A very short reflection on the intertwining of Chinese and Filipino heritage, from pancit to Ellen Adarna
When Jullie Daza wrote “Kung Hei Fat Choy” as the title of her most recent article about the Lunar New Year and Chinese people in the Philippines, she risked criticism from those more attuned with the intricacies of Chinese heritage.
But she was primarily writing for a Filipino general audience, and for most of us, the above greeting is what we’ve come to know as the Chinese New Year greeting. Miss Daza then proceeded to remind (or inform) us of what the phrase really meant.
With regards to the Chinese imprint on Filipino culture and identity, there really is a lot to inquire into, and the nuances depend on whom you ask.
Is it Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year? Is it Hokkien or Fukien? Are we Filipino-Chinese or Chinese-Filipino? Is it Kung Hei Fat Choy, Gong Xi Fa Cai, or Xin Nian Hao Kuai Le?
Perhaps all of these are correct. Geopolitical journalist Tim Marshall writes in the 2016 geographic treatise Prisoners of Geography that China isn’t so much a country as it is a civilization, asserting that like Western Europe, the diversity of unique, defining characteristics within north to south of China is such that there are many nations within China’s borders.
For one, people within geographical China use the same writing system and its characters, even if spoken Mandarin sounds nothing like spoken Cantonese, which sounds distinct from spoken Fukien.
These differences are analogous to the difference between Italian, French, and German, where the one thing they truly have in common is the Roman alphabet. Even Chinese-Filipino media outlets sometimes miss the mark by a few notches when they say things like “Hokkien, a dialect in the Chinese language.”
Outside of China, Chinese civilization has also left its imprint, from the Chinatowns around the world and especially so in the Philippines.
It could be argued that a good part of what we know as Filipino words, customs, and even food have Chinese roots.
We have at least 10 words (but possibly up to 100, based on other sources) derived from Fukien, the language of the Fujian people, whose descendants migrated to many parts of Southeast Asia and Taiwan before the Civil War, thus the ubiquity of Hokkien in the region. Now this is a dialect.
A cursory glance at Filipino street food, from tusok-tusok favorites to instant rice and noodle dishes and the meats that pair with them, will show us parallels with a Mom n’ Pop (mama he baba) stall in Taipei, hole-in-the-wall in Hong Kong, or a five-star hotpot restaurant in Shanghai.
A cursory glance at Filipino street food, from tusok-tusok favorites to instant rice and noodle dishes, will show us parallels with a Mom n’ Pop (mama he baba) stall in Taipei, hole-in-the-wall in Hong Kong, or a five-star hotpot restaurant in Shanghai.
I remember my first time in Taiwan, where the tour guide excitedly told us, a 100 percent Filipino tour group, about must-try specialties.
It turns out we’ve been having these must-tries all our lives! Beef noodles are basically pares, and in Taipei eateries (where the layout are very like our turo-turo karinderya, the noodles even come with a side of steamed kangkong.
Their chicken and mushrooms noodles are basically chicken sotanghon with tenga ng daga, all with garlic and carrots.
Even one of our national dishes, pancit, is derived from pian-e-sit, which in Fukien roughly translates to “something conveniently cooked.”
Even in historical moments, Chinese presence remains palpable, from General Jose Paua helping in both the Revolution against Spain and the Philippine-American War to the Wa Chi guerillas tying down Japanese troops in the areas around mega Manila during World War II.
My father, his siblings, and their parents speak English, Filipino, Ilokano, Ibanag, and some Bisaya. We identify more as Filipinos: We only see the Chinese holidays as vacation days, not as traditions we must strictly observe.
The only real clue that we have any East Asian blood is the way we get mistaken as locals when in Hong Kong or Taipei where we have to say, in slow English, sorry, I don’t speak Chinese, or the way that Japanese tourists bumping into us around World War II monuments here in the Philippines would sometimes bow to lolo, probably mistaking him as an Imperial Army veteran.
What we know as mestizos are more likely Chinese-Filipino mestizos than Spanish-Indio mestizos. What our last names would have us believe notwithstanding, Spanish nationals rarely married Filipino natives, at least compared to Chinese immigrants tying the knot with our Malay ancestors.
You’ve probably read about Rizal, the Aquinos, and even Marcos being of Chinese descent, but Wikipedia recently added Ellen Adarna to their list of Filipinos of Chinese ancestry.
Things take a more poignant turn, however, when you ask the Chinese-Filipinos themselves and see some stark differences across generations.
While Chinese-Filipino Millennials and some older academics embrace the term Chinese-Filipino, subtly highlighting that they have assimilated to the Philippines, their parents and especially grandparents might have a different idea.
This gets more complicated when you consider the Chinese Civil War, which ended in 1949, and the split between China and Taiwan, which triggered another wave of migration to our islands. Is someone now Chinese-Filipino, Taiwanese-Filipino, or just Chinese, just Taiwanese, or simply Filipino?
We like to joke about the “Great Wall of China,” when Filipinos try to date the children of Chinese families and end up getting rejected for not being Chinese (or not Chinese enough, as a morena-but-clearly Chinita date confessed to me to when I asked about the last guy she saw), but this apparent racism is probably tied to the elders feeling like a stranger in a strange land.
While Chinese immigrants throughout history contributed to the birth of our industries and enterprises from Luzon to Puerto Princesa, from Cebu to Cagayan De Oro, they also faced persecution from both the Spanish and Philippine governments and people in the form of legislation and outright atrocities, which probably influences why the older generation remains wary of non-Chinese Filipinos.
Presently, with a new wave of immigrants from China mainly through the form of offshore gambling enterprises, which are illegal there but which are here to sate the appetite of mainland gamblers looking to get their fix, we see this continuing trend of Chinese people heading to our islands in hopes of striking gold.
Today’s relationship between the Chinese and Philippine governments is ambiguous as, despite the friendly and as what some criticize as excessive concessions on the part of the Philippine government toward China, the country continues to purchase its biggest armed assets from China’s traditional military rivals in Asia, such as South Korea and India.
Finally, Filipino public perception of China has increasingly been mistrustful owing to the ongoing disputes between the Chinese coast guard and Filipino fishermen in the South China Sea. It goes without saying that this has further complicated the already complex heritage of the Chinese in the Philippines.
Nonetheless, it’s interesting to note that while Filipinos today often aspire to migrate to places in the Western world (and this includes “Western” countries like Australia and New Zealand) in hopes of a “better life and opportunities,” other people have migrated and continue to migrate to the Philippines with the same aspirations.