Power and the Pandemic: Thoughts on the Future of Chinese-Filipino Writing

Charlson Ong

The year 2020 has impacted our world in an unprecedented way. Social structures and economies have been deeply shaken. We became one in adversity yet many in our antipathies. The unseen culprit was common—a virus that sickened or quarantined billions of people across the planet for months—but apparent enemies multiplied. Acts of solidarity and altruism grated against resurgent tribalism and novel bigotry. Conspiracy theories jostled with science over social media.

The center of much controversy has been China, where the city of Wuhan was the epicenter of the first Covid-19 outbreak by the end of 2019. Chinese authorities were suspected of delaying announcement and underreporting the actual extent of the infection early on, thus failing to help avert or at least moderate a global pandemic.

The Philippines’ misgivings about China’s role in spreading COVID-19 were compounded by the festering resentment over the giant neighbor’s perceived bullying of the Philippines in the West Philippine Sea and the Duterte administration’s acquiescence to such behavior.

President Duterte’s refusal to impose a travel ban on China early enough— doing so only on January 31—was widely seen as having allowed the pathogen into Philippine shores as the country’s first recorded death due to the virus was that of a tourist from China on February 1—the first registered case outside China. By February 5, three Chinese tourists in the Philippines were positive for the virus. To many, this delay was further evidence of the government’s undue deference to China.

Ever since assuming office in 2016, President Duterte had sought to improve ties with China. These ties were strained when the Aquino government won its suit against China at the UN-International Court of Arbitration for occupying Philippine maritime territory. He publicly declared a ‘pivot to China’ after the US and other Western nations openly criticized his administration’s violent anti-illegal drugs policy.

Aside from acquiescing to the Chinese occupation of Philippine territory— disenfranchising Filpino fisherfolks in the process—in exchange for questionable loans, President Duterte had also been taken to task for failing to stem the flow of narcotics from China despite a high profile ‘war against drugs’ that had killed tens of thousands of street-level pushers. Chinese firms have further been accused of illegal quarrying and mining in parts of the Philippines.

But the issue that has perhaps most affected the Philippine middle class is the influx of tens of thousands of mainland Chinese, many given visas only upon arrival, employed by POGOs (Philippine Offshore Gaming Operators) that have mushroomed across Metro Manila in the past few years. According to the Philippine Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR)—a government entity that licenses the operations—some one hundred thousand mainland Chinese are presently employed by some sixty POGOs.

As gambling is banned in China, Chinese entrepreneurs, often with local partners, have set up online gaming facilities in the Philippines that cater exclusively to mainland Chinese clients. Since Mandarin skills are required, employees are recruited from China and housed in Metro Manila enclaves that cater to their every need—including commercial sex.

Housing for POGO employees has inflated condominiums and other residential rates, making them inaccessible to many Filipinos. ‘Chinese-only’ restaurants and bad behavior by some mainland Chinese have also ruffled local feathers. Chinese crime syndicates have become increasingly brazen in preying on POGO employees, increasing crime incidents in the mega city.

While Beijing itself has called for the closure of POGOs—suspecting them of being money laundering sites—it has not blocked online access to these sites. At the same time, local Philippine officials who benefit from the tax revenues have also been reluctant to clamp down. (Although POGOs have also been charged for underpaying taxes.)

By mid-January, POGO employees returning from a holiday in China were feared by many Filipinos to be carriers of the infection. All at once, these foreigners were no longer mere nuisances but existential threats. As the virus burned through Wuhan and other places, narratives disparaging Chinese authorities spread through social media.

On the other hand, Chinese media highlighted the efforts of local doctors and nurses to combat the disease and the sacrifice of Wuhan residents in enduring a harsh 76-day lockdown to ‘buy time’ for the rest of the world.

Social media became an arena for contestation over what many dubbed the ‘China’ virus.

A music video produced in part by the Chinese Embassy in the Philippines and features a veteran Filipino singer, titled “Iisang Dagat” (One Ocean) in Filipino—although its Chinese title Na Bien Di Hai could be better translated as “The Other Side of the Sea” or “Beyond the Sea”—that was released online at the end of April and meant to highlight Filipino-Chinese amity amid the pandemic drew instead a tsunami of protests and putdowns from Filipinos who accused it of soft selling China’s occupation of Philippine maritime territory. The maritime imagery of the video, which reminded Filipinos of the ongoing tussle with China, was rather ill-advised, and the Chinese Ambassador who wrote the song’s lyrics was either oblivious of Philippine public opinion or catering mainly to a mainland China audience.

Many Filipinos on social media picked up on worldwide posts critical of China and dubbed the pathogen the ‘China-Duterte Virus.’ Anti-Chinese racist slurs also began to appear. This pushback from other netizens, including many Chinese- Filipinos (who dub themselves ‘Chinoy’), urged a more ‘objective’ response to events. They chose instead to highlight ‘positive’ undertakings, including the visit of a medical team from China to advise local health personnel as well as efforts of the local Chinese-Filipino community in raising and dispensing aid to hard-hit communities.

Other social media users accused some ‘Chinoy’ netizens of promoting Chinese state propaganda.

As a fiction writer, China has loomed large in my life and art. As a Filipino of Chinese descent, much of my writing has been about the immigrant experience. A fiction writer should proceed from a place he knows intellectually and existentially. But the question of identity is intrinsically bound up with that of ethnicity.

Pandemic fears and anti-China sentiments have bled into racism in some places in perhaps the same way that 911 spawned certain anti-Arab/Muslim behavior in its aftermath.

Asian Americans launched an “I am not a virus” campaign after the racist assault. Similar challenges confront the Chinese-Filipino presently. How does a writer or artist react to such provocation? Does one also engage in social media polemics or bide one’s time? Await perspective for more substantial discourse?

Like most immigrants to the Philippines, my grandparents came from the Minnan-speaking region around Xiamen at the turn of the last century. They were of peasant origin and came during civil strife in China for better prospects. Like many, they joined relatives and town folk and learned a craft or trade. My grandfather eventually became an importer of glassware in Binondo, Manila’s traditional Chinatown. When the US took control of the Philippines in 1899, it restricted Chinese entry to the colony as it feared a large Chinese migration to the US mainland. Thus, many Chinese entered the Philippines as sons of other kin or town mates. Today, many Chinese Filipinos still officially go by surnames different from their original. This pattern of emigration largely ended with the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and China went on lockdown from much of the world.

My parents were born in Manila. My maternal grandmother was Filipino, so my mother grew up multilingual and was raised Catholic. My father was raised in Chinatown and spoke Filipino and English sparingly.

During the first half of the 20th century, Chinese schools in the Philippines were heavily influenced by the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Government in China. So many local-born youngsters were politically aligned with Kuomintang China.

Naturalization was also prohibitive even after Independence in 1945. Having declared Martial Law, Ferdinand Marcos allowed the naturalization of long-standing Chinese residents in 1975. Only then did many Filipinos of Chinese ancestry whose families have been in the country for generations become citizens.

By the time I was in school in the 1960s, there were officially no more ‘Chinese schools,’ only those that continued to ‘offer foreign language subjects.’

At a time of growing nationalism as well as the wariness of communist China, local Chinese majority schools were eyed with suspicion, and their curriculum was placed under scrutiny.

I attended a Jesuit-run school that served largely Chinese Catholic families. We were taught to read and write in Mandarin, but most learning texts were produced locally—no longer imported from Taiwan—and no reference was made to China as the ‘motherland.’ Still, every summer vacation, school officials organized ‘exposure’ tours for parents and students to Taiwan—then still officially a ‘temporary bastion of the Republic of China’—and Hong Kong.

There were ever mixed messages about China and ‘Chinese-ness’ in my adolescence. No longer ‘mother/fatherland,’ it remained the never-never land of ancestral grit and glory. Mao might have dumped Confucius for Marx, but now he had an atom bomb with all those snotty ‘white devils’ fretting in their breeches. They were non-Chinese neighbor but don’t even think of dating his daughter. Chinese Filipino women especially were barred from romancing non-Chinese men by the ethno/social distancing ‘Great Wall.’

At some point, ambivalence proved convenient, and one learned to negotiate identity upon circumstance.

My writing has examined this sense of ambivalence and continuing negotiation.

I based much of my fiction on tales I grew up with. Stories told to me as a child by my grandmother, my parents, relatives, and friends.

I have also patterned certain characters on individuals I’ve known from way back: People who have touched me somehow. It is my way of paying tribute to them and other writers and works that have influenced me.

For instance, my story “How My Cousin Manuel Brought Home a Wife,” which is included in the anthology Best Philippine Short Stories edited by Dr. Isagani Cruz, is a tribute to the classic Philippine story of Manuel Arguilla, “How My Brother Leon Brought Home a Wife,” that I first read in high school.

But while Arguilla’s story concerns an adolescent boy whose elder brother brings home to the province a young wife from the big city of Manila. My story is about a young man whose long-lost cousin brings home a wife from Brazil to Manila’s Chinatown.

When Arguilla wrote his story in the 1930s, most Filipinos still lived in rural areas and bringing home a city-born wife was still a big deal. When I wrote mine in the 1990s, most Filipinos lived in towns and cities, and many worked abroad and had foreign spouses. Time alters the context of stories, but human issues remain constant. How do we live? How do we love?

My story was inspired by an occasion in my boyhood when a family friend invited us to a party to celebrate the return of her brother from years of foreign sojourn. She said he was coming home with his Brazilian wife. I was excited to meet my first Brazilian, who turned out to be this tall, hefty white woman who spoke mostly Portuguese. I thought then it was Spanish. It was a strange, happy occasion.

But I wondered even then how it would have been if the wife had turned out instead to be a hefty African-Brazilian. Would the family have hosted a party as well? How would the guy’s China-born mother have reacted? Traditionally, many Chinese people were biased against darker-skinned people. Fairness was highly valued in traditional Chinese society: a fetish. Brides were supposed to be petite and fair complexioned, even bound feet in earlier times.

Are stories about what-ifs? About conflicts spawned by the unexpected and the absurd. So I had my protagonist bring home an African-Brazilian wife to comedic and life-changing consequences.

Another well-anthologized story of mine is “The Execution.” It concerns the execution of the man, legally known as Lim Seng, who was the only person officially executed under Martial Law and its consequences on a fictional Chinese Filipino family. Lim was arrested soon after the declaration of Martial Law in September 1972 and charged with trafficking narcotics.

I was 12 years old when he was executed by musketry in Fort Bonifacio, and I saw the event on TV. I remember the varied reactions of family and friends and the debates. When school re-opened, a classmate told me how his father awakened him during the dawn of the execution and brought him to see it live. It was open to the public.

It surprised and bothered me that anyone would want to watch someone else—a stranger, for that matter—killed and even bring his son along. Of course, executions, as that of Dr. Jose Rizal, used to be public spectacles. But the fact that my classmate was also Chinese Filipino deepened my wonderment. Why, I asked myself.

I wrote the story many years later to answer my query, in a way. The stories we write are often answers as well to some of the deepest questions that trouble us. In the end, they may help others answer their own too.

Folk tales and legends, including urban legends, can inspire contemporary fiction. Again, decades ago, there were persistent rumors that some dumplings being sold downtown contained other than pork or beef. They were supposedly stuffed with cat meat or other exotic matter. I used this idea for a story called “A Tropical Winter’s Tale,” about a wife from China who finally gets fed up with her oppressive husband and deals with him in a “savory” manner.

Current events, especially those that impact us personally, can also generate fiction. The killing of countless protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 spurred me to write “Trouble in Beijing” in 1994 about the reconciliation between a China- born man and his estranged Philippine-born daughter following the events in Beijing. It was also my way of finally mourning my father, who had died of heart failure in 1987 while I was on my first trip to China. I was relieved he had not lived long enough to witness those events that I knew would have pained him deeply.

Our stories are records of our passing. They cannot help but be of our own time, even if they are set in the past or the future, and our place, even if set in alien territory. We often use places we’ve been to in our writing.

In 1986, after the EDSA uprising, I became jobless. I spent time working in Taipei. One night there was a big earthquake that fell an old building. It occurred before dawn. When I rushed out to the veranda of our dormitory, expecting to see many people in the streets—as in Manila—I saw no one. It was winter, and the road was eerily cold and quiet. It struck me that the city was hurting. A line came to me: “The night we met the city was in pain.”

Something told me that I would make use of the line someday. So I tucked it away. Sometime later, when I returned home, I used it as the opening line of my story “Another Country,” which won a prize in the Asiaweek Short Story competition. It was based on my stay in Taipei. In the story, a young Chinese-Filipino man goes on professional exile in Taipei after the People Power Revolt in the Philippines. He is caught between his loyalty to his father’s sense of history and his sentiments for a Filipino compatriot.

“To remember and to sing!” says National Artist Nick Joaquin in his classic drama ‘Portrait of the Artist as Filipino’ is the writer’s vocation.

Memory is vital. We remember as individuals, as communities, and as nations. To lose one’s memory is to lose one’s self. To remember is to be free.

For me, Philippine literature is an ever-growing banquet, a buffet. Anyone who wants to engage in it should ask themselves: What do I bring to the table?

I finished my first novel in 1998, in time for the celebration of the Philippine centennial. I wanted to write a novel that would locate the Philippine imagined community in Southeast Asia. Our literature, especially in English, has always traced nationhood to Spanish/Catholic colonization. This is inevitable, of course, and valid. We also write under the shadow of Jose Rizal.

But I wanted to write the other story—that of south Chinese emigration to Nanyang that played a vital role in the formation of nation-states. In the Philippines, this led to the formation of the Sanglay/Ilustrado class at the turn of the last century and the present Chinoy/Taipan.

The result was the novel An Embarrassment of Riches. It is set on a fictional Pacific Island called the Victorianas that resembles the Philippines. After the island’s dictator dies, elections are called. The narrator, Jeffrey Kennedy Tantivo, a Chinese Victoriano in self-exile in the Philippines, is summoned home by his friend Jennifer Suarez Sy, daughter and heiress to the island nation’s richest Taipan. They own Megalomalla- a vast cradle-to-grave emporium that employs most of the island’s inhabitants. Jennifer is running for President and wants Jeffrey to help her.

After she wins, Jennifer transfers the Presidential Office to Megalomalla as per the advice of her Feng Shui master. This sparks an uprising that leads to her downfall. Megalomalla becomes a war zone.

Malls began dominating the cityscape when I started writing the book and continue to be the site of some of our fiercest contestations.

The novel is a satire on the dysfunction of the Cory Aquino years when the government was often paralyzed by discord and an exploration of ethnic and political identity.

The main character Jeffrey Tantivo writes:

“….there is perhaps a nagging suspicion among our elders that we mayhave found another country. A country to live and die for…that offers sustenancebut demands commitment and sacrifice: A focus for youthful passions luring usaway from more mundane and safer concerns of clan and commerce. A countrythat again dangles the promise of martyrdom which only ends in betrayals—all thatis, that an exile must at least partially abandon when he abandons home. ‘Neveragain’ he tells himself and admonishes his children- ‘this is not our war, or yours, wefought ours many seasons ago so you may live in peace’ At some point the migrantknows he must choose to live fully as a person without country if only to survivethe vicissitudes of uprootedness. He bends with the wind and profits on cynicism.He says ‘no’ to everything that forced him to leave home and family—war andpatriotism. He dreams that his children will become citizens of the world. It is apipe dream of course, for one cannot love humanity without sympathizing with a neighbor brutalized by systemic oppression; because nationalism is only the concrete expression of our humanity in a particular historic context. This he knows. He knows in his heart of exile that his children are no longer his compatriots. He knows this dream of unbelonging is the last thing he must surrender with grace to time.”

Geography is destiny, and our proximity to China has always been a boon and bane. The novel, written over twenty years ago, somehow pre-figures some of the issues we now face in dealing with a giant neighbor as an emergent global power.

My second novel Banyaga: A Song of War, delves into nearly a century of Philippine history but from the point of view of the Chinese community. It begins at sea and ends at sea. In the 1920s, four Chinese boys meet on a boat from Xiamen to Manila and became sworn brothers. They become patriarchs of clans of diverse fates and fortunes.

The book spans the period before World War II, the war years, post-war reconstruction, the Martial Law period, and ends with the People Power Revolt.

My third novel Blue Angel/White Shadow is crime fiction. It begins with the death of 25-year-old lounge singer Laurice Saldiaga in her room at the Blue Angel Café and Bar in Binondo. Inspector Cyrus Ledesma, a Chinese mestizo cop with a dark past, is assigned to investigate the matter. Ledesma digs up evidence that implicates the bar owner, the Mayor, and the police chief. The book is my tribute to Manila’s Chinatown, which is fast transforming.

I write fiction in English because most of my influences are works in English, which is the language I feel most comfortable using. However, I also write in Filipino for other media. But I also claim another reason for writing in English: I use it as a representative language since my characters often speak in a potpourri of different tongues—Chinese, Philippine, and English.

When I started writing, there were few outlets since we were still under authoritarian rule. Most prominent writers wrote for the theatre, and I, too, wanted to be a playwright. But I realized that if I wanted to be authentic, I would have to use Filipino or Tagalog the way immigrant Chinese spoke it—that is, how my grandmother spoke it. And that was a sensitive matter back then. It was how Chinese people were caricatured in mass media.

When I was a boy, there was a character on TV named Akong, played by a drummer named Bert Delfino, who was decked out in a Qing dynasty costume and queue. Akong was the usually friendly, if miserly, neighborhood storeowner in a sitcom called Kwentong Kustero (cart driver’s tales) that featured an array of comic caricatures, including an oratorical Ilocano lawyer and a gay gossip. Aside from occasionally overpricing his goods, Akong was a relatively benign character. His store was the hub of the community.

He amused me and enjoyed the show, but my grandmother disliked it. I would switch channels when she was around. Later I realized that her dislike stemmed from the fact that the character caricatured her. I, on the other hand, spoke Tagalog fluently as a local born and identified with the majority audience. Until my adolescence, Akong was the only representation of the Philippine Chinese on local TV. There was none in the movies.

Then in 1975, the late National Artist Lino Brocka directed his classic Maynila: Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, written by Clodualdo del Mundo Jr. based on the Edgardo Reyes novel. Much of it is set in Chinatown, which is familiar to me.

It starred the young Hilda Koronel as the ill-fated Ligaya Paraiso, who is recruited from the province to work in Manila but ends up as a kept woman to the lecherous Chinese Ah Tek in Binondo. Ah Tek is played by a real Chinese person. Her hometown beau Julio Madiaga, played by a debuting Bembol Roco, comes to find her and experiences the seedy side of city life. Julio blames Ah Tek for Ligaya’s death and avenges her by murdering Ah Tek inside his abode with an ice pick. The mob then lynches him.

It is a gruesome, horrific murder scene that shocked me as an adolescent— the first time a local Chinese is depicted on the big screen, and he is slaughtered like an animal.

I loved to write even as a schoolboy, but that cinematic experience spurred me in a big way. Between the caricature that was Akong and the evil Ah Tek, there was a whole array of local Chinese characters, a whole bunch of stories that needed telling. Ah Tek must not be the end of it, I decided.

Just as Quiroga, the opportunistic Chinese merchant in Rizal’s El Filibusterismo, is not an unfair representation of the Chinese of the time, only an incomplete one. There was, after all, the real-life immigrant Chinese, Jose Ignacio Pawa, who joined the revolution as a General in Aguinaldo’s army.

Then in 1976, National Artist Eddie Romero came out with the film Ganito Kami Noon Papaano Kayo Ngayon?’ which featured a Chinese character played by the martial artist Tsing Tong Tsai. He is a heroic character who gives his life protecting the main protagonist Kulas, played by the young Christopher De Leon, when the revolution against Spain breaks out. The movie further inspired me to write about fringe characters in our history.

The Chinese have long been the invisible person in Philippine society. Seen yet not seen: inscrutable, unknown. He lives in the city’s heart, conducting much of the commerce that created a nation, yet is consigned to the periphery of the collective imagination—little more than shadow or caricature. It is a condition that has served both the establishment—which often thrives on corruption related to illicit Chinese commercial activity and relies on goods and services provided by the merchant class—and the Chinese who choose the safety of anonymity.

In recent years there have been a growing number of PH writers of Chinese ancestry. Like mine, their memories are not of China but of Chinatown. We do not have conquering heroes or legendary warriors to celebrate, only merchants, artisans, and entrepreneurs. Ours is not a history of conquest or mythic barter but occasional persecution and continual accommodation.

After decades of writing fiction in English, I recently returned to playwriting and wrote a one-act play in Filipino titled “Buwis.” The main character is a Chinese immigrant widow, and in the play, I finally employ the Chinese Tagalog that I feared using when I was younger. But now I think the time is ripe for it. If there are many Englishes, including Filipino English, there are many variants of Filipino, including that of the immigrant Chinese.

Aside from literature, the Chinese Filipino experience has also been the subject of popular cinema through the “Mano Po” franchise which produced eight movies in about a decade. The series’ popularity suggests that the Chinese immigrant experience has become mainstream fare, and much ground has been covered.

But the past three decades since the re-opening of China have seen an increasing presence of mainland Chinese in the Philippines. From itinerant vendors and deal makers, they now consist of big-ticket investors, political influencers, and POGO employees. From large labor in past eras, huge capital is now being transferred from China, creating a new dynamic in PH society.

I think Chinese Filipino writing will now have to deal with this increasingly complex relationship among ‘Chinoys,’ mainland Chinese and Philippine society at large, as well as the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China in which the Philippines is implicated.

With China increasingly perceived as an aggressive state bent on imposing its interests and narrative upon the rest of the world, the Chinese Filipino writer also risks being identified as not representative of a minority discourse but of a dominant power.

For the ‘Chinoy,’ the ‘sea inside’ is bound to turn stormier.