Chinatown

Like Mother’s Day and Halloween, the celebration of the Lunar New Year has caught on in this country, with the event this year declared a non-working public holiday for the first time. My maternal grandparents from China’s Fujian province would have been pleased.

My Lolang Taba (Fat Grandma; I had a Lolang Payat or Thin Grandma) died when I was six, and my grandfather much earlier, so I grew up a very hilaw na Tsinoy, imbibing little of my Chinese heritage.

My few memories of my Lolang Taba were of the chocolate she ground herself and shaped into little oval pieces with a manual press. She kept a fish that looked like an eel (for long life, I was told) in a tank on the second floor of her walk-up in Sta. Cruz.

I do remember the aroma of Chinese food, incense and medicinal herbs in my Hokkien-speaking relatives’ homes. Weekends were days for eating chicken or beef mami, maki mi and cuapao with my family in Ha Yuan on Masangkay street, near a Chinese school in Manila.

Growing up I also enjoyed regular visits to Binondo and Manila’s Chinatown. These days I miss Ha Yuan, but Chinatown is still thriving. Escolta lost its classy cachet a long time ago with the emergence of Makati, but the rest of Binondo remains an important commercial district.

Binondo continues to be a vibrant business hub, but many buildings have seen better days and should be restored. The architecture of these buildings indicates their history and it would be a shame to destroy them or allow them to fall into disrepair.

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Many history books refer to the district. The latest that I’ve come across dates back to 1858 – an account of Manila and Laguna by an Austrian scientist, Karl von Scherzer, when he visited the Philippines on the naval frigate Novara in June of that year.

The English translation of his account has been compiled in a book together with historical illustrations and other materials about the Austrian navy and the Novara. It was the first Austrian ship to circumnavigate the globe from 1857 to 1859 and make a port call in the Philippines, under the auspices of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian.

The book, which includes a brief write-up on Austria’s most famous submarine commander, Georg von Trapp – immortalized in “The Sound of Music” – is titled “An Austrian View of the Philippines.” Published late last year and available on Amazon.com, the book’s author is Wilhelm M. Donko, Austria’s current ambassador in Manila.

Von Scherzer was in Manila and Laguna from June 15 to 25, 1858. Here’s his account of his arrival:

“The members of the Scientific Commission started from Cavite, where the frigate lay at anchor, in the small steamer which plies daily to the capital, which, when beheld from a distance, with its gloomy, lofty, defiant fortifications, and its dense clusters of monastic buildings and church towers, gives the impression rather of some great Catholic Mission than a place of commerce. In the roads there were not above 16 ships lying at anchor, whereas we counted 165 in Singapore, a disproportion which, considering the favorable site of Manila and its wealth in all manner of valuable produce, can only be accounted for by the pressure of political and administrative regulations, which weigh like a mountain upon trade and commerce.”

As you can see, we were weighed against one of our Asian neighbors and found wanting as far back as 150 years ago – for reasons that are being raised to this day by investors.

Behind the lighthouse at the mouth of the Pasig, Von Scherzer wrote, was “a dense mass of the inevitable filthy bamboo huts, which being inhabited by the poorest section of the population, increase the dismal, gloomy impression left by the first view of the city.”

Today the bamboo has changed into plywood, GI sheets and discarded vehicle tires.

Von Scherzer described the city of Manila – at the time referring only to the walled portion and therefore on one side of the Pasig – as an area with “all the peculiar features of a Spanish town with the ancient type.”

“It consists of eight straight, narrow streets, all running in one direction. Within these are most of the public buildings; the Governor-general’s Palace and that of the Archbishop, the Municipality, the Supreme Court, the Cathedral, the Arsenal, the Barracks.

“Profound silence reigns in the grass-grown streets, between the gloomy masses of stone, of which at least one-third are Church property. There is no evidence anywhere of joyous life or social progress, and the variegated, charming flower-garden, lately laid out in the square in front of the Cathedral, stands out like a solitary gay picture, amid austere, somber, historical paintings of vanished might and faded splendour. Within the walls of this melancholy old city only Spaniards and their descendants may dwell, all other races being excluded from this privilege.”

Several pages away, Von Scherzer observed, “The entire Archipelago is nothing but one rich church domain, a safe retreat for the legions of Spanish monks, who are able to lord it here with unrestrained power. There is a Governor-general of the Philippines only so long as it pleases the Augustinian, Dominican, and Franciscan friars… The spiritual reins have ever bridled the secular authority, and such a state of things is the severest impediment to the development of the country and its intellectual growth.”

Writing about the other side of the river, Binondo, the Austrian observed that the district “is the true business city and headquarters of trade… here prevails from morning till night a perpetual whirl of busy, cheerful crowds circulating through the streets, of which that called the Escolta is the most frequented, as it is the handsomest and most attractive.”

Escolta, unfortunately, went to seed a long time ago, and I don’t know if anyone is interested in restoring it to its historical glory.

But Chinatown is still there, a picturesque, energetic enclave in a city characterized by urban decay.