By Estanislao Albano, Jr.
One of the realities in this country which depresses me most is the wide disparity in the economic status of native Filipinos and Chinese Filipinos. The trouble is that there is no way I could avoid contemplating the reality because it is so ubiquitous. It follows me everywhere. While in Davao City more than two years ago, I stayed in a hotel owned by a Chinese. One morning, I passed one of the Filipino workers of the hotel picking used beddings and other used things put by the guests outside the doors of their rooms and I was asking myself how many generations will it take until the worker will have a progeny who could build and run a hotel or do something of similar magnitude. Or will the progeny of that Filipino worker be working for the Chinese forever?
Just last week while delivering newspapers I chanced upon a Chinese lady leaving their compound in her car. Someone closed the door and although I did not see him, I just knew it was a Filipino worker responsible.
From snatches of information gathered here and there, I learned that the economic gap between Filipinos and the Chinese has not always been that wide. Or at least, in the past generation, there were poor Chinese men who pushed carts on streets buying bottles and other discards for junk shops to eke out a living. Way back in college in 1978, an elderly instructor told us that during their childhood, Filipinos used to derisively call out at the Chinese who passed the neighborhood with their carts “Intsik beho” and things like that. That must have been right after the war and probably, those Chinese just arrived from China . As for those who came generations earlier, I read someplace that there was already a rich Chinese merchant bloc during the time of the Spaniards.
The bottomline is we no longer see people with Chinese features working the streets with carts. That occupation now exclusively belongs to the race that used to look down on the Chinese newcomers. In fact, at this point, there are no more poor Chinese Filipinos. I still have to see one who lives under a bridge or begging on the streets. If there is a Chinese Filipino who is poor, I am willing to bet that that’s because his genes or part of it is Chinese but his mentality is Filipino. He is lazy, is shot through with vices, his priorities are all wrong, etc. Conversely, many of the Filipinos who have put their poverty behind through honest labor have adopted the Chinese way of doing things. Hereabouts, we sometimes hear the expression “kasla la Intsik” referring to people who are wise with their money.
What makes the reality rankle is that we have been in these islands longer than the Chinese and here we are way, way beneath them economically. They own the malls, the airlines, the banks, the giant corporations. Last night, I saw on television that Forbes Magazine had named Henry Sy of the SM chain and Lucio Tan of Asia Brewery and Philippine Airlines as the two richest men in the country in that order. There are many rich Filipinos but none of them have achieved the status of the taipans. Which makes the contention that the Chinese are superior to native Filipinos tenable. One time, I went to the comfort room of one of the buildings of the Philippine General Hospital and there was this graffiti taunting Filipinos as bobos when placed alongside the Chinese. I did not resent it because reality could speak for itself. For one, just look at the results of government board exams and you will see many Chinese-sounding names at the top.
But more than the probable racial superiority of the Chinese which many Filipinos would vehemently deny, there is the question of what the Chinese Filipinos have been doing and we native Filipinos have not to explain the abysmal economic gap between the two peoples. Sometime in the mid90s, I went to buy some materials at the Philippine Lumber in Tuguegarao City . It was past 12 when I got there and the establishment as is the wont of the Chinese business community was closed for lunch. While waiting for the store to reopen, I noticed this elderly Filipino woman sitting on the sidewalk infront of the store with her head on her knees. On one side, she had several chicken and before her was a basket filled with assorted vegetables and some fresh water snails. Several of the snails had gotten out of the basket and were moving away into the space for pedestrians. The woman was asleep.
Then and there it occurred to me that that accounts for part of the great economic disparity between the Chinese and native Filipinos. While the Chinese through several generations have been slaving to shake away their poverty and then to accumulate wealth, we have been sleeping literally and figuratively condemning ourselves to selling things on the sidewalk among the parked expensive vehicles of the Chinese.
I do not begrudge the Chinese their wealth. They worked and continue to work hard and long so that they may enjoy a better life. What upsets me is that after all these generations of staring at the contrasting economic conditions of the two races, only a few Filipinos have learned from the Chinese.**
