Philippines.
This was written in 1999. Matter of Taste by Matthew Sutherland
********
I have now been in this country for over six years, and consider myself
in
most respects well-assimilated. However, there is one key step on the
road
to full assimilation which I have yet to take, and that's to eat BALUT.
The day any of you sees me eating balut, please call immigration and ask
them to issue me a Filipino passport. Because at that point there will
be no
turning back.
BALUT, for those still blissfully ignorant non-Pinoys out there, is a
fertilized duck egg. It is commonly sold with salt in a piece of
newspaper,
much like English fish and chips, by street vendors usually after dark,
presumably so you can't see how gross it is. It's meant to be an
aphrodisiac, although I can't imagine anything more likely to dispel
sexual
desire than crunching on a partially-formed baby duck swimming in
noxious
fluid. The embryo in the egg comes in varying stages of development, but
basically it is not considered macho to eat one without fully
discernable
feathers, beak, and claws. Some say these crunchy bits are the best.
Others
prefer just to drink the so-called 'soup', the vile, pungent liquid that
surrounds the aforementioned feathery fetus...excuse me, I have to go
and
throw up now. I'll be back in a minute.
Food dominates the life of the Filipino. People here just love to eat.
They
eat at least eight times a day. These eight official meals are called,
in
order:
breakfast, snacks, lunch, merienda, pica-pica, pulutan, dinner, and
no-one-saw-me-take-that-cookie-from-the-fridge-so-it-doesn't-count.
The short gaps in between these mealtimes are spent eating Sky Flakes
from
the open packet that sits on every desktop. You're never far from food
in
the Philippines. If you doubt this, next time you're driving home from
work,
try this game. See how long you can drive without seeing food and I
don't
mean a distant restaurant, or a picture of food. I mean a man on the
sidewalk frying fish balls, or a man walking through the traffic selling
nuts or candy. I bet it's less than one minute.
Here are some other things I've noticed about food in the Philippines.
Firstly, a meal is not a meal without rice-even breakfast. In the UK, I
could go a whole year without eating rice. Second, it's impossible to
drink
without eating. A bottle of San Miguel just isn't the same without
gambas or
beef tapa. Third, no one ventures more than two paces from their house
without baon and a container of something cold to drink. You might as
well
ask a Filipino to leave home without his pants on. And lastly, where I
come
from, you eat with a knife and fork. Here, you eat with a spoon and
fork.
You try eating rice swimming in fish sauce with a knife.
One really nice thing about Filipino food culture is that people always
ask
you to SHARE their food. In my office, if you catch anyone attacking
their
baon, they will always go. "Sir! KAIN TAYO!" ("Let's eat!"). This
confused
me, until I realized that they didn't actually expect me to sit down and
start munching on their boneless bangus. In fact, the polite response is
something like, "No thanks, I just ate." But the principle is sound-if
you
have food on your plate, you are expected to share it, however hungry
you
are, with those who may be even hungrier. I think that's great. In fact,
this is frequently even taken one step further. Many Filipinos use "Have
you
eaten yet?" ("KUMAIN KA NA?") as a general greeting, irrespective of
time of
day or location. Some foreigners think Filipino food is fairly dull
compared
to other Asian cuisines. Actually lots of it is very good: spicy dishes
like
Bicol Express (strange, a dish named after a train); anything cooked
with
coconut milk; anything KINILAW; and anything ADOBO. And it's hard to
beat
the sheer wanton, cholesterholic frenzy of a good old-fashioned LECHON
de
leche feast. Dig a pit, light a fire, add 50 pounds of animal fat on a
stick, and cook until crisp. Mmm, mmm... you can actually feel your
arteries
constricting with each successive mouthful.
I also share one key Pinoy trait ---a sweet tooth. I am thus the only
foreigner I know who does not complain about sweet bread, sweet burgers,
sweet spaghetti, sweet banana ketchup, and so on. I am a man who likes
to
put jam on his pizza. Try it! It's the weird food you want to avoid.
In addition to duck fetus in the half-shell, items to avoid in the
Philippines include pig's blood soup (DINUGUAN); bull's testicle soup,
the
strangely-named "SOUP NUMBER FIVE" (I dread to think what numbers one
through four are); and the ubiquitous, stinky shrimp paste, BAGOONG, and
it's equally stinky sister, PATIS.
Filipinos are so addicted to these latter items that they will even risk
arrest or deportation trying to smuggle them into countries like
Australia
and the USA, which wisely ban the importation of items you can smell
from
more than 100 paces.
Then there's the small matter of the blue ice cream. I have never been
able
to get my brain around eating blue food; the ubiquitous UBE leaves me
cold.
And lastly on the subject of weird food, beware: that KALDERETANG
KAMBING
(goat) could well be KALDERETANG ASO (dog)... The Filipino, of course,
has a
well-developed sense of food.
Here's a typical Pinoy food joke: "I'm on a seafood diet. "What's a
seafood
diet?" "When I see food, I eat it!"
Filipinos also eat strange bits of animals---the feet, the head, the
guts,
etc., usually barbecued on a stick. These have been given witty names,
like
"ADIDAS" (chicken's feet); "KURBATA" (either just chicken's neck, or
"neck
and thigh" as in "neck-tie"); "WALKMAN" (pigs ears); "PAL" (chicken
wings);
"HELMET" (chicken head); "IUD" (chicken intestines), and "BETAMAX"
(video-cassette-like blocks of animal blood). Yum, yum. Bon appetit.
"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches" --(Proverbs 22:1)
WHEN I arrived in the Philippines from the UK six years ago, one of the
first cultural differences to strike me was names. The subject has
provided
a continuing source of amazement and amusement ever since.
The first unusual thing, from an English perspective, is that everyone
here
has a nickname. In the staid and boring United Kingdom, we have
nicknames in
kindergarten, but when we move into adulthood we tend, I am glad to say,
to
lose them.
The second thing that struck me is that Philippine names for both girls
and
boys tend to be what we in the UK would regard asoverbearingly cutesy
for
anyone over about five. "Fifty-five-year-olds colleague put it. Where I
come
from, a boy with a nickname like Boy Blue or Honey Boy would be beaten
to
death at school by pre-adolescent bullies, and never make it to
adulthood.
So, probably, would girls with names like Babes, Lovely, Precious,
Peachy or
Apples. Yuk, ech ech. Here, however, no one bats an eyelid.
Then I noticed how many people have what I have come to call "door-bell
names". These are nicknames that sound like - well, door-bells. There
are
millions of them. Bing, Bong, Ding, and Dong are some of the more
common.
They can be, and frequently are, used in even more door-bell-like
combinations such as Bing-Bong, Ding-Dong, Ting-Ting, and so on. Even
our
newly-appointed chief of police has a doorbell name Ping. None of these
door-bell names exist where I come from, and hence sound unusually
amusing
to my untutored foreign ear. Someone once told me that one of the Bings,
when asked why he was called Bing, replied "because my brother is called
Bong". Faultless logic.
Dong, of course, is a particularly funny one for me, as where I come
from
"dong" is a slang word for... well, perhaps "talong" is the best Tagalog
equivalent.
Repeating names was another novelty to me, having never before
encountered
people with names like Len-Len, Let-Let, Mai-Mai, or Ning-Ning. The
secretary I inherited on my arrival had an unusual one: Leck-Leck.
Such names are then frequently further refined by using the "squared"
symbol,
as in Len2 or Mai2.
This had me very confused for a while.
Then there is the trend for parents to stick to a theme when naming
their
children. This can be as simple as making them all begin with the same
letter, as in Jun, Jimmy, Janice, and Joy.
More imaginative parents shoot for more sophisticated forms of assonance
or
rhyme, as in Biboy, Boboy, Buboy, Baboy (notice the names get worse the
more
kids there are-best to be born early or you could end up being a Baboy).
Even better, parents can create whole families of, say, desserts
(Apple Pie, Cherry Pie, Honey Pie) or flowers (Rose, Daffodil, Tulip).
The
main advantage of such combinations is that they look great painted
across
your trunk if you're a cab driver. That's another thing I'd never seen
before coming to Manila -- taxis with the driver's kids' names on the
trunk.
Another whole eye-opening field for the foreign visitor is the
phenomenon of
the "composite" name. This includes names like Jejomar (for Jesus,
Joseph
and Mary), and the remarkable Luzviminda
(for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, believe it or not). That's a bit like
me
being called something like "Engscowani" (for England, Scotland, Wales
and
Northern Ireland).
Between you and me, I'm glad I'm not. And how could I forget to mention
the
fabulous concept of the randomly inserted letter 'h'. Quite what this
device
is supposed to achieve, I have not yet figured out, but I think it is
designed to give a touch of class to an otherwise only averagely weird
name.
It results in creations like Jhun, Lhenn, Ghemma, and Jhimmy. Or how
about
Jhun-Jhun (Jhun2)?
How boring to come from a country like the UK full of people with names
like
John Smith. How wonderful to come from a country where imagination and
exoticism rule the world of names. Even the towns here have weird names;
my
favorite is the unbelieveably-named town of Sexmoan
(ironically close to Olongapo and Angeles). Where else in the world
could
that really be true? Where else in the world could the head of the
Church
really be called
Cardinal Sin?
Where else but the Philippines!
Note: Philippines has a senator named Joker, and it is his legal name.
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