Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the

Nineteenth Century

UST PUbliShing hoUSeManila, Philippines

2010

Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the

Nineteenth Century

Richard T. Chu

UniverSiTy of SanTo ToMaS PUbliShing hoUSe

Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the

Nineteenth Century

UST PUbliShing hoUSeManila, Philippines

2010

Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the

Nineteenth Century

Richard T. Chu

INTRODUCTION

In these essays, Richard Chu responds to recent developments in the literatures of transnationalism and global Chinese ethnicities, applying them to Tsinoy (Chinese Filipino) history in new and fruitful ways. In the first essay, he draws upon the work of Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini on the “flexible citizenship” of transnational migrants, arguing that part of the transnational lives of so many Chinese in the Philippines—past and present—were their ability to escape or transcend the defining labels and limitations put upon them by colonial governments and national societies. The case in point is the major Chinese figure of late nineteenth century Manila, Don Carlos Palanca Tan Quien-sien. We are shown how Palanca/Tan could not only evade the limitations of a single obligatory label—“Chinese”—but could also present himself in a variety of personae that would enable him to pursue his goals and interests with a maximum of options and a minimum of restraints. Chu is at pains to show us, as he has done in some

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of his other work, that the way to understand the Chinese in Philippine history is to avoid being misled by colonial classifications, and focus instead upon the ways in which the Chinese both conformed to and evaded colonial labels. Thus, Palanca/Tan could manipulate his own sense of identity to maximize his opportunities and minimize any limitations.

With these findings, Chu seems to be in the same camp as Andrew Wilson who, in his recent book about Chinese leaders in Manila, has also used Palanca/Tan as an extended example of the Chinese elite of Manila in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. But while Chu is concerned mostly to show multiple identity possibilities and warns against accepting colonial labels, Wilson makes an entire book out of the “virtuosity” of Palanca/Tan and his contemporaries in the Chinese elite. For Wilson, the elite of that era not only used their flexible identities as instruments of their own ambition; they also used their cultural and political virtuosity to completely control and enculturate the local Chinese population with stereotypical versions of “Chineseness” that served elite purposes. A similar approach, again,

xiRichard T. Chu

well beyond what Chu is trying to do, is found in a recent work by Flemming Christiansen. Here, the context of time and place differs. Christiansen is writing about immigrant Chinese businessmen in contemporary (1990s) Europe but, like Wilson, the leaders are seen as having no commitment to an abstract or even a personal version of Chinese culture. For them, everything is instrumental. They use Chinese culture to maintain community, impress China with their “patriotism,” and negotiate their way with local governments in Europe. It seems to me that it is very easy to fall into the trap of seeing the behavior of Chinese overseas leaders as purely instrumental, with no personal cultural belief and subject to no uncontrolled cultural influences from their local environment.

Instead of this, when we read Chu, it becomes apparent that there must be real cultural concerns for Palanca/Tan, as well as Ignacio and the other Boncans of the second essay. Both are seen as living—necessarily—transnational lives, with relatives and business interests in both China and the Philippines. In doing so, they acquire business

xii Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

and cultural experiences that complicate their lives. In both families, intermarriages occur, producing mestizo families and, as Chu says, the possibility of several cultural traditions operating within a single family. Will families like these, at some point, come to rest on a more Philippine set of interests and commitments or on a more Chinese one? Perhaps so. But in the meantime, some kind of balancing seems to be called for.

A kind of balancing of the two ends of their transnational plank (and everything between the ends) is evident in the genealogy of the Boncans. This is a family of wealth, but without—at least in what is presented here—the conspicuous formal leadership role found in Palanca/Tan. Here, it becomes apparent that over time the Boncans have become more Philippine-oriented than China-oriented. Chu, in this essay, uses “Filipino” and “Chinese” as terms of cultural orientation. But seen more broadly, what seems to be happening is “localization”: the Boncans’ involvements and aspirations come to be more in and about the Philippines than in and about China. Filipino, Spaniard, Chinese, Indio, and

xiiiRichard T. Chu

Mestizo are categories into which they seek to insert themselves in order to gain their ends. Localization is happening, as some Chinese scholars—Zeng Shaocong, for example—seem to see as an inevitable process in diasporic Chinese life.

Can we compare what we know of the Palanca/Tan family and the Boncan family? Is it possible to say that while the Boncans were becoming more Philippine-oriented, the Palanca/Tans were becoming more China-oriented? Such a comparison is more difficult than it may seem. Many transnational Chinese families in the Philippines of an earlier time maintained a dual family system; one family in Fujian, the other in the Philippines. It is commonly said in China that the family in China was seen by the emigrant, at least when he first went to the Philippines, to be more important than any family he might establish in the Philippines. But if there were a long period of absence from China and little direct contact, the Philippine family might become the more important, especially if the migrant had become so successful in the Philippines that he could not really leave his business and other interests

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in the country. It seems to me that to completely understand what was happening to the Palanca/Tan family and the Boncan family, we would have to know about both ends of the migration connection in the transnational life sphere that the migrant and his families inhabited. Would success at one end imply failure on the other? Does the visibility of the Boncans in the Philippine context imply that they became largely invisible in the Chinese context? Or is it simply that we know more, for the present at least, about the Philippine end? In the Palanca/Tan case, I remember meeting a descendant of Don Carlos in Manila some forty years ago, who was known to me by the surname Chen, the Mandarin version of Tan. I have no further information about the family. Did it become de-localized from the Philippines but flourished in China?

In these two essays, then, Chu deals with colonial classification and the varieties of self-identities in the first essay and, in the second, with the question of localization and—by implication, though not explicitly—with questions of “Filipinoness” and “Chineseness.” I would like to pursue the subject

xvRichard T. Chu

of “Chineseness” here, both how it is being studied by others and how Chu is going about it. We have already seen the radical attempts of Wilson and Christiansen to present the essence of being Chinese as merely a set of convenient ethnic stereotypes to be manipulated for their own interests by leaders and would-be leaders in Chinese overseas contexts. Other writers take “Chineseness” seriously. Some of them, adopting the term huaren (ethnic Chinese), introduced by China to indicate global Chinese who are not citizens of China, perceive a global “cyber-community” of ethnic Chinese. Others attempt to assess the essence of nationally-defined Chinese “communities” around the world. They ask such questions as “How are Chinese Canadians different from Chinese Americans?” Since the 1940s, nations with important Chinese populations have tried to nationalize the terms used for them (thus, Chinese Americans, or Chinese Filipinos), implying that in a cohort of global Chinese, Chinese Americans, for example, will have certain cultural characteristics that differ from both non-Chinese Americans and also from those of Chinese Filipinos. Much of the

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current academic literature refers to contemporary or recent Chinese populations and, as indicated, much of it wishes to characterize whole populations—local, regional, national, or global—in some way. Thus, one can find at the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore an exhibition entitled “Chinese More or Less,” suggesting that quantification or classification of “Chineseness” on national or other terms, is somehow possible.

Although the study of the Chinese who live outside of China has focused mostly on individual “communities,” there has also been a growing attention to the ethnicities of “Chinese” families and individuals. Some years ago, Wang Gungwu suggested several kinds of personal identities among the Chinese overseas, depending on situations and contexts. Most recently, I have discussed sources of information about “Chineseness” that new immigrants to a global city may make use of in adapting to their new situation, while providing for maintenance of certain values of their own. A recent study of South Asian Indian and Korean migrants to Dallas by Pawan Dhingra carefully

xviiRichard T. Chu

shows how these migrants and their local-born children balance “Indianness” or “Koreanness” with “Americanness” in order to manage the various domains of their multicultural lives (work, leisure, politics, etc.).

Richard Chu’s work fits roughly into this category of individual and familial ethnicities. His intention is to demonstrate how—in the domains of family, religion, and business—the Philippine Chinese of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century used the full range of institutions and attitudes available in managing their transnational lives. What is most striking to me among Chu’s findings is the willingness of the nineteenth century Chinese in Manila to leave their businesses in charge of non-Chinese while they were away (presumably in China tending to the other half of their lives). Chu has discovered this, among others, through the use of church and legal archives in which marriages, wills, and business arrangements are managed by the colonial religious and legal institutions rather than by methods commonly associated with Chinese culture. Clearly, the Chinese families whose records

xviii Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

he has studied were deeply involved in non-Chinese institutions and social contexts.

On this point, there could hardly be a greater contrast in Chu’s findings to what we see in Wilson’s work. Wilson presents Chinese elites as absolute bosses of an “ethnic enclave.” In his version, ordinary ethnic Chinese are totally controlled (from migration in Fujian to burial in Manila or Fujian) by these bosses, who make use of stereotypical versions of “Chineseness,” which they manipulate for their own interests. There is no sense that any of the Chinese—whether the leaders or all the others that the leaders supposedly control—have any genuine Filipino part of their lives. Chu’s contribution is to show us, first, that the categorization of the ethnic Chinese as only Chinese is a misleading artifact of colonialist record-keeping, and second, that the individual Chinese and their families were often deeply involved in non-Chinese aspects of life. And, while Wilson is interested only in migrant leaders, Chu, especially in his earlier work, is also interested in the second generation (as most current students of the global Chinese are). On this subject he is able to challenge

xixRichard T. Chu

assumptions I made in my early work that mestizos were a cohesive and totally localized group that had little to do with Chinese migrants. Chu has even suggested that the first generation of mestizos may have been very different from subsequent generations in its possession of cultural skills that enabled its members to continue running the businesses established by their parents and also remain very much in touch with the migrant Chinese.

The character of such families and the attitudes, objectives and usages of their founders and subsequent heads could vary greatly. In the two cases at hand—Palanca/Tan and Boncan—we are talking not about essential or abstract culture, but rather about how one wishes to be seen culturally. The two families differ greatly in this. Don Carlos had a stock of identity performances. He wished to be seen as one or another of his identities according to the needs of the situation. Seemingly, he had no desire to settle on any visible identity other than those required by emerging situations. The Boncans, by contrast, had a sense of direction. While Don Carlos used the categories accepted by others in order to

xx Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century

remain flexible, the Boncans tried to be seen as either Spanish or Filipino within the legal categories established. Palanca/Tan was a transcendent of legal categories; the Boncans attempted to fit into established legal categories. But they were both alike in their concern about how others saw them.

These various new findings I have pointed out set Chu’s research apart from that of others who work on the Philippines. These constitute pioneering work, not only with respect to his findings, but even more so with respect to his method. It is the latter that I wish to discuss in the remainder of this introduction. It is a method that traces family histories by archival means and, where possible, by oral history. Can that method be extended in some way to topics broader than the one at hand? In the middle of the Boncan essay, Chu speculates that his method might be used to determine the proportion of families with Chinese background in the present Philippine population. I would go further.

xxiRichard T. Chu

I have in mind two suggestions. First, why could we not use Chu’s method to prepare a multicultural history of the Philippines—one that includes not only the Chinese but all the peoples who have lived in the country? Could we thus have a history whose themes are those of social and cultural interaction? Such a project would change the study of Tsinoy history—as well as Muslim and Cordillera history—from specialized topics of interest only to a few persons of such background, to a general topic that included the Chinese and other “minorities” as integral to Philippine history and thereby a topic of interest to mainstream historians and others.

Second, the study of the Chinese, as Chu is doing, leads us to the externalities of what we usually think about Philippine history. The Chinese in the Philippines were and are transnationals placed in a national political frame of reference. But many Filipinos—both now and in the past—have also led transnational lives, whether inside or outside of the Philippines. Could we prepare transnational histories of the Philippines by using Chu’s method of combining archival and oral history methods?

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Either of these two projects would be extremely labor intensive. Clearly, on a large scale, Chu’s method demands group efforts. If one were to attempt either of the projects suggested, the quickest way to do so would be to organize interested individuals to write their own family histories. These are best done through organizing groups, in which no more than ten people at a time are involved in writing their own family stories, based on interviewing elders and consulting archives, genealogies, and other records. Once these stories are published, the families are identified and more in–depth archival work may begin. All of these needs organization. Some of these projects are now underway in several countries. In the case of migrant Chinese, the projects I know of are in North America and Australia. In Canada, small groups produce small books of eight or ten family stories, each story dealing with only one aspect of a family’s history.

How far should one extend these “family” stories cum histories? In the case of the Chinese, should one include parts of a family that remained in China? Where dual families existed certainly seems to be

xxiiiRichard T. Chu

part of the story. The work of Madeline Hsu and Li Minghuan has dealt with both ends of the traditional migration concourse (south China and overseas). And in China, Wang Lianmao, of the Quanzhou Maritime Museum, has shown how Chinese family genealogy books yield evidence of one family’s strategic planning for migration. For me, the most memorable of the cases he has discussed is the one he presented in Vancouver some years back, in which a family in the Quanzhou area of Fujian in the eighteenth century decided to send one son to Taiwan, another to Jakarta (Batavia) and a third to Manila. This, we were assured, was a common practice on the part of the Chinese living around Quanzhou. From this perspective, the story of the Chinese in the Philippines, begins not in the Philippines but with family strategies in Fujian and should include what subsequently happens to the family in China as well as in the Philippines and elsewhere.

If story-telling and historical research on that scale were attempted, it would still require more organization and coordination. Who would organize all these? In the Philippines, it might be the Kaisa

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para sa Kaunlaran, Inc., an organization of Filipinos of Chinese descent who are dedicated in tracing their past and recognizing their ancestry. It likely would be too much to include—at least on the outset—all dimensions of the transnational (transregional) family histories that would be studied. It is probably best to start small as how we are doing in Canada. We are limiting our family histories to the province of British Columbia, and beginning with Vancouver.

What would such an historical enterprise accomplish? For one thing, it would encourage us to think of Philippine history writing in new ways. Chu is working within a tradition of global Chinese studies. But he is basically a historian of the Chinese in the Philippines. In these two essays and in his other work, he has introduced us to new ways of thinking about and accomplishing the study of that subject. Could these methods prompt us to think whether we could study Philippine history as a whole, as a history of families, with a theme of social interaction of all the peoples who have lived in the Philippines? In this way, the history of Tsinoys would not be of interest only to those of Tsinoy background, like

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Chu, but to all who are committed to the history of the Philippines. The study of the Chinese would no longer be a specialized topic, but an integral part of general Philippine historiography.

If it is seen that way and if we accept that the Tsinoy story necessarily has Chinese links and is both a national and transnational topic, then we might find ourselves also doing histories of the transnational and transregional dimensions of Philippine history, something that has not been popular in Philippine historiography up to now. In the contemporary context, Philippine history, given the large number of Filipinos around the world, has now some obviously transnational dimensions. But much earlier there were substantial numbers of Filipinos scattered globally, especially as sailors. We are already aware that in the case of Chinese people, global scattering is not really new. Indeed, contemporary scholars of the history of China are increasingly including the history of Chinese people wherever they are or have been in discussions of “Chinese history.” Could it not be the same for Filipinos and the writing of Philippine history?

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What I have suggested are possibilities—ideas stimulated by the new perspectives and methods we find in these essays and in Chu’s other works. One more thing, Chu asks: if the Chinese lived so closely among the non-Chinese, how did they get separated and how can they be reunited? His answer to the first part of that question is to cite American policies of the early twentieth century and Filipino and Chinese nationalisms. One could add the policies of China. But to educate us all to the point of reconciliation, we need to know the details. By that I mean the workings-out of the separation through the histories of the Chinese and the non-Chinese schools in the Philippines over the course of the twentieth century. This is how we will fully understand how Filipinos came to think of the Chinese as alien and the Chinese to think of Filipinos as alien to them. This is where we will find much of the basic story of how the Chinese in the Philippines learned how to be “Chinese” and how Filipinos in the Philippines learned to be “Filipino.”

Edgar Wickberg