The Chinese Connection
Doreen Fernandez as published in Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food published in 1988
Socialization to Chinese or Comida China Food *
When I was growing up in Silay, Negros Occidental, eating out meant onlyone thing: Chinese food at Leong;s in Bacolod, which seemed like the only panciteria in the world- at least in our small provincial world. Invariably we had nido soup, or soup of shark fins, which my father called by their full name: aletas de Tiburon. Then of course one had to have morisqueta tostada (fried rice), agrio dulce (sweet-sour pork), lumpia Shanghai, pinsec frito (fried wonton), torta de cangrejo, maybe a pancit, and camaron rebozado dorado con jamon.
Eventually I went to Manila for the last years of high school as interna. When my father came to town he of course took us to eat-a big treat. We would go out in our “Sunday dress”, a most unglamorous and uncomfortable school uniform, long-sleeved, white, pleated, starchy and warm. Our eating-out repertoire expanded to sizzling steaks at the Selecta on Azcarraga Street (now C.M. Recto Avenue), which we he loved- and Panciteria Moderna, where we had more or less what we had in Bacolod.
Staying on for college, graduate school, work and marriage expanded my experience of Chinese food. It seemed that Panciteria Moderna was not the whole Philippine-Chinese world. There were Panciteria Antigua and Wa Nam (all in the same Sta. Cruz area), the latter so amazingly cheap that we once hired it to serve food at a class party. We wandered into Chinatown and found See Kee, which seemed like Atlantis. It had so many other things besides lumpia Shanghai, sweet-sour pork, fried rice (which we had learned to call “fly lice” with a joking, knowledgeable air). Notice the change in the language of the names?
See Kee’s fried pigeon served with salt, steamed crabs with a sawsawan of oil and ginger, kutchay tips with shrimps, and especially the noodles called “fried milk” (“fly milk”-fried bihon topped with a sauce of eggwhite, crabmeat and milk)-these were another world. So were the famous pigeons at Smart off the Escolta. This was Chinese food, not comida China. The latter was served at Leong’s, or at Moderna, and was familiar.
Comida China was for lunch or dinner in a restaurant, and did not include siopao, siomai, or mami, which were for merienda. Of course, as a child, siomai to me was only and always Tia Tilde Valencia’s little pork-filled morsels that the old lady vendor with the basket on her head brought around town. Even when I found out that it was Chinese in origin, the taste of siomai still had the stamp of Tia Tilde, now gone, and all later siomai had to measured up to food of childhood and memory. Kekiam wasn’t Chinese either because we were taught how to cook that in a college cooking course, or we had it at home on ordinary days, my father calling it by an irreverent name referring to its shape and to Chua, a Chinese friend of his. Siopao was what one bought at Ma Mon Luk on rare jaunts out, or at the school canteen when the concessionaire brought in a few. I don’t think we stopped to consider it Chinese. And certainly lumpiang ubud and pancit were not, being staples of home cooking.
My husband, on the other hand, grew up in Paco, and his childhood was filled with sidewalk cooking and vending-bitsu-bitsu, buchi, ampaw, gugurya “na tinitinda ng bakla”. We did not have those in Silay, and one day we drove all around Paco to satisfy my curiosity about these exotica, but alas, they were all gone. We did stop at the neighboring panciteria of his boyhood, called Panciteria Santiago, where they still wrapped up a serving of pancit in a cone of paper.
Travelling to Hong Kong, Taipeh and China in later years, we learned more and more about Chinese food. All those regions and the vast variety of food! Bear’s paws, monkey’s brains (a story to dramatize and exaggerate a bit, at appropriate occasions), Lion’s head (a ball of pork), Beggar Chicken, fish maws, sea slugs, fish brain soup, roasted unborn pig, civet cat, hairy Shanghai crab, sheets of bean skin like silk, eel in oil and garlic, fishes vari-shaped and multi-colored, vegetarian noodle dishes with white and black fungus and vegetables in galaxies.
Some dishes would jog memory, however. On a street in China, at breakfast time, at merienda time, hot kawa (woks) would appear, in which were cooking many things that looked familiar- bitsu-bitsu, buchi, gugurya? Could that be where they had come from? And the Cantonese breakfast lugao with chicken, or fish, or pork. Parang arroz caldo! But arroz caldo has a Spanish name! Could it have Chinese origins? And one day, at breakfast in a restaurant in a restaurant in Hong Kong to which bird fanciers took their pets, hung them up beside one another on poles, and had for themselves pots of tea and lots of dimsum: dumplings (aha, siomaiI); stuffed steamed bread (siopao pala); and noodles in broth (umm, mami).Was there a Chinese connection? Was this the Chinese connection?
The Chinese Connection Unfolding
Once on a tour in Frankfurt the guide offered a cold drink as prize if anyone could say where spaghetti came from. “America!” said an American. “Italy!” said an Italian. “Japan!” proclaimed a French lady. I won because I said “China!” and didn’t confess that I wrote a food column, or that I had learned Chinese friend who was a gourmet, a writer and an amateur chef married to an even better cook. Norman Soong had told me that not only spaghetti had come from China, but also pizza, and took us to a restaurant to prove it. Sure enough, there was a flat piece of dough (almost as thin as lumpia wrapper), on which one put bits of mutton, vegetables and relishes. No cheese, but delicious.
Language and History of Food
Little by little, bits of evidence of the Chinese connection revealed themselves in peregrinations through restaurants and books. Gloria Chan-Yap wrote a thesis on Hokkien food words that had been adapted into Tagalog, and I learned that “by their names ye shall know them” (and their origins). The food and cookery terms adapted into the Pinoy repertoire are a rich source of information. And they are legion.
Sianse is Chinese, and so are tokwa, taho, and tahure and anything coming from soy beans, including toyo. So are many of the pork terms- liempo, kasim- suggesting that the Chinese brought with them the use of many pork cuts and cooking methods. Beef, on the other hand, is called by many Spanish names-lomo, punta y pecho, solomillo, cadera- indicating that those usages and recipes came from Spain. Kenchi and kamto are Chinese. So are not only siopao and siomai, but also all the noodle names-bihon, miki, miswa, pancit, mami, lomi, sotanghon. And herb and flavoring names like wansoy, kinchay and kinchamsay (dried banana blossoms).
But if names are a key, why then the Spanish names for comida China? Morisqueta tostada, camaron rebozado, pescado en salsa agrio-dulce, torta de cangrejo, sopa de nido, pinsec con caldo, aletas de tiburon? Obviously, they came into our restaurants during the Spanish period, when menus were written for the convenience of the diners and not of the chefs. To make the names and the nature of the dishes understable to the diners (surely predominantly Spanish-speaking), the Chinese dishes were given Spanish names- which became institutionalized as the names of the Chinese food served n panciterias from Spanish times onward.
In the American period, when English came to be the language of the menus, these names slowly- very slowly-slipped into English, and then later into Tagalog. Some of them remain half in Spanish still; some have had their spelling so corrupted by non-Spanish-speaking restaurant owners, cooks and typesetters, as to be barely discernible.
Along and around Escolta, restaurants with blackboards on stands outside had and still have the menus written in chalk: COMIDA CHINA, they say on top. But the food names are Spanish, English, Tagalog, mestizo. Nido Soup; Wonton Soup; Sweet- Sour Pork; Sharkfin Soup. Fried Rice. Ampalaya con carne. Camaron Rebozado (usually Rebosado) still, perhaps because “Batter-Fried Shrimps” do not have the same flavor. Nido is convenient-just one word against “Soup of the Nests of Cliff-nesting Swallows.” Even Bird’s Nest Soup seems wordy.
Eventually came menus that said: CHINESE FOOD. Chopsuey with rice, Chicken Chopsuey, Beef with Brocolli, Ampalaya con CarneI (opps, a holdover), Bihon Guisado. And Halo-Halo, meaning a dish of mixed cold meats- pork, ham, intestines, liver. Suman China. Oyster Cake. Or Torta Talaba. Pato Tim, Pata Tim, Baboy Tim! In Biñan, Laguna, at a small restaurant called Po Hong, we found a blackboard-menu in which the only Spanish word was “con”, the rest being in English and Tagalog. Atay con Gulay. Chopsuey con Hipon. In Lubao, Pampanga, we were delighted to find a menu that listed Camaron Rebosado (the “z” dropped long ago) under Philippine Dishes, and Camaron Dorado con Hamon (note the H) among Chinese Dishes.
In these menus is hidden the history of the evolution of Chinese food into Filipino-Chinese (equivalently Filipino) food. In small panciterias in Quezon City, Quiapo, Legazpi City, Baguio, etc., the Spanish is atrociously misspelled, having passed from menu to menu- or printer to printer, or proofreader to proofreader, or cook to cook-without being understood or recognized as Spanish. But it is there, the evidence of the way Chinese food slid into our lives with the mediation of the Spanish language.
What must have happened in this process of indigenization is this: the Chinese traders of the pre-Spanish centuries brought along with them food, cooking techniques, tastes, along with other habits of their culture. Settling here, they adapted these to local ingredients and most probably taught them to their Filipino wives. (Intermarriage and acculturation are features of the successful absorption of Chinese into Philippine society-a success notable in Southeast Asia, where Chinese and native cultures have often clashed violently.) The weather, the fruits of nature, the Filipino taste buds wrought further changes.
Chinese food thus entered homes and habits at ground level, so to speak- as the food of everyday, the food of a fellow villager, not a conqueror. It came accompanied by cooking methods and implements, meats and vegetables, occasions and manners- in effect by a whole food culture. We did not “import” individual dishes, as a housewife might try out a new recipe from a cookbook. We slowly, unconsciously learned to “eat Chinese”.
When time came to serve the Chinese food in restaurants, the names were translated into Spanish, dating their entry into the realm of eating-out food. Now, in the 20th century, we can recognize Chinese food- by the Chinese names and by Spanish name, and also by the English and Tagalog names-individually or in combination. Some dishes, like pesa and that accompanying miso, we do not recognize at all. Few realize that these are Chinese in origin and not naïve, so thoroughly have they been indigenized, so much a part of our everyday food have they become, so “sariling atin” do they seem.
No mother considers camaron rebosado and lumpia frito comida China when she prepared them at home. Native they are now. Pancit is food for fiesta, for pasalubong to wives waiting at home, for children’s and class parties, for daily fare. Goto is on man a streetcorner-sariling atin by now. Siopao might be a schoolchild’s baon; mami his merienda in the school canteen. In a little panciteria in Biñan or Lubao, the food is Filipino, having earned citizenship by its long residence and its having learned to speak the language of the Filipino stomach.
The Chinese connection in our food, started in the interaction of trade centuries ago, is now buried deep in our history, in our hearts, and in our tastes.
Note:
* Headings are mine.
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