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By Go Bon Juan
Editor’s note: The Sixth Dr. Jose P. Rizal Awards for
Excellence awarding ceremony will be held at 7 p.m., June 14, 2008,
at the Kaisa-Angelo King Heritage Center on Anda and Cabildo
streets, Intramuros, Manila.
What were typical street scenes in Manila in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries?
Here’s one from Yesterday in the Philippines
written by Joseph Earl Stevens between 1893 and 1895: “Other
familiar street scenes consist of Chinese barbers, who carry around
a chair, a pair of scissors, and a razor wherever they go, and stop
to give you a shave or haircut at any part of the block; or Chinese
ear cleaners, who scoop out of the organs some of the unprintable
epithets hurled by one native at another.”
And here’s another from James A. Le Roy’s
Philippine Life in Town and Country written in 1905: “In the
cities and towns, the industry of making shoes after the
European-style and slippers of the heel-less Filipino sort is of
some importance, but the work in leather is done more by Chinese
than by Filipinos. The harnesses, like the shoes made in the
islands, are of poor Chinese leather … [T]he carpenters and masons
are more commonly Chinese than Filipinos.”
The two accounts were compiled and published in
1968 by Filipiniana Book Guild as books 1 and 2 of The Philippines
circa 1900.
Of course, these street scenes no longer exist
in Manila, even in Chinatown. But what is significant about
Stevens’s and Le Roy’s books is they tell us the occupation the
Chinese were engaged in a hundred years ago.
Stevens provides us with the information that
there were many Chinese barbers serving both Chinese and Filipino
clients.
Le Roy emphasizes that more Chinese than
Filipinos were into leather production, carpentry and masonry.
The 1903 Census shows there were 2,508 Chinese
carpenters in the country at the time, most of them presumably in
Manila.
Stevens’s and Le Roy’s descriptions of
Manila’s streets should be sufficient to shatter the stereotypes
people have of the Chinese in the Philippines. The ethnic Chinese
are not born businessmen. In fact, just a hundred years ago, many of
them were barbers, carpenters and masons. They were laborers, no
different from many Filipinos. Their eventual transformation to
businessmen is rooted in the country’s economic and social
conditions. Let us all remember that.
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