A tribute to my grandmother "Tinang"
Hands
By Regina Zamora Cowell
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I look at my hands more often now that I am older. They look like Lola Tinang's hands -- wrinkled, budging blue veins,
trimmed nails without ornament. Her palms were always dry. I remember her scratching them often as I find myself
doing. Her palms were also like mine, deep ridges of brown life lines running across from left to right in a straight line,
overshadowing the vertical lines that crossed them. I did not have a chance to scrutinize whether or not she had five lines
that cross one another, a sign of good luck. I have five; she could have had the same number. The only difference is that I
have an extra line that ends beyond the palm, the sign of a spendthrift, while hers were ones of frugality. Our lives are so
different from one another.
Lola Tinang (Celestina Boncan) was my father's mother. My mother's mother, Lola Mary (Maria Lopez) died before I
was born, leaving seven orphaned children. That is another story in itself. I grew up living two blocks from Lola's grand
house in a quiet area in Manila. It stood high above all other houses close to the old Paco Cemetery where the Filipino
hero, Jose Rizal, was buried. Rizal's remains are no longer there; the cemetery has been turned into a more profitable
venture as a verdant place for weddings and fashion shows. Lola's house has tall dirty barb-wired walls to hide it from
the noxious buses, cars and taxis that now ply through the once quiet streets. The house has been swallowed up by tall
buildings, businesses, medical schools, massage parlors, Japanese restaurants, and tourist pensions. The house's
lovely garden, that grew so many varieties of begonias, caladiums, and roses, is paved for a parking lot that is used for
a cousin's ice cream business inside the premises. Lola Tinang would have cried to see it today.
Lola Tinang's family history is similar to that of so many Filipinos who lived in Manila in the mid-1880s. She was a
Chinese-Filipino mestiza, from a long line of "Sangleys(1)." The first Boncan was Sy Hao, her great-great grandfather, a
15-year-old stowaway from Fujien province in China. That province had only 15 percent arable land and people suffered
from periodic droughts that flushed out a lot of rural residents looking for better opportunities elsewhere. In the late 19th
century, more than 85 percent of Chinese immigrants to the Philippines came from Amoy Island off Fujien.
According to the family oral history, Sy Hao started out selling cigarettes by the piece. Following a paper trail of his
residences, he lived in a better part of Binondo, Manila 10 years later and owned two cargo ships that plied up and down
the coast of Luzon, as well as the inter-island and the Manila-Amoy trade routes. At 31-years-old, he married a Christian
Chinese-Filipino mestiza, Francisca Yap Pochuan. They had five children, my great grandfather Marcelo being the oldest
son. Growing more prosperous, Sy Hao chose to be baptized in 1875. In turn, he became a "fourth class" naturalized
Spanish citizen. Ever pragmatic, he chose an important Filipino businessman to be his godfather, and his baptismal
name became Ignacio Hao Boncan. Ignacio may have been his godfather's name, but the surname is entirely his doing:
He chose "bon" from the German "von," a title of German nobility; "kan" came from Khan -- Kublai and Genghis --
emperors of China. Von" was spelled with a "b" because Spanish did not have a "v" sound. I've seen his picture, seated
in a high uncomfortable Chinese chair, clothed in a long silk embroidered mandarin robe and a mandarin hat with jade
above his brow, his long beard and queue grey, his feet resting on a pillow. He had high aspirations surely, but
scratching deeper under the surface, he remained a Buddhist. His expression is stern, frowning, completely humorless.
He seemed so foreign to me. My Lola Tinang did not look like him.
Sy Hao, now Ignacio, is buried in Manila's Chinese cemetery among old Spanish tombstones. He rests in a tomb
guarded by two fierce dragons with red eyes. The inscription reads: "Sr. Don Ignacio Hao Boncan, 1833-1889, Español
naturalizado por gracia de Su Majestad Reina de España, El 23 de Mayo de 1889 a la edad de 55 años y 10 meses."
He came a long way from the Fujienese boy stowed away on a boat, fleeing the ravages of hunger and poverty.
Ignacio's children were raised as Filipinos, and by the time my grandmother was born in 1888, the following
generations lived as middle-class Filipinos with no dreams of going back to the land of their ancestors, nor speaking
anything other than Tagalog or Spanish. They were devoted Catholics. Lola Tinang went to the Colegio de Sta.
Escolastica, and was educated to guide her children's physical health and spiritual growth. She may have been given a
needle and thread by the nuns before she was able to write a sentence. This didn't change too much from when I went to
school in the early grades, but at least female students my age went on to study math and science, and read books in
English. However, I think we were educated with the same educational goal -- to influence minds no older than 12 years.
Tinang, now a young woman, met my grandfather, Pepe, who was also a part of the tight social circle of families in
Manila who knew each other and married one another. While reading an uncle's family history, I discovered a photo
where three of my grandfather's sisters, Paz, Rosalia, and Trinidad — or Paching, Aling and Trining, as we knew them
—sat among members of my grandmother's side of the family. Aha! What oral history I didn't know, I found in old photos.
Pepe was an enterprising man. He was famous for being one of three people who made up the first graduating class
of the Los Baños College of Agriculture. They had an American professor, Dr. Baker, who came to Los Baños from
Cornell University, and the four of them hiked up to the dense forest with their bolos and a jug of water for hands-on
learning. What a dashing man young Pepe was! Simply irresistible, if you ask me.
Pepe courted and married Lola Tinang in 1917. He took her to Tarlac, a province near Manila, where he bought land to
farm. She was miserable. They had two children while in Tarlac, but Pepe gave up farming and sold the land to a
neighbor, Jose Cojuangco, the father of Corazon Aquino. I think he couldn't convince Tinang that life was good in the
province. This may have been the start of her passive-aggressive personality, a trait whispered about and chuckled over
by my aunts and mother. Lolo always had to compromise (read "give up") when this silent stubbornness came out in
force. So he built her a house in Paco, Manila.
The house had Pepe's imprint all over it and almost nothing of hers. Pepe's style was grand, solid. Hers was simple.
Pepe furnished it with European furniture, Italian marble and mirrors, Venetian chandeliers, an elegant mahogany
staircase that swept up from the first floor to the second, a beautiful grandfather clock, and the skins and heads of a
polar bear and a tiger draped over the sofas. The grandchildren, those who weren't intimidated by the fierce teeth, loved
sliding down the skins.
Tinang was happy enough to leave the public rooms in Pepe's hands. Hers was the kitchen and the garden. The
kitchen contained a small two-burner stove, and the most rudimentary pots and pans. Her counters were tiled roughly,
more for sanitation than style. One side was her dirty kitchen where cooking was done with coals. Her refrigerator came
only later. Her garden ran around the periphery of the house, where she would putter here and there, watching over her
begonias or picking fragrant jasmine from a most prolific climbing tree. A family rumor, which may or may not be true,
said that Lola played with the duendes, little people the size of a big soda bottle, in the back garden. One would never
know.
Now I don't want to mislead you. Lola Tinang was the lady of the house, and although she did some cooking, she
supervised at least two cooks in the kitchen, a gardener, a laundry woman who smoked cigars with the burning tip
inside her mouth, and a cleaning woman who swept and washed the constantly dusty floors. She also had another
woman who was there just to do her bidding. She had a driver who drove her anywhere she wanted to go. She would
spend her mornings at Mass, then come home to supervise Pepe's breakfast, before preparing Pepe's mid-day meal.
In between, she would walk around her garden, hands behind her, talking softly to the plants, and telling the gardener
what to do. In the afternoon, she would take a little nap, and then spend time gazing out of her second floor window
watching people walk by, a habit women had in the rural areas.
Some afternoons, my mother would take us over to see Lola Tinang. She would have little paper bags with mangoes,
atis,lanzones, naranjitas, or other fruits in season. We loved her fruits, always our favorites. Each paper bag had a name
written on it. "Ginita" was mine. Lolo Pepe's fruits for his grandchildren were more exotic -- rambutan, grapes,
Washington apples, lychees from China, and California oranges. He had a wonderful way of knowing when the fruit was
at its ripest. He grew experimental guavas, his own varieties that were twice as large as the usual guava. He used us as
testers of his prize guavas, and we had to say we liked eating all the slices he gave us. His grandchildren will not eat
guavas to this day.
The afternoon were also times for Lola Tinang's panggingi, card games with her friends. If Pepe came home early,
he'd join the women. If she had a grudge that still rubbed her the wrong way, her passive-aggressive nature would
blossom and Pepe had no other choice but to let her win.
Lolo Pepe and Lola Tinang lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. Twenty family members walked down
the aisle to start the wedding procession. Then there they were, walking more slowly with time marked on their faces.
The crowded church burst into the loud applause of their 500 friends and family. After they renewed their vows, Lola
Tinang stood up, before Pepe knew what was going on, and turned around to face the guests. She shook her fist high,
"Ako ang liona!" (I am the lioness!) Filipinos believe that the first person who stands up after the wedding ceremony gets
to be the boss. That was her hidden agenda, and she must have been planning this while letting her children worry
about the wedding details. During the party, they waltzed, "Oh how we danced on the night we were wed ..." We
grandchildren didn't know that our Lolo and Lola could dance.
After Vatican II was published and the Mass was celebrated in the vernacular, Lola Tinang stopped going to church.
When she had her first stroke, she was a prisoner in her own house, confined to the second floor, escaping only if there
were enough people who could carry her downstairs in a chair. Her daughters didn't allow her to do anything for herself,
and her walk turned into stumbling steps, always guarded by two people as her crutches. She didn't smile anymore, and
her stares were unfocused, blank. She was surrounded by too many people, and I couldn't get close to her, not close
enough to say something that would lighten her day, to tell her I loved her.
When she had her final fatal stroke, I was present in her hospital room, along with so many other grieving relatives.
She was reduced to a thin brown woman who had no identity. Just another woman dying. This was the first death I
witnessed, the first time I saw a handkerchief tied from her head to her jaws to keep her mouth closed. It was hard,
alarming. I was not ready for it.
I look at my hands. I work with my hands -- cooking, gardening, cleaning, writing, typing. I took care of my children
without nursemaids. I drive a car, gas up the car, can change the oil and fix a flat tire. My life is of a different generation in
a different country. My itch for travel comes from Lolo Pepe, not Lola Tinang. Wanting to live in other countries is Lolo
Pepe's gene, not Lola Tinang's. Yet, my hands look like hers. I wear her wedding ring, not my own. It is one of my most
cherished possessions. My mother often comes closest to my mind and heart on quiet times, but Lola Tinang often sits
on my shoulder, probably shaking her head in disbelief at what I have to do to live here, but content that I have a good
husband who gave me two children "para la mejorar de la raza" (for the betterment of the race). Mahal kita, Lola. I love
you.
Footnote
(1) "Sangley" is an archaic term used during the Spanish colonial era for categorizing the offspring of the Chinese and "indios," as the
Spanish called the indigenous Malay population who now consider themselves the true Filipinos. The word "sangley" is derived from the
Hokkien “seng-li," meaning "business." During the Spanish colonial times, the Chinese were barred from owning land, and being their
usual resourceful selves, many found Filipino wives who then held the land titles for the family. By the time my great-great grandfather
immigrated to the Philippines around 1848, the Sangleys had intermarried for generations and were firmly established in society,
specifically in Manila's Binondo district. At that time, Manila was the center of the Spanish galleon trade, where goods and luxury items
from China were loaded onto Manila-bound ships before crossing the Pacific and landing in Acapulco, from where trade goods went by
land and sea to their final destination, Sevilla. The Sangleys were the primary import-export traders; the Spanish acknowledged this role
but kept them under the tight leash of regulation and taxation. When the Spanish felt there were too many Chinese, they would go on a
rampage by burning Binondo or deporting them back to China. The Christianized Chinese were better off and permitted to stay in Binondo.
As the Chinese community grew, Santa Cruz, another Manila Christian Chinese community, was established by the Spanish. Today, the
churches in Binondo and Santa Cruz are the most well known in Manila; the masses, processions, and ceremonies are attended by very
large crowds of devotees from all races.
Prominent families are from this mestizo line, including Jose Rizal, the Philippines' most prominent national hero; Emilio Aguinaldo, the
first President of the First Philippine Republic who fought the Spanish and the Americans; Sergio Osmena, the second President of the
Philippines; and Corazon Cojuangco Aquino, the first female President of the Philippines.
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