Pedigrees

PINOY KASI

Pedigrees
By Michael Tan
Inquirer
Last updated 02:59am (Mla time) 12/01/2006

Published on Page A15 of the December 1, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer

WHEN I hear “pedigree,” I think of a snooty poodle, haughty head held up high, with a certificate from the Philippine Canine Club showing her parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, including several names in red to refer to champions or those that won awards in dog shows.

But pedigree applies as well to humans, with claims to aristocracy, again supported by the pedigree itself, which is the list of ancestors. In Western countries, it does make some sense since only the rich would have extensive ancestral records. I’m going to explain later that among the Chinese, both rich and poor (or maybe the not so poor) are able to keep pedigrees.

Last Wednesday, I wrote about the human need to unravel our origins, dating back millions of years with human evolution, or in the more recent past with family trees. There’s even computer software now available to help with reconstructing the records.

But even without the software, I think people might be able to manage. The Chinese have managed centuries of ancestral records without computers. A few years back, my parents and I visited the province of Fujian and went to our "lao jia" [ancestral village], where my paternal grandfather came from. My father and all his siblings were born in the Philippines and yet the ancestral book had them all. I was told that if I really wanted to dig further back, I could do this across several generations.

Shortly after that visit, my father received a letter from the family association asking him to update the records by sending the names of his children. I imagine that the records will continue to be updated across several generations of Chinese-Filipinos.

Here in the Philippines, family trees are beginning to catch on. In fact, this might be a good time to start a project, with the Christmas clan reunions. Just interviewing all your relatives should get you started with your pedigree (stop thinking now about poodles).

If you’re really serious about all this, you can bring the names of some of your ancestors to the Mormons’ national church headquarters in White Plains, Quezon City, where they have a computerized file of all birth records in the Philippines. From these files, you should be able to piece together a major part of your ancestral jigsaw puzzle.

Complications

Not all of this search for ancestors will be smooth sailing. As you search through the Mormons’ computerized files, be prepared for surprises, such us finding previously unknown spouses and offspring of those illustrious ancestors.

A bigger problem though may be the lack of records, given that many Filipinos are born and die without ever being registered. That’s why the best way to start is still through old-fashioned interviews with your relatives. Work on the older ones—even if they seem forgetful, their long-term memory is usually intact, and that includes remembering who’s related to whom.

I know one elderly woman who had to be hospitalized two years ago and whenever a doctor, nurse or therapist entered her room, she’d look at the nameplate. If the surname sounded familiar to her, she’d begin rattling off the names of people she knew with the same surname and ask if the hapless hospital staff was related. With additional questions about hometowns, parents’ and grandparents’ names, she did succeed in establishing some of the kinship ties of several of the hospital personnel.

Not surprisingly, this grand old grandmother's home in Quezon City has its family tree painted on her living room wall. It’s a large tree, which I’ve always imagined to be narra, with the main trunk representing a man who lived in the 19th century, with four (or was it five?) huge branches, each representing one wife, with the names of all descendants, and their spouses, down to great-grandchildren represented by tiny twigs.

Anthropologists love these family trees, or, if we want to sound more scholarly, genealogies. There’s a whole notational system for doing these genealogies to represent males, females, sibling relationships, parent-offspring relations, marriage, divorce, death.

But I’ve always wondered how accurate these genealogies are. Not all families will be as inclusive as that Quezon City clan I just mentioned, with all the side branches. Other clans would be very selective with their family trees. We remember the lawyers and doctors and bishops and generals, but conveniently forget the "kobrador" [bill collector], the "kargador" [stevedore], the vendors, the "colegiala" (convent-school girl) who ran away with (gasp) the "tsuper" -- oops, I beg your pardon, the family chauffeur.

Then there’s the problem of families that change their surnames. The “I-witness” TV program's Howie Severino had an entertaining documentary last month about names in the Philippines, with some coverage of stigmatized surnames. The documentary mentioned one Ilocano chap with the surname Pekpek (a Tagalog slang word for the vagina) who got it changed to ... Perpek. Only in the Philippines.

IMSCF syndrome

Now the truth why I’m doing another column on origins. I had a subtitle in last Wednesday’s column that read “IMSCF syndrome,” but didn’t quite get to discuss the syndrome for lack of space.

So just what is this syndrome? One of my graduate students, Christine Ajoc, alerted me to this term in a paper she submitted for my biological anthropology class. It means “I am Spanish-Chinese-Filipino syndrome,” and it is common among overseas Filipinos living in North America. Among Filipinos in Hawaii, there’s another variation where they claim Hawaiian ancestry as well.

The term actually appears in a legal website, dictionary.laborlawtalk.com, and is described as “ethnic forgery” because that mixed ancestry is fabricated. The dictionary entry speculates that this falsified pedigree reflects the lack of a national identity among overseas Filipinos and the need to boost their social status by claiming to have Spanish and/or Chinese blood. Somehow, Filipino takes on connotations of being poor, of being inferior.

When you think about it, this is really another variation of genealogical amnesia. By bringing in fake ancestors, we actually exclude the genuine ones. It’s sad, in a way, and instructive, reflecting our colonial mentality and our obsession with class.

I don’t hesitate to tell people my grandparents came from a dirt-poor village in southern China and that both my grandfathers started out in the Philippines with very small buy-and-sell ventures, with my maternal grandfather selling handkerchiefs on a sidewalk on Escolta Street.

My father says there is a Chinese proverb that, loosely translated, goes this way: “A successful person should have no qualms about acknowledging humble origins.” I would think there should be pride in staking that claim, and making a statement for the way hard work can make a difference for generations to come.