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Friday, January 31, 2003
Filipino-Chinese or Chinese-Filipino?
By Cherry T. Lim
of Sun.Star Cebu
ARE people of Chinese descent living in the Philippines Filipino-Chinese or Chinese-Filipino?
“The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage” calls those of foreign heritage who are citizens or residents of the United States Italian-Americans, Japanese-Americans or African-Americans, for example. This indicates that ethnicity is referred to first, followed by one’s citizenship, in the terms used to refer to such people.
Following this rule, the ethnic Chinese who are citizens of the Philippines should more accurately be called Chinese-Filipino.
Why then are prominent institutions like the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Volunteers Fire Brigade Inc. so named?
Because conformity rather than originality or correctness was the determining factor in the naming of the groups, which are not exclusive clubs to begin with, which is further reason the etymology of their names is unimportant, their leaders said.
“Almost all organizations in the Chinese community are named like that,” that is, with “Filipino” heading the two-word term, said Chiu Lim Go, executive vice president of the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Volunteers Fire Brigade.
Filomeno Lim, president of the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, has an explanation for this.
There are at least 150 organizations in the country with the term “Filipino-Chinese” in their names because these are all affiliates of the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry.
In Cebu alone, there are three such affiliates: the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Lapu-Lapu Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Mandaue Filipino-Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
Lim said the Cebu Filipino-Chinese Chamber was open to anybody who wanted to join, regardless of his ethnicity. Its membership currently comprises both Filipino and Chinese citizens, although most members are Filipino citizens of Chinese descent.
Go said the situation was pretty much the same in the fire brigade.
But if you really want to argue about terminology, Lim said Americans of Chinese descent living in the United States do not call themselves Chinese-Americans, but “ABCs or American-born Chinese.”
And who can accurately determine one’s descent anyway? Is there such a thing as a pure Chinese or pure Filipino?
“Was (Jose) Rizal a pure Filipino?” Lim asked. “He was 25 percent Chinese.”
He said the only real pure Filipinos are “the Igorots, those found in the mountains of Baguio, and those inhabitants before (explorer Ferdinand) Magellan landed in the Philippines” in 1521.
Now that their leaders have been enlightened, however, on the proper usage of the terms on ethnicity, will the Cebu organizations now consider changing their names?
Out of the question, Lim and Go said. These are the names registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and making any change would be a tedious process.
(January 31, 2003 issue)
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