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By Go Bon Juan
Editor’s note: The Sixth Dr. Jose R.
Rizal Awards for Excellence awarding ceremony will he held at 7
p.m., June 14, at the Kaisa-Angelo King Heritage Center on Anda and
Cabildo streets, Intramuros, Manila.
Lugaw na kamote or sweet-potato congee has been
a favorite dish among the older-generation Chinese here and
elsewhere, especially in China’s Fujian province. This dish used
to be a constant offering on the menu of Chinese restaurants. I
myself would go to these restaurants to have lugaw na kamote for
dinner.
Besides lugaw, there are many ways to cook
kamote: Kamote soup, boiled kamote, dried kamote chips and inihaw na
kamote. There’s also kamote-cue and sugared or caramelized kamote.
I still remember the time I joined the
Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s
first official visit to China in January 1994. In Beijing, Yao Eng
Hui, then honorary president of the Federation, saw a stall selling
inihaw na kamote at one yuan a piece. He asked the driver of the
tourist bus to pull over so he could buy the treat for all the
delegates on the bus. Yao, who was wearing an Americana (coat and
tie), munched on inihaw na kamote with gusto. He also started
reminiscing about the kamote he used to eat in his childhood days in
Fujian.
I guess only a few Filipinos know that kamote
was introduced from the Philippines to China during the reign of
Ming Emperor Wan Li. What is even more significant is that the new
crop saved millions of lives during the famines in China. Because
kamote is easy to grow even in mountainous areas—it needs only a
little soil and water—the lowly kamote saved the Chinese from
starvation during severe droughts. Several percent of land area in
Fujian is mountainous. The soil is barren and unfertile. This is the
main reason the Fujianese people had to migrate overseas.
He Qiao Yuan of the Ming dynasty not only wrote
about the history of kamote in his famous book on Fujian, Min Shu or
Book on Fujian, but also wrote a poem entitled “Fan Shu Song” or
“Ode to the Kamote.”
Not only that, according to professor Yuan Long
Ping, China’s Father of Hybrid Rice, the very reason he agreed to
introduce the technology of hybrid rice to the Philippines—the
first and only country that did so—is to repay this nation for
having introduced kamote to China hundreds of years ago. He is just
paying back that utang na loob (debt of gratitude) China owed the
Philippines.
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