Supernatural Cities project member, Dr Tom Sykes, presents ‘A People in Between: History, Memory, Death and Chinese Filipinos’, a video essay based on a chapter from his 2018 book The Realm of the Punisher: Travels in Duterte’s Philippines. Walking around the Manila Chinese Cemetery on the Day of the Dead in 2011, Tom discovered that the community’s respect for its elders extended well into the afterlife:
‘The cemetery looked less like a cemetery and more like my neighbourhood in Quezon City. The crypts had all the trappings of middle-class homes. Chrome-plated bath tubs sprawled under pagoda roofs, broadband routers twinkled through polished jalousie windows and deftly chiselled hedges bordered a blue-domed townhouse. Between grilles and balustrades I saw TVs, microwaves, espresso machines, refrigerators and air-conditioning units.’
Tom’s perambulations segue into the long and turbulent history of the Chinese-Filipinos, examining their role in the Spanish colonial era, 1896 Revolution and World War II. ‘The community has long occupied an unstable space amid opposites: hero and villain, native and expat, powerful and powerless; and that middle path between being an object of hatred and an object of esteem – might we call it envy?’
‘I took a 360 gaze around the graves. How much pain was inside them? Were there casualties here of the 1603 and 1639 pogroms, bodies shorn of heads because the Spanish had jammed them on to spikes and left them around the city? Were there idealists here punctured by firing squad bullets for dreaming of a free state? Teenage conscripts thrashed to a gory end by the Japanese during the Bataan Death March? Whoever they were and whatever had happened to them, I hoped they’d all found some peace now, at last, among their living kin and their all mod cons.’
Watch the video here.
Tom Sykes 