A year a half ago, in 2007, the Asian Museum ran an exhibit of influential Filipino painters, artists who not only defined the aesthetic and pictorial representation of the Filipino but also defined its national public/international image (see post https://kalutang.net/blog/?p=27 ). These were Juan Luna, the erstwhile and controversial colleague of Jose Rizal; Fernando Amorsolo, the “father of the portrayal of bucolic life and brown beauty”; and Zobel de Ayala, purveyor of 20th century culture and art and scion of the Ayala business empire. Considering the logistics of setting up an exhibit of this scale, the Asian Museum did a remarkable job. The problem was in the context of the museum’s holdings and programming, the Filipino presence is not persistent and consistent. There is for example, no permanent Filipino exhibit compared to the Chinese, Japanese and East Indian collections. So two years later, the Asian Museum tried to address this and offered in collaboration with the Office of the San Francisco Mayor and Target Corp., another ‘tasting’ of Filipino culture and heritage, which coincidentally was also a celebration of the Filipino-American Heritage Month, an annual tribute in the State of California’s civic calendar that Filipino-American associations, especially FAHNS, assiduously lobbied for. This year’s event, in fact was propitious, given the economic environment most cities are experiencing, including San Francisco. I gathered this much from Rodel Rodis, erstwhile Filipino American spokesman, political gadfly, and activist who described to me how, in fact this would have not happened, had he and others not intervened to encourage the City to find the money to fund this event. The Filipino American public should be grateful to these personalities and associations for the opportunity to offer a slice, a ‘tasting’, of what constitutes some aspects of the Filipino heritage.
This time, I took along with me a good friend, his daughter and her daughter’s classmate for a short adventure in Filipino land. Events like this are tricky from an educational perspective, since they are by logistical necessity, fragmented and inconsistent. This is not anyone’s fault. What is really needed ia a Filipino-American cultural center, just as the blacks have the Museum of African Diaspora or like the Jewish museum, where permanent collections could be established and where Filipino culture is not merely insinuated within the rubric of Asian or Pacific Islander, and so on, specially when museums need to fill a programming gap. (I digress here. This is a future blog topic.).
On the floor, there were many options and we couldn’t find the story telling group. So we let the girls lead the way. The two girls in my party, (one is half-mestizo Filipino/Chinese, the other half white/Chinese), enjoyed making sipa (an ancient game similar to hacky sack, but unlike its volley-ball like technique, a sipa player’s skill is determined by how long he/she can keep the sipa on air by bouncing the sipa shuttle with inside of his foot (or the outside of her foot) repeatedly, a game that is definitely not for arthritic seniors who are now paying for all those Big Macs ingested in a lifetime. It didn’t matter that the girls couldn’t kick it like natives, the fun was in making the sipa, by far more elaborate that the one I have played with as a child. This contraption had a washer for weight, rice paper to wrap around it and colorful feathers bound by pipe cleaner wire around it to give it balance in the air. I couldn’t find someone at that time to demonstrate the proper way of kicking it, but I suppose that’s what happens to cultural memory as it migrates across the oceans, just as parol-making (lantern) and its parade towards Christimas time along Mission Street, is reinvoked as Walter Benjamin would say, not as history but as theatre. The alibata (ancient calligraphy) experience was less successful, strangely so since the girls have Chinese progeny and would have been exposed to its calligraphy. Maybe it was the presentation. Instead the girls quickly got lost in the Museum shop while awaiting the next show in the auditorium. Like any curious school child, they checked out the books and the expensive displays (gasp!) but realized that with their school allowance, they couldn’t afford a cheap fan at $8 ! So off we went to the auditorium to catch a few songs from Evelie, another one of those erstwhile Filipino -American performers who have been around long enough in the public stage to blend a program of Tagalog songs with Native American and Buddhist music that at times gave an impression of ethnicized New Age music (no offense). The girls couldn’t appreciate the music. I was left to enjoy a couple of nice renditions of jazzy Filipino music from the Little Brown Brothers combo. The girls would be back later for the dance show. Left to myself, I went for a quick gulp of Museum coffee which is where I chanced upon Rodel and his friends. Among other things we had a short banter about History, but I was anxious to catch the showing of the video ” The Gift of Barong” which unfortunately conflicted with dance show upstairs. The film was a surfers self-discovery of Filipino culture and I wasn’t disappointed (another future blog topic). Neither were the girls disappointed with dance show. Like most kids, they love movement and as their father told me, they took on to the costumes and the music at once. By now, the girls were satiated with so much culture but still had room for some culinary experience. Appropriately enough the Cafe offered adobong chicken (leg) and lumpia. This is not your typical mom’s or lola’s adobo (chicken must be chopped in small bite size pieces, not the whole leg) and the lumpia shanghai was not wrapped in rice but in egg roll wrapper (Filipino dorm kids have ritualized this with authentic panache). Thankfully, there was a vinegar dip to rescue its authenticity. The girls’ taste buds were not prejudiced to judge the real from the contrived. Their hunger was gustatory not cultural and soon enough the chicken leg adobo was consumed. Filled with enough heritage, we would have called it a day and head back for Palo Alto except that I thought that the girls should round off their experience with halo-halo at Goldilocks Mt. View, a lone outpost of Filipino gustatory excess in the midst of Chinese and Mexican dives. A concoction of sweet red beans, gulaman (jello) bits, saba (plantain) chunks, rice (pinipig) crispies, beneath a layer of crushed ice soaked in milk and topped with ube (yam) ice cream; the halo-halo is a reflection of Filipino heritage, an eclectic melange of conflicting tastes and confusing progeny that those who are uneducated in it find it perplexing and sometimes annoying. The girls obviously loved it.
