Chinese Filipino - Society and Culture

Society and Culture

Society

The Chinese Filipinos are mostly business owners and their life centers mostly in the family business. These mostly small or medium enterprises play a significant role in the Philippine economy. A handful of these entrepreneurs run large companies and are respected as some of the most prominent business tycoons in the Philippines.

Chinese Filipinos attribute their success in business to frugality and hard work, Confucian values and their traditional Chinese customs and traditions. They are very business-minded and entrepreneurship is highly valued and encouraged among the young. Most Chinese Filipinos are urban dwellers. An estimated 50% of the Chinese Filipinos live within Metro Manila, with the rest in the other major cities of the Philippines. In contrast with the Chinese mestizos, few Chinese are plantation owners. This is partly due to the fact that until recently when the Chinese Filipinos became Filipino citizens, the law prohibited the Chinese from owning land.

Culture

As with other Southeast Asian nations, the Chinese community in the Philippines has become a repository of traditional Chinese culture. Whereas in mainland China many cultural traditions and customs were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution or simply regarded as old-fashioned nowadays, these traditions have remained largely untouched in the Philippines.

Many new cultural twists have evolved within the Chinese community in the Philippines, distinguishing it from other overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. These cultural variations are highly evident during festivals such as Chinese New Year and Mid-Autumn Festival. The Chinese Filipinos have developed unique customs pertaining to weddings, birthdays, and funerary rituals.

Wedding traditions of Chinese Filipinos, regardless of religious persuasion, usually involve identification of the dates of supplication/pamamanhikan (kiu-hun), engagement (ting-hun), and wedding (kan-chhiu) through feng shui based on the birthdates of the couple, as well as of their parents and grandparents. Certain customs found among Chinese Filipinos include the following: During supplication (kiu-hun), a solemn tea ceremony within the house of the groom ensues where the couple will be served tea, egg noodles (misua), and given ang-paos (red packets containing money). During the supplication ceremony, pregnant women and recently engaged couples are forbidden from attending the ceremony. Engagement (ting-hun) quickly follows, where the bride enters the ceremonial room walking backward and turned three times before being allowed to see the groom. A welcome drink consisting of red-colored juice is given to the couple, quickly followed by the exchange of gifts for both families and the Wedding tea ceremony, where the bride serves the groom's family, and vice versa. The engagement reception consists of sweet tea soup and misua, both of which symbolizes long-lasting relationship. Before the wedding, the groom is expected to provide the matrimonial bed in the future couple's new home. A baby born under the Chinese sign of the Dragon may be placed in the bed to ensure fertility. He is also tasked to deliver the wedding gown to his bride on the day prior to the wedding to the sister of the bride, as it is considered ill fortune for the groom to see the bride on that day. For the bride, she prepares an initial batch of personal belongings (ke-chheng) to the new home, all wrapped and labeled with the Chinese characters for sang-hi. On the wedding date, the bride wears a red robe emblazoned with the emblem of a dragon prior to wearing the bridal gown, to which a pair of sang-hi (English: marital happiness) coin is sewn. Before leaving her home, the bride then throws a fan bearing the Chinese characters for sang-hi toward her mother to preserve harmony within the bride's family upon her departure. Most of the wedding ceremony then follows Catholic or Protestant traditions. Post-Wedding rituals include the two single brothers or relatives of the bride giving the couple a wa-hoe set, which is a bouquet of flowers with umbrella and sewing kit, for which the bride gives an ang-pao in return. After three days, the couple then visits the bride's family, upon which a pair of sugar cane branch is given, which is a symbol of good luck and vitality among Hokkien people.

Birthday traditions of Chinese Filipino involves large banquet receptions, always featuring noodles and round-shaped desserts. All the relatives of the birthday celebrant are expected to wear red clothing which symbolize respect for the celebrant. Wearing clothes with a darker hue is forbidden and considered bad luck. During the reception, relatives offer ang paos (red packets containing money) to the birthday celebrant, especially if he is still unmarried. For older celebrants, boxes of egg noodles (misua) and eggs on which red paper is placed are given.

Births of babies are not celebrated and they are usually given pet names, which he keeps until he reaches first year of age. The Philippine custom of circumcision is widely practiced within the Chinese Filipino community regardless of religion, albeit at a lesser rate as compared to ethnic Filipinos. First birthdays are celebrated with much pomp and pageantry, and grand receptions are hosted by the child's paternal grandparents.

Funerary traditions of Chinese Filipinos mirror those found in Fujian. A unique tradition of many Chinese Filipino families is the hiring of professional mourners which is alleged to hasten the ascent of a dead relative's soul into Heaven. This belief particularly mirrors the merger of traditional Chinese beliefs with the Catholic religion.

Subculture

Chinese Filipinos, especially in Metro Manila, are also divided into several social types. These types are not universally accepted as a fact, but are nevertheless recognized by most Chinese Filipinos to be existent. These reflect an underlying generational gap within the community.:

• Culturally-pure Chinese—Consists of Chinese Filipinos who speaks fluent Hokkien and heavily-accented Filipino and/or English. Characterized as the "traditional shop-keeper image", they hardly socialize outside the Chinese community and insist on promoting Chinese language and values over others, and acculturation as opposed to assimilation into the general Philippine community. Most of the older generation belong to this category.

• Binondo/Camanava Chinese—Consists of Chinese Filipinos who speaks fluent Hokkien and good Filipino and/or English. Their social contacts are largely Chinese, but also maintain contacts with some Filipinos. Most of them own light or heavy industry manufacturing plants, or are into large-scale entrepreneurial trading and real estate. Most tycoons such as Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, and John Gokongwei would fall into this category, as well as most Chinese Filipinos residing in Binondo district of Manila, Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, and Valenzuela, hence the term.

• Greenhills/Quezon City Chinese—Consists of Chinese Filipinos who prefer to speak English (or Taglish) as their first language, but poor or passable Hokkien and Mandarin. Most belong to the younger generation of Manila-based Chinese. Culturally, they are influenced by Western thought and culture. Many enter the banking, computer science, engineering, finance, and medical professions. Many live in the Greenhills area and in the La Loma, New Manila, Sta. Mesa Heights, and Corinthian Garden districts of Quezon City, hence the term.

• Pinoy Chinese—Consists of Chinese Filipinos who largely reside outside of Metro Manila or Chinese Mestizos. They speak Tagalog, Cebuano, or a Philippine language, but are fluent in English, and mostly poor in Hokkien. They are known locally as the probinsyanong Intsik.

Civic organizations

Aside from their family businesses, Chinese Filipinos are active in civic organizations related to education, health care, public safety, social welfare and public charity. As most Chinese Filipinos are reluctant to participate in politics and government, they have instead turned to civic organizations as their primary means of contributing to the general welfare of the Chinese-Filipino community and to the betterment of Philippine society. Beyond the traditional family and clan associations, Chinese Filipinos tend to be active members of numerous alumni associations holding annual reunions for the benefit of their Chinese-Filipino secondary schools.

Outside of secondary schools catering to Chinese Filipinos, some Chinese Filipino businessmen have established charitable foundations to benefit Philippine society. Notable ones include the Gokongwei Brothers Foundation, Metrobank Foundation, Tan Yan Kee Foundation, Angelo King Foundation, Jollibee Foundation, Alfonso Yuchengco Foundation, Cityland Foundation, etc. Some Chinese-Filipino benefactors have also contributed to the creation of several centers of scholarship in prestigious Philippine Universities, including the John Gokongwei School of Management at Ateneo de Manila, the Yuchengco Center at De La Salle University, and the Ricardo Leong Center of Chinese Studies at Ateneo de Manila. Coincidentally, both Ateneo and La Salle enroll a large number of Chinese-Filipino students. In health care, Chinese Filipinos were instrumental in establishing and building renowned medical centers in the country including the Chinese General Hospital and Medical Center, the Metropolitan Hospital, the Angelo King Medical Center at the De La Salle Health Sciences Institute, Chong-Hua Hospital and the St. Luke's Medical Center, one of Asia's leading health care institutions. In public safety, Teresita Ang See's Kaisa, a Chinese-Filipino civil rights group, organized the Citizens Action Against Crime and the Movement for the Restoration of Peace and Order at the height of a wave of anti-Chinese kidnapping incidents in the early 1990s. In addition to fighting crime, Chinese Filipinos have organized volunteer fire brigades all over the country, reportedly the best in the nation. In the arts and culture, the Bahay Tsinoy and the Yuchengco Museum were established by Chinese Filipinos to showcase the arts, culture and history of Chinese Filipinos and the Philippines.

Ethnic Chinese perception of Filipinos

All indigenous Filipinos were initially referred to as hoan-á (番仔) by ethnic Chinese in the Philippines. It is also used in other Southeast Asian countries by Hokkien speaking ethnic Chinese to refer to peoples of Malay ancestry. The term itself means foreigner and is actually non-derogatory when it first came to use. However, it acquired a negative connotation (like the term tsekwa used by Filipinos to refer to Chinese) over the years, and Southeast Asian locals prefer that ethnic Chinese refrain from using it. Most older Chinese still use the term out of familiarity rather than prejudice, while younger Chinese now use the term hui-li̍p-pin lâng, which directly means, "Philippine/Filipino person".

Chinese Filipinos generally perceive the government and authorities to be unsympathetic to the plight of the ethnic Chinese, especially in terms of frequent kidnapping for ransom. Older generation Chinese Filipinos still remember the rabid anti-Chinese taunts and the anti-Chinese raids and searches done by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) and Bureau of Immigration. However, the emergence of the present Chinese Filipino generation, who are mostly third or fourth generation immigrants, generally view the Philippine people and government positively, and have largely forgotten about the historical oppression of the ethnic Chinese.