipinos have been attracted to Hong Kong since the 1890s, when revolutionaries plotted here against their Spanish colonial rulers.
