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A Lauriat of Chinese-Filipino Dishes

Caroline HAU
Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies
Kyoto University, Japan

The publication of My Angkong’s Noodles is a milestone in Chinese-

Filipino culinary history.
Written by Clinton Huang Palanca (one of the most gifted Filipino
writers of his generation and a talented cook himself), photographed by
Neal Oshima, styled by Ginny Roces de Guzman, and published by
Elizabeth Yu Gokongwei, this beautiful, lavishly illustrated book contains
more than a hundred recipes for rice, noodle, seafood, pork, beef, chicken,
and vegetable dishes, plus desserts, for everyday eating as well as festive
occasions. Thoughtful essays by Mara Coson, the late Doreen Fernandez,
Rafael Ongpin, and Jeffrey Yap leaven this cookbook, and sixteen recipe
authors and five establishments (including Ling Nam, Mann Hann, and
Hai Kang) contributed to the creative team endeavor.
“Angkong” in the title means “grandfather” in Hokkien or
Minnanhua (literally, “the speech south of the Min River”), the lingua
franca of the Chinese community in the Philippines and a topolect (nay,
language) that is spoken by more than forty-six million people in China
(mainly southern Fujian), Singapore, Malaysia (especially Melaka and
Penang), Taiwan, and parts of Indonesia (including Medan in North
Sumatra) and Thailand.

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Although the kitchen is often assumed to be the domain of women,

Palanca invokes his own father’s love of cooking to show that the lived
experience and history of the Chinese in the Philippines complicate this
“tradition” and its stereotype of the “dutiful daughter-in-law.”
For most of the nearly four centuries during which the Philippines
was a colony of Spain, Chinese migrants were overwhelmingly male. They
were either bachelors or married men who left their wives and children
behind in Fujian. Some of these migrants founded their own families in
the Philippines through marriage or informal unions involving Filipino
women. It was not unusual for Chinese men—the more prosperous ones,
at least—to have families in China as well as the Philippines.
These Chinese-Filipino unions in turn produced the so-called
“mestizos,” who were granted their own legal classification between 1760
and the 1880s, and from whose ranks descended some of the country’s
most illustrious (and some notorious) sons and daughters: Tomas Pinpin,
Lorenzo Ruiz, Jose Rizal, Emilio Aguinaldo, Sergio Osmeña, Ferdinand
Marcos, Jaime Cardinal Sin, and Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, to name a
few. Only in the early twentieth century did sufficient numbers of Chinese
women migrate to the Philippines, a trend that accelerated in the 1930s
because of the chaos and devastation of the Sino-Japanese War but tapered
off once China went Communist and Hong Kong replaced Amoy/Xiamen
as the embarkation point of emigration for far smaller numbers of Chinese.
In recent decades, new migrants (xinqiao) have kept the community
institutions such as Chinese-language newspapers and organizations afloat,
even as second- and third-generation Chinese Filipinos have integrated
into Philippine society in the wake of the landmark relaxation of
naturalization requirements in 1975.
As Doreen Fernandez pointed out, the word pansit that we now
use to refer to the popular Filipino dish of noodles cooked with seafood,
meat, or vegetables originated in the Hokkien word pien sit, meaning
“something that is conveniently cooked: usually fried,” proof enough that
“fast food” cooked and peddled by Chinese men but thoroughly adapted

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to Filipino taste and sensibility was already inventing its own tradition in
colonial Manila and other urban areas.
Included in the cookbook are recipes for such Chinese-Filipino staples
as Han Zhi Be (lugaw with cubes of sweet potato), Kiam Peng (savory rice
with toppings of chicken, pork, Chinese sausage, and roasted peanuts),
Ma Tsang (tetrahedral dragon-boat parcels of glutinous rice flavored with
five-spice powder, packed with bits of pork belly, chestnuts, black
mushrooms, and dried shrimp, and wrapped in bamboo leaf), Ngo Hiong
(kikiam, seasoned pork encased sausage-like in crisp bean curd sheets),
Gulam (short-rib beef stew), Mi Sua Teng (Misua Medley, featuring patola
and fresh oysters), O Ah Jien (oyster cake), Chai Tao Que (radish cake),
Sai Zhi Tao (Lion’s Head meatballs, eaten with Chinese pechay), Diong
Kwei Teng (medicinal black chicken soup, boiled with goji berries/
kam kee, bamboo pith, and red dates), and Lo Han Zhai (vegetarian stir-
fry with wood-ear fungus, fa cai vegetables, bamboo shoots, baby corn,
snowpeas, and Chinese cabbage). For the more adventurous cooks planning
a lauriat (from the Hokkien term, lau-diat, “merry-making”) banquet, there
are recipes for Po Pia (Chinese lumpia), a simpler, more ecologically
friendly version of the Put Tiao Chiu (Buddha Jumps Over the Wall, the
original of which is made of melted sweet potato and taro, prepared over
two days, and served in porcelain wine jars), and Pao Hi Hiu Ko (abalone
with mushrooms).
These dishes have as their base the chicken stock (preferably home-
made) that distinguishes the food culture of the Chinese from that of the
Japanese, who normally use fish stock, and Koreans, who use seaweed.
The coastal origins of Chinese-Filipino cuisine can be seen in the liberal
use of oysters and seafood. While the Southeast Asian (Nanyang) influence
is evident in the Philippine version of shrimp toasts (He Pia), Chinese
cuisine has also been shaped by China’s interaction with the Philippines.
Sweet potato, a major supplement to the Fujianese diet, and chili pepper,
without which Sichuan mala sauce is unimaginable, first entered mainland
China from South America via Manila, a key port in the galleon trade.

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At the same time, Chinese cooking has made a home for itself in
the Philippines, with siopao and siomai, maki (made of pork shoulder,
pork fat, and camote flour), fishballs (Hi Wan), boiled peanuts (Sah To
Tao), pata tim (Hong Ti Ka, braised pork trotter), and humba (Hong Ba,
roasted pork belly) becoming part of the Filipino repertoire. In turn, the
Chinese-Filipino table has incorporated Pinoy favorites such as pochero,
which used to be served by mestizos on Sundays, and the delicious
Philippine mango. A number of dishes are mestizo in themselves: bean
sprout and tofu cake (Tao Hu Que), beef and tripe curry (Kali Guba Guto),
and chicken taro in coconut sauce (Iya Chiu Kwei). Others offer clever
improvisations on old standbys: using Haw flakes, for example, for sweet
and sour pork (Cho Ba).
Palanca rightly states that Cantonese cuisine has long set the
benchmark for the globalization of Chinese food, owing to Cantonese
immigration to America and to the rise of Hong Kong as one of the Four
Dragon economies in East Asia and Guangdong province as a special
economic zone in post-Maoist China in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the Philippines, the Cantonese who form a minority of the Chinese
population had tended to cluster in the restaurant business, a fact that is
borne out in Jose Rizal’s second novel, El filibusterismo (1891), which
includes a chapter in which “fourteen young men from the principal islands
of the archipelago, from the pure indio (if there be pure ones) to the
Peninsular Spaniard” decide to “celebrate” the defeat of their efforts to set
up a Spanish-language school by throwing a party at the Panciteria
Macanista de Buen Gusto. (Macanista is derived from the proper noun
“Macao”; the Chinese in the Philippines still refer to Cantonese speakers
as “Macao-a”—a reference to the port city from which Cantonese originally
sailed in the early centuries of the Spanish era—much as they call people
from India “Bombay-a,” regardless of place of origin).
As shirtless Chinese waiters bring in the dishes for the four-course
meal, the students laughingly dedicate the first course, soupy “ pancit
langlang”—made of “mushrooms, crabs or shrimp, egg noodles, sotanghun,

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pieces of chicken, and I don’t know what else,” the student Makaraig
helpfully explains to the sneaky, noncommittal Don Custodio. (“Langlang”
in Tagalog means ingredient or spice, but “ Langlang ”/” Lanlang ”/
”Lannang” is also what the Hokkien call themselves, literally “our people”;
the late historian William Henry Scott tells us that in the sixteenth century,
Tagalog elders referred to pirates as “langlang”). The other three courses
are: lumpia de chino made of pork, crab cake, and pansit guisado. One
wall of the restaurant is festooned with this versicle, “Glory be to Custodio
for his cleverness and pansit on earth to the youths of good will!” If the
effort to nationalize Spanish, the colonial language, is doomed to failure,
a form of “national” solidarity may yet be engendered among “ilustrados”
of different ethnicities and backgrounds by the simple act of eating comfort
food together. It is Rizal who tells us that while the pansit is supposed to
have a “Chinese or Japanese” provenance, the kind that Filipinos eat is to
be found only in the Philippines.
The relative invisibility of Fujianese cuisine owes something to the
mercantile profile of its emigrants and to the rugged, mountainous terrain
that kept the province isolated. Ironically, this isolation has ensured that
Hokkien and the other Min languages would retain vestiges of Middle
Chinese (and perhaps even Old Chinese), which accounts for why Hokkien
reading of Tang poetry rhymes while Mandarin Chinese does not.
Viewed in terms of the longue durée, however, isolation is relative
to some parts of Fujian but not to others. The Fujianese city of Quanzhou,
where many of the ancestors of modern-day Chinese-Filipinos originate
(Zhangzhou is the other major source of immigration to the Philippines in
the early Spanish period), stands out for its long, cosmopolitan history
and its cultural diversity as a contact zone between east and west and
between near east and far east. Established in the 8th century as a port-city
of Tang China, Quanzhou surpassed Guangdong to become the largest
seaport in China during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan (1271–1368)
Dynasties, serving as the starting point of the fabled maritime Silk Road,
meriting mention by Marco Polo, and acting as a springboard for Kubilai
Khan’s attempted invasion of Java.

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Fujian was noted in the Ming and Qing Dynasties for two important
cultural achievements. The first is Fujian’s singular success in providing
the highest number—2,436—of people who attained the highest degree,
jinshi, in the 276-year history of the imperial examination system that
supplied the bulk of the empire’s civil bureaucracy during the Ming Dynasty
(1368—1644). The two counties of Putian near Fuzhou and Jinjiang in
Quanzhou (Jinjiang happens to be the ancestral home-county of many
Chinese-Filipino families) alone accounted for 493 and 368 jinshi degrees
respectively, and had the largest and third largest number of jinshi degrees
per capita in China. The reason for this scholastic success was that Fujian
merchants could afford to hire tutors for their scions; indeed, there were
Philippine Chinese like Lim Tua Co (of the Destileria Limtuaco), who
attained jinshi status in the nineteenth century, and there was a Fujianese
family that produced seven generations of jinshi over 200 years. The second
achievement is Fujian’s native son, Lin Shu (1852—1924), born in Fuzhou,
who enjoyed a long, distinguished career in the late nineteenth century
(late Qing [1644—1912] period) as China’s foremost translator who
introduced Western literature into China. Although Lin Shu did not know
any foreign language, he worked with bilingual collaborators to translate
more than 170 literary works, many of them novels in English and to a
lesser extent French, into literary Chinese, and in so doing, helped
modernize Chinese thought and culture.
The coastal cities of Xiamen, Zhangzhou, and Quanzhou have
thrived historically on the remittances and investment of their sojourning
sons in Southeast Asia and, now, in the Anglophone Pacific countries that
include the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Neglected by the socialist
government, which did not bother with infrastructure-building in the 1940s
to 1970s, Fujian’s Xiamen/Amoy was one of the first cities to be designated
a special economic zone in 1980, followed by the capital city of Fuzhou in
1984. Close contact with Taiwan across the straits and major investment
by the Hokkien diaspora since the economic reform and opening up of
China in 1978 have made Fujian the ninth richest province in terms of
GDP per capita in 2013.

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For too long now, Chinese Filipinos have had to rely on their own
family recipes, handed down from generation to generation, as well as
popular Taiwanese author and television personality Fu Pei Mei’s
bestselling three-volume cookbooks and special cooking classes in Southeast
Asia, for their comfort food. My Angkong’s Noodles not only offers a
lauriat of classic dishes from one of the oldest Chinatowns in the world,
but also restores to Philippine and Southeast Asian history the Chinese
Filipinos’ place in it.

A ckno wledgments
cknowledgments
This essay was originally posted in the author’s blog on 30 May 2019. https:
//ikangablog.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/a-lauriat-of-chinese-filipino-dishes/. The editors
would like to thank Professor Hau for kindly giving us permission to reprint the essay—with
minor changes in compliance with the journal’s formatting guidelines—in Asian Studies:
Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia.

Volume 56 (1): 2020