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Siopao and Power: The Place of Pork
Buns in Manila’s Chinese History
IN 1997, THE FILIPINO LAWYER and activist Argee Guevarra
mused nostalgically about Manila’s iconic Chinese restau-
rant, Ma Mon Luk, an “institution that mami [noodle soup],
siomai [siu mai], and siopao [steamed pork buns] built.”
Guevarra praises the establishment’s“unpretentious charac-
ter,”showcasing a proletarian environment that contrasts
with increasing numbers of modern “second-rate, trying hard
copycat”food chains in Manila. But despite these praises, he
expresses his embarrassment in enjoying the wares of the
“old-fashioned, decrepit, almost dirty”restaurant—especially
one known for “rampant rumors”claiming that the savory
meat filling of Ma Mon Luk siopao is not pork, but cat
(Guevarra 1997; 1998).
How could Guevarra, speaking as a Manila middle-class ur-
banite, fondly remember the culinary contributions of Chinese
migrants in his city while remaining suspicious of rumored
meat adulteration at the same time? What allows Guevarra to
write so fondly about the restaurant and its signature dish, only
to repeat racialized slurs about contamination?
The architecture of the steamed pork bun offers us some
insight, but we must look beyond its basic structure to under-
stand the networks of labor and migration that produced it.
Siopao is a larger diasporic form of Cantonese char siu bao
(buns filled with sweet barbecued pork), a regional expression
of the baozi (steamed bun) common across Chinese cuisines.
The façade is an unadorned white bun, its bright red contents
providing few clues as to its provenance. The diner is left to
trust the word of the merchant, menu, or waiter when it comes
to the identity of the mystery meat. And just as the grandeur of
monumental architecture may hide the detailed interior work
of pyramid or temple builders, an exclusive focus on the char
siu bao’s architecture obscures the kitchen labor and racial-
ized narratives that function to ostracize Chinese migrants in
Manila. Nevertheless, the story of the movement of char siu
bao and its populations from the Guangdong province in
South China to the US empire in the Pacific could not have
a better symbolic food to tell its tale. Even when the bao is
broken open and consumed—assimilated, integrated—into
the body, the consumer may remain suspicious both of the
food and of the people who assembled it.
While char siu bao and its hybrid versions have symboli-
cally stood in as culinary ambassadors for Chinese migrants
to Manila, suspicions of taboo meat used as ingredients sug-
gest a perpetual state of cultural exile, notwithstanding the
city’s four-hundred-year-old Chinese community, and even
longer histories of trade and cultural ambassadorship be-
tween China and the Philippines. Guevarra’s horror stories of
cat meat in Ma Mon Luk’s siopao can be traced to the mech-
anisms of cultural exclusion that span the multiple imperial
occupations of the Philippines. This article investigates
Chinese Manileños during the Spanish and American occu-
pations, not to compare and contrast their experiences
through the two imperial periods but rather to engage with
both in a mutual dialogue. This dialogue, spanning centuries
Abstract: This article explores culinary suspicion toward Chinese
Manileños during the Spanish and American occupations of the
Philippines. It takes siopao—an urban Filipino adaptation of the
Cantonese char siu bao (steamed barbecue pork bun)—as its point of
convergence, and explores modern controversies accusing Chinese
cooks of using taboo meats instead ofpork. These suspicions developed
according to a cultural lineage rooted in the exclusion of Chinese
migrants and their foodways and formalized in legal mechanisms of
urban segregation and exclusionary laws. This article suggests that the
simultaneous love and repulsion for siopao stands in for a range of
alternative multiculturalisms that sought to govern Chinese bodies,
adapted across the imperial fringes of the Spanish and US empires. At
the same time, tracing the global networks of Chinese labor, Spanish
and American imperialisms, and Philippine migration, this article tells
a story of how a portable, working-class Chinese dish became Filipino
as it passed through the hands and mouths of a global Pacific.
Keywords: Asian migration, Asian American Studies, urban history,
modern empire, Pacific history
RESEARCH ESSAY |Adrian De Leon, University of Toronto
GASTRONOMICA:THE JOURNAL OF CRITICAL FOOD STUDIES ,VOL. 16, NUMBER 2, PP.45–54, ISSN 1529- 3262, ELECTRONIC ISSN 1533-8622. © 2016 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.PLEASE DIRECT ALL REQUESTS FOR
PERMISSION TO PHOTOCOPY OR REPRODUCE ARTICLE CONTENT THROUGH THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS’S REPRINTS AND PERMISSIONS WEB PAGE,HTTP://WWW.UCPRESS.EDU/JOURNALS.PHP?P=REPRINTS.DOI: 10.1525/GFC .2016.16.2.45.
GASTRONOMICA
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of mobility, empire, and taste, ultimately converges into the
palm-sized pork bun.
I will argue that the simultaneous love and repulsion for
siopao as a Chinese dish stands in for a range of alternative
multiculturalisms, specific to Manila itself, on the imperial
fringes of the Spanish and US empires. Spanish-ruled Manila
depended upon the geographical and political segregation of
Chinese populations, and American-ruled Manila depended
upon the legal and cultural governance of Chinese bodies.
Both regimes sought to regulate a population they simulta-
neously saw as beneficial and threatening to their colonial
projects; on the ground, with siopao and its merchants, this
resulted in foods and vendors that were both beloved and
distrusted. These suspicions suggest a hegemonic heritage of
exclusion traceable to Spanish and American imperial ad-
ministrators, adopted by the urban middle class of Manila.
In cities at the edges of empire, Chinese food laborers
were ostracized in many ways. In Manila, Chinese migrants
occupied all social classes, but even the Chinese mestizo
elite remained distinct from, and unequal in the eyes of, the
governing Spanish mestizos. As non-indios (native Tagalogs
in the region), the Chinese also were delegated outsider sta-
tus with regard to the local population. But simultaneously,
their foods were ingested—appropriated—as classic Filipino
fare for Manileño urbanites, then discursively rejected as dirty
when rumors of illicit meats ran rampant. The Chinese
in Manila were embraced because of their culinary
contributions—evidenced by the nostalgic musings of
Argee Guevarra—and excluded by a lineage of dietary and
cultural suspicions raised and sustained by Western com-
mentators. I will blueprint the mechanics of colonial exclu-
sion through imperial descriptions of Southern Chinese
written by Western travelers and urban administrators. Out
of the contradictions and hypocrisies that emerge, this essay
will reconsider the processes of Chinese culinary immigra-
tion and integration, thereby explaining the deeply con-
flicted position of char siu bao in Manila.
It is no coincidence that char siu bao, an ostensibly Southern
Chinese snack, became one of the great plebeian foods of
the Pacific Islands. In Hawaiian cities it is known as manapua,
and in Samoa (including American Samoa) it is keke pua‘a.
In Guam, home to a large Filipino population, it is also siopao.
Char siu bao also thrives in the Marshall Islands (though its
cultural history is beyond the scope of this article) as siu pao with
a more eclectic selection of stuffing such as fish and vegetables
(Commerford 2011).
Because of their portability and convenience, these buns
may be considered “street foods”; however, I am wary of this
label because, as dim sum, they are also sold in casual sit-in
restaurants.
1
Instead, siopao might be located within wider
discussions on public dining cultures, irrespective of the mo-
bility of the food’s laborers and the specific architectures of its
dining spaces (Gabaccia and Pilcher 2011: 109–26). The buns
can be considered “urban foods”—at home in either street or
shop, but rarely seen in the countryside because the labor-
intensive production can only be justified by the commercial
demands of a substantial population of diners.
2
As “urban
foods,”the legacy of pork buns and their laborers are shaped
by these characteristics. The buns satisfy meal-induced hun-
ger as well as what Filipino food historian Doreen Fernandez
calls pantawid gutom, or hunger impulses not governed by
three square meals a day. In her 1988 seminal collection,
Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food (co-authored with the poet
Edilberto N. Alegre), Fernandez notes that pantawid gutom
emerges out of an urban Filipino work ethic that creates
alternative eating schedules on the go (174). It also implies
FIGURES 1A AND 1B:Ma Mon Luk’ssiopao (left) and mami noodles (right).
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIAN DE LEON © 2015
GASTRONOMICA
46
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a quick snack or an appetite depressant; therefore, siopao
can serve as both a snack to quell hunger between meals
or as part of a complete meal when it accompanies mami
noodles.
3
As street foods, pork buns satisfy urban hunger and
are a necessity for sustaining oneself during a workday, while
also becoming imbued with local mythologies.
4
Pork buns as
sit-in foods (perhaps domesticated from the streets, as when
they accompany noodles) also satisfy workday hunger and are
similarly mythologized. These myths pertain to the people
who work around their foods—in this case, the Chinese in
Manila. Even in the early modern moment of the early
Spanish empire, siopao signified the cuisine of an increas-
ingly global China, and the pork bun became stuffed with
the history of the Chinese presence in Western empires.
Across Two Empires
As people and pork buns traveled together across the South
China Sea and the Pacific, Southern Chinese merchants and
migrant laborers became associated with char siu bao, both
in how they identified themselves and how others imagined
them. Manila was a major destination, an imperial city histor-
ically marked by migration and multiculturalism. The Bi-
nondo district of Manila, with its four-hundred-year history,
is considered the oldest Chinatown in the world; it is en-
shrined in literary text and walking tours alike. But the forma-
tion, livelihood, and mobility of Chinese populations in
Manila were, in fact, part of the colonial projects of Spain
and the United States. In order to understand how siopao
could be considered both an integral part of Filipino food-
ways and a source of impurity and danger for Filipino
consumption, it is necessary to understand the histories of
Manila’s Chinese populations (Douglas 1966).
The first waves of Fujianese and other Southern Chinese
migrants to Manila arrived as merchants from China and
Taiwan in the 1550s, around the time of the city’s official es-
tablishment as the seat of the colonial government of Spain.
Subsequently, Southern Chinese cuisine made its linguistic
and culinary mark on Philippine foodways long before the
American colonial era. In fact, as a commercial and imperial
capital, Manila gradually became the primary destination of
Chinese travelers to the Philippines. As a result, the Spanish
administration imposed taxation and licensing procedures in
order to regulate Chinese trade to their new colony. Immedi-
ately, Spanish-Chinese relationships were regulated accord-
ing to finance and trade. The Spanish called the Chinese
sangley, from the Hokkien word for “one who brings or deliv-
ers goods”; mixed-blooded Chinese were therefore mestizo de
sangley, and later, simply mestizo (Chap-Yap 1977: 22). In
other words, the Spanish vision of the Chinese was as entre-
preneurs and capitalists, a vision which would govern Sino-
European (and later, Sino-American) relations in the city for
the next several hundred years. With later commercial migra-
tions from South China, and with subsequent generations,
the new Chinese sangley population settled into established
enclaves such as the Binondo Chinatown (Gil 2011).
Binondo is an island enclave outside the walls of the Intra-
muros fortress of Old Manila, surrounded by the Pasig River
and the Binondo Estuary. The architecture of the enclave re-
flects an established Chinese heritage; signs are written in
Chinese and English, and Orientalist arches line the major
entryways into the area. Here, the primary language is a dia-
lect of Fujianese, and despite being hundreds of years old,
the area maintains its distinctive Chinese identity in Manila.
The attractive ornateness of the Binondo Chinatown ob-
scures its historical relationship with another sort of China-
town: the Parián or Chinese quarter within the Intramuros.
The Spanish government established it as an exempt space
for Chinese merchants in 1581, when the entry of other
Chinese into the walled city was banned after dark. It was relo-
cated several times, but never far from Manila’s walls, in order
to provide ease of access to Chinese business. The Parián
system was not unique to Manila; across the Pacific, in colo-
nial Mexico City, the Parián was where merchants sold luxury
goods, including Chinese cloth. Therefore, in such quarters
Chinese products arrived on Manila galleons and Chinese
merchants arrived with them. As the Far East colony of Spain
(and the overseas province of New Spain, governed through
Mexico), the Manila Parián also contained both Chinese pro-
ducts and Chinese populations (Dong 2010: 75–88). Binondo,
in turn, was established as a missionary parish for Chinese con-
verts in 1686, at the time of a royal decree expelling all non-
Christian Chinese (including mestizos) from the Philippines.
In contemporary times, this area became known as Chinatown
(Chia 2006: 509–34). The Parián was demolished in 1790, in
order to renovate the Intramuros fortress, and as a result,
remaining non-Catholic Chinese merchants scattered across
Luzon. Many settled in nearby Binondo, effectively abolishing
sub-segregation among Chinese populations in Manila. With
the arrival of Chinese merchants, Binondo began to compete
with Intramuros as a cultural center of las islas Filipinas and as
a hub of market activity (Chu 2010: 52–59).
In Manila, a story of two enclaves emerges. Binondo be-
came a hub of elite mestizo nationalism immortalized in José
Rizal’s 1887 revolutionary novel, Noli Me Tangere, while the
mobile and unstable Parián enclaves have faded from urban
memory. Today, at the site of one of the last parianes stands
Manila’s Metropolitan Theater. With the historical rise of
GASTRONOMICA
47
SUMMER 2016
Binondo, increasingly powerful Chinese mestizos sought to
enter the elite class, threatening both natives who laid claim
to the land and the Spanish who governed from within the
walls of Intramuros (de Llobet 2014: 214–35). But from the ad-
vent of Manila, the elite’s relations with the Chinese popula-
tion have been marked by mistrust, segregation, and suspicion.
Manila’s trade with China continued through the end of
the Qing dynasty, and the 1880s saw mass migrations from
China to the Philippines as Beijing sought to exert influence
on the islands through its overseas population. By the 1910s,
the collapse of the Qing government pushed further migra-
tion out of China—especially from the South—in order to
avoid the rising conflicts between militant factions in the
post-imperial state. These migrants gravitated to port cities
such as Manila and occupied the culturally familiar spaces of
the Binondo Chinatown (Wilson 2004).
Through the Philippine Revolution and the Spanish-
American War, and the subsequent Philippine-American
War between the First Republic in Malolos and the United
States, the position of Chinese migrants in Manila became
increasingly destabilized. Without the political support of
their imperial homeland, later migrants occupied various pla-
ces on the social ladder in relation to the already-established
Chinese mestizo elite and provoked intensifying animosity
from natives and Spanish mestizo Manileños. These relations
were further disrupted by the Spanish displacement in favor
FIGURE 2: Map of City of Manila and Vicinity, Office of Department Engineer, Philippine Department, 1919. Intramuros is at the western tip,
with Binondo immediately to the northeast.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GEOGRAPHY AND MAP DIVISION,WASHINGTON,DC,HTTPS://LCCN.LOC.GOV/201258625 9.
GASTRONOMICA
48
SUMMER 2016
of a new American government. The incoming American
elite governed the city not according to the Spanish spatial
differentiation of old city and outskirts, but by way of new
policies and principles of race (Kramer 2006). Manila no
longer signified only the city within the walls, but also all of
its adjacent neighborhoods within a reasonable distance,
including Binondo. Concomitant with these legal changes to
Manila and its new settler population of Americans came
urban developments including parks, hotels, and neighbor-
hood clean-up brigades (Anderson 2006).
Writing in 1900, soon after the United States annexed the
Philippines, the American José de Olivares compiled Our
Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil,a
multivolume tome documenting the imperial possessions
acquired by the United States. In his ethnography of the Philip-
pine people he offered an American conceptualization of the
status of mestizos on the islands—and indirectly suggested the
relative status of mestizos under the new administration:
The Mestizos, or half-breeds, constitute a large percentage of the native
population, both among the Tagalogs and the Visayans. Those of Spanish
fathers, however, constitute a distinct class from those who have Chinese
fathers. The former are usually far more intelligent and enterprising than
the natives, and many of them are to be found among the leading
merchants and professional men of Manila and other cities of the
archipelago. (de Olivares 1899–1900: vol. 2, 570)
De Olivares went on to describe the handsome features of
Spanish mestizas and mestizos but completely ignored the
Chinese, except for the one mention of the Spanish mestizo
being of a “distinct class,”a cut above the Chinese mixed-
race population. In doing so, the American writer reinforced
Spanish-era class and race hierarchies, ignoring both the
affluence of Binondo and its people’s tenacious influence in
the city’s politics.
Other documentarians of the period noted the class and
occupational differentiation among the Chinese in Manila.
Homer Clyde Stuntz (1904: 268), in his comprehensive survey
of the Philippines written under the patronage of Governor
William Howard Taft, documented ethnic violence to which
he bore witness in the city:
Filipino drivers of public conveyances will go out of their way to run
down Chinese coolies carrying their baskets in the streets. I have seen the
most wanton cases of this form of petty persecution. Hardworking and
unoffending men are crippled, and sometimes killed outright, by the fury
of Filipinos who will not work, and who are mad out of measure with the
Chinaman because he will work.
Stuntz thus perpetuated the vision of the savage Filipino native
and the hardworking Chinese migrant. His descriptions of
the Chinese throughout the book portrayed an industrious and
capitalist people, and he credited this entrepreneurial ambition
to Chinese people of all classes. He also relied on a related set
of Chinese stereotypes: namely, the propensity to hoard and
gamble. He marked this entrepreneurial people as driven pri-
marily by the pursuit of profit—in opposition to his descriptions
of Filipino laziness—and even claimed that many converts to
Christianity did so solely for the sake of advantaging their
business. He noted the insularity of Chinese businessmen,
their inner machinations impenetrable to even the interested
American. To complete the picture of the suspicious China-
man, he warned that they were the “chief offenders in the adul-
teration of articles of export,”and that Chinese merchants
diluted products in order to maximize profits—suspicions that
persist to the present day (ibid.: 275–80).
From these conflicted opinions of the Chinese in the
Philippines—of an industrious and a mistrustful Chinaman—
Stuntz made his policy recommendations to the colonial gov-
ernment, which was enmeshed in a heated debate on Chinese
immigration.
5
He called the application of the Chinese Exclu-
sion Act in the Philippines “a grave blunder.”After its insti-
tution in 1899 by the US Congress and General Elwell
Stephen Otis, the military governor of the Philippines, the first
colonial decade saw outcries against the law. Many voices
echoed Stuntz’s concerns about the lack of a labor force,
speaking out in favor of a heavily regulated immigration policy
that would bring more Chinese labor to the Philippines to
develop colonial infrastructure. In other words, Stuntz and
his contemporaries recommended the incorporation of the
Chinese into the colonial project of Manila, but as perpetual
outsiders—neither members of the nascent Philippine nation
nor US colonial subjects, out of consideration for simmering
anti-Chinese sentiment in the mainland (Bender 2009: 56–57).
Stuntz’s recommendation for a semipermeable immigration
policy echoed how the Spanish governed their sangley in
colonial Manila, i.e., as a semipermeable wall between
Binondo and the Intramuros fortress, governed by business
relations with the Chinese. In attempting to protect their own
in Intramuros, the Spanish elite governed “intermuros”—
relationships and (often unequal) movement from one side
of the wall to the other.
The Chinese contingent in Manila, subject to a series of
exclusion laws and expulsion campaigns, nevertheless flour-
ished as distinct communities during both Spanish and
American occupations. In Spanish Manila they became a
legally distinct ethno-social class with the establishment of
their own merchant guild, the Gremio Mestizo de Sangley in
Binondo. In the nineteenth century, the Chinese mestizo—a
new middle class—exerted influence on public affairs. The
Spanish administration, seeing this as a threat, sought to turn
GASTRONOMICA
49
SUMMER 2016
the natives against the Chinese middle class in order to dispel
anti-Spanish tensions. These attempts failed, and by the end
of the century it was the educated Chinese mestizos who led
the cultural and military revolutions against the Spanish
occupants. Among these individuals was José Rizal, the
“national hero of the Philippines,”who was executed for the
dissent that his revolutionary novels incited. By the end of the
Spanish occupation, those with Chinese blood and those of
native heritage were collectively known as “Filipinos”in the
campaign for independence (Tan 1985: 50–63).
The cultural privilege of the Chinese mestizo was over-
turned by the United States invasion, and an influx of coolie
labor from South China further diluted the mestizo’s previ-
ous prestige. Early examples of American colonial writing
(such as José de Olivares’s survey of new colonial islands)
once again segregated the native from the Chinese. Whereas
the United States sought to justify its colonial project in the
Pacific as “benevolent assimilation,”they excluded the
Chinese, whose presence in the mainland United States
supposedly incited the “yellow peril threat.”Alas, the United
States made sure that their “little brown brothers”would
remain “brown,”and that the Chinese would remain as coolie
labor or peddlers—nothing more (Chu 2010: 286–87).
Ma Mon Luk
One peddler in Manila’s history, having arrived in the early
twentieth century, would become the legendary patriarch of
Manila’s siopao and noodle soups. Local mythologies have
come to glorify Ma Mon Luk’s Chinese heritage as well as
his culinary contributions to Manileño food. He and his
culinary inheritors wedged themselves into the cultural
conflicts and contacts of Manila’s Chinese migrants. While
stereotypes of cheating and adulterating continued to prevail
with regard to the Chinese in the city, they were in turn
underprivileged by the American colonial system that
promoted anti-Chinese suspicion through exclusion laws and
in local culture.
According to local mythologies and Philippine media,
Ma Mon Luk emigrated in 1918 from Guangdong to Manila
and became a Cantonese street vendor after an allegedly
unfruitful career as a teacher in China. Legend credits him
as the importer of siopao to the Philippines, which he sold
with mami (noodle soup) and siomai. He and his family
opened the first Ma Mon Luk restaurant in the Binondo
Chinatown in 1957, after years of selling his wares as a street
vendor. The restaurant has passed through at least six loca-
tions in its history, but only two remain: in Quezon City
and in Quiapo near Binondo. Another branch located
within the historic Chinatown proper has since closed as
well. Recipes of siopao asado (a prolific and popular dish)
are well known, and Ma Mon Luk’s version is only one of
many, despite its notoriety. Even today, among the Filipino
diaspora, mention of Ma Mon Luk conjures up both unmis-
takable pork savoriness and fears of cat-meat adulteration,
reviving both nostalgia and suspicion.
6
Nonetheless, Ma
Mon Luk’s recipes are revered as restaurant trade secrets,
despite the plethora of popular recipes in cookbooks and
websites for home consumption.
How did Ma Mon Luk—and, therefore, siopao in its
popular form—fit into local Manila culture and folklore?
Contributing to Ma Mon Luk’s tenacity is the restaurant’s strong
claim, backed by Philippine media, to being the “original”pro-
genitor of these iconic Filipino-Chinese products. The Filipino
television station ABS-CBN supported the restaurant’s assertion
that mami noodles were named after Ma Mon Luk himself—
one video described how Ma comes from the name “Ma”Mon
Luk, and mi from mian (麵), meaning “noodle.”This is most
likely untrue—according to the linguist Gloria Chan-Yap
(1977: 33), mami comes from the Hokkien words maq (meaning
“meat”) and mi (meaning “noodle”), which in Fujianese cuisine
is a “noodle dish with pork and chicken cooked in soupy style.”
Nevertheless, Ma Mon Luk’s menus proudly proclaim its origin
myths, and ABS-CBN echoes them with the same fervor; in
popular culture, the foods of Ma Mon Luk signify the foods of
proletarian labor of a nostalgic past.
7
Homer C. Stuntz (1904:
273) alluded to the economy of Chinese diets in the mass migra-
tions of the early twentieth century—the same migratory cohort
that included Ma Mon Luk at the fall of the Qing dynasty:
“In some form or other [the Chinese] toiled for their daily
rice. . . . His food is of the coarsest and most scanty; but daily his
little hoard grows, until at last the sum he had settled upon as
sufficient to start him in the career of a trader or money-changer
has been gathered.”Reading this against ABS-CBN’sMaMon
Luk legends renders translatable narratives. While Ma Mon Luk
opened a restaurant, which his family expanded with success, it
is his image as a street peddler, and siopao’s image as a street
food, that persists in local memory. What continues to be sold is
Ma Mon Luk’s large pork bun, combining the frugality of
street fare with the decadence of restaurant prosperity.
Dubbed with a Spanish-sounding name for its filling, siopao
represents a harmonious picture of multiculturalism in
Manila: Spanish, Chinese, and indigenous histories seam-
lessly incorporated into the pork bun.
But the history of interethnic tensions in Manila reveals a
more disturbing undercurrent beneath Ma Mon Luk’s other-
wise tenacious set of legends. The Ma Mon Luk tales, as in-
grained as they are in popular local media, remain shut out
GASTRONOMICA
50
SUMMER 2016
from full integration into a Manileño mythos. Stories of cat
meat used in their siopao are remembered and passed around
by locals such as Argee Guevarra, echoing Stuntz’s fears of
Chinese adulterated products, considerably more frightening
because these products are ingested into the body.
While popular stories such as Guevarra’s cyclically
breathe new life into cat-meat scares, Chinese stereotypes of
taboo meat-eating are, of course, not new. Travel writings in
the colonial eras paid particular attention to these supposed
eating habits. Jean-Baptiste du Halde’sA Description of the
Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary (1736) noted that while
the Southern Chinese elite ate pork, the “ordinary people”
ate “the Flesh of Horses and Dogs, even tho they dye of Age
of Sickness; nay they do scruple eating Cats, Rats, and such
like Animals, which are openly sold in the Streets”(quoted
from Roberts 2002: 35). John Lockman, in Lettres édifantes
(1743–1762), echoed the indiscriminate gluttony of the
Chinese commoner:
The Chinese eat any kind of Meat; Beasts that die in Ditches, as willingly
as those which died by the Butcher’s Hand. They eat Frogs, which
appear loathsome to an European Eye, but are well-tasted. ’Tis said their
Rats don’t eat amiss; and that Snake-Broth is in Reputation there. The
common people are great Gluttons, and eat four Times a Day, they
cramming down the Rice (their principal Food) so greedily with their
Chopsticks, that they frequently almost choak [sic] themselves. (Quoted
from Roberts 2002: 42)
Suspicions of Chinese diets continued to be documented
after these eighteenth-century writings. Combined with
Stuntz’s mistrust over adulterated Chinese products and the
supposed amorality of Chinese Christians, cat-meat rumors
in Ma Mon Luk’s siopao perpetuated Chinese exclusion in
Manila, even as a product of their foodways became pinoy
(local Filipino) fare. Further combined with what historian
Warwick Anderson (2006) describes as a regime of sanitation
and health in the early twentieth-century Philippines, vesti-
gial suspicions over meat fillings in siopao were kept alive
in discriminatory histories of Spanish and American coloni-
alisms. As a result, siopao has been appropriated into local
foodways, but its laborers remain excluded from a unified
Filipino discourse.
Global Siopao
Within the cultural legacies of Spanish segregation, American
radicalization, and global Chinese suspicion, siopao exists.
Despite such legacies, it is a favorite of Manileños, and in the
imaginations of writers such as Argee Guevarra, Manila’s food-
ways would be incomplete without a taste of the bun and re-
lated foodstuffs like mami noodle soup. An ethnographer of
Cantonese populations in Marcos-era Manila who wrote of
the small eateries that served siopao and noodles, among other
Chinese-owned businesses and grocery stores, did not men-
tion any Chinese street vendors selling siopao (as Ma Mon
Luk had done earlier in the century); instead, steamed food
had moved into the restaurant (Ma Mon Luk was almost cer-
tainly one of them) and into the Filipino child’s school lunch
(Jong Cheong 1983: 146). According to another survey of street
eating in Manila from around the same time, written by
Doreen Fernandez, vendors by and large no longer sold the fa-
miliar fare now found in Manila’s indoor eateries. Instead,
they served every bit of the chicken, especially offal meats.
Recalling her youth in Manila, Fernandez noted that this was
not always the case (Fernandez and Alegre 1988: 154–58); she
argued that prior to economic crises that hit the Philippines to-
ward the end of the Marcos dictatorship (around 1981), choicer
cuts of pork and chicken were served by the street vendors,
while siopao made its way indoors, into restaurants and
homes. On the one hand, the domestication of siopao reflects
Chinese upward social mobility, despite the maintenance of
cultural differences. On the other, the widespread production
of siopao is no longer relegated to Chinese street merchants; it
is made in homes for Filipino children as much as it is made in
eateries for Binondo visitors. Siopao is ingested into the stom-
achs of Manileños and the Philippine body politic.
The bun itself is known to be quite large and savory, big-
ger than the char siu bao of dim sum restaurants, and it is
filled to its seams with the Hispanic-named “pork asado.”
This is not the grilled beef of a Mexican carne asada, but
rather a pork stew commonly cooked in Hoisin and oyster
sauce, soy sauce, and sugar.
8
The seasonings and sauces used
are similar to those required in char siu—the barbecued pork
that fills char siu bao and its Hawaiian cousin, manapua.
9
As a result, contemporary siopao is many times creolized:
it developed among Southern Chinese expatriates in Manila,
with local ingredients, and a Hispanic-named filling. But the
culinary similarities between pork asado and char siu are too
numerous to overlook. What seems to be at work is the poli-
tics of culinary name-changing across national cuisines.
Western European foodways apply euphemisms to otherwise
off-putting cuts of meat, such as sweetbreads for the thymus
and pancreas of calves and lambs, or the colloquial “Pope’s
nose”for chicken tails. Contemporary Philippine street foods
are similarly euphemized, often rather humorously: chicken
feet are Adidas, chicken wings are Philippine Airlines (PAL),
and ears are Walkman (Fernandez and Alegre 1988: 156).
At first glance, a switch from “char siu”to “pork asado”does
not follow an obvious pattern of euphemism. However, a history
of Chinese exclusion, cultural quarantine, and “yellow peril”
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51
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reveals otherwise: the ostensibly foreign-sounding “char siu”
might very well have been tainted and defiled by the cultural
histories of the Chinese in the Spanish and American empires.
This name change, quite possibly effected to cater to a popu-
lar audience still reeling from an American invasion and
Spanish-era privilege in nostalgic memory, echoes the name
changes that occurred among the Chinese population in the
Philippines. An 1849 decree from Spain required that
subjects in the Philippines adopt Hispanic surnames. The
Southern Chinese community in the Philippines therefore
romanized their names or adopted Spanish ones. Furthermore,
because the Chinese would go by different names throughout
their lifetimes (further fueling the fires of anti-Chinese suspi-
cion), these name changes were meant to be permanent so as
to easily document them as Spanish subjects. But many kept
both names, leading to further confusion and distrust among
the Spanish administration and the American government that
followed. Richard T. Chu (2010: 111–15) argues that name
changing was adopted in order to maintain Chinese Manileños’
inclusionin the cultural and commercial enterprise, but retain-
ing the original name allowed them to confuse their colonial
masters by means of developing a hybrid identity.
Therefore, siopao reflects how the colonial Chinese nego-
tiated their identity in a multicolonized Manila.
10
They
carved entrepreneurial and social spaces for themselves, and
by the late twentieth century, developed mythologies around
their culture and cuisine. As the most famous example of sio-
pao’s penetration into Manila’s foodways, Ma Mon Luk and
his restaurants present a case study of how Chinese migrants
used food and origin narratives to construct ethnic identity in
a city that would become a nexus of pan-Philippine migration.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, siopao also
remains squarely quotidian, crossing class and spatial lines from
the restaurant and back out into the streets. Vendors offer pares
(pairs of food), including siopao and mami, as well as puto
(steamed rice cakes) and dinuguan (pork blood stews). More
broadly, Chinese Filipino culture has become more main-
stream (such as Chinese New Year becoming an official holi-
day), while new Chinese immigrants of all classes have
brought about the veritable gentrification of Binondo, import-
ing new Chinese regional cuisines as well as increasing the
value of premium real estate. Siopao, in juxtaposition with these
new foods in Binondo and elsewhere in the city, has moved
in tandem with the older generations of Chinese Filipinos in
local memory, becoming more mainstream Filipino.
11
Today, siopao is a global phenomenon, carried around the
world by the Filipino diaspora and the international trade of
Philippine foods. In particular, Ma Mon Luk’s products have
become ingrained in Philippine culinary parlance. Today,
instant mami is shipped worldwide (Gallardo et al. 2004). Var-
ious brands of Pancit Canton (Cantonese noodles named as a
variation of Fujianese pancit), in instant noodle form, are
shipped from the Philippines to the United States among over
$7 billion worth of exports, where they make their way into
sari-sari (variety) stores and turo-turo (counter-service) restau-
rants, and ultimately into the pantries of Filipinos abroad.
Siopao can be found in many Filipino stores’freezers in North
America and is usually packed in children’s school lunches or
as a casual snack. Turo-turo stores in Toronto, Canada, for in-
stance, abundantly stock siopao in their fridges, made in-house
or sourced locally from Filipina women bakers in surrounding
neighborhoods or in church communities.
12
But even these
diasporic siopaos have their own longer twentieth-century his-
tories, further evidencing the vastly transpacific and simulta-
neously deeply local nature of both food and ethnic identity.
For instance, along the west coast of the United States in the
1920s and 1930s, Filipinos also enjoyed the pork buns of
Chinese vendors—despite probably never having eaten urban
siopao before. In similar fashion as in Manila, legal racial seg-
regation forced Filipinos and Chinese to live in close quarters,
situating Chinatowns right next to Little Manilas. Cantonese
bakeries found allies among the Filipino community, who en-
joyed their wares well into the postwar period. For instance,
Yet Bun Heong in Stockton, California, had been open for
over a century, but by 1972 had moved into Little Manila’s
Filipino Plaza. Mutually excluded in the continental United
States—as their brethren across the Pacific had been in
Manila—Filipinos and Chinese in North America would mix
and mingle through the warmth of freshly steamed siopao.
13
According to the earlier-quoted Doreen Fernandez (1988:
146), Chinese food has become indigenized and incorporated
into the Philippine diet. Speaking to Filipinos she proclaimed
that siopao and other Chinese-derived foods are sariling atin—
“of our own”—despite their foreign origins. The stories and
sites of siopao abroad offer support for Fernandez’s musings:
Filipinos could get their siopao from local stores, which in
turn source them from local bakers, and they are consumed in
school lunches and home snacks. Siopao occupies a distinctly
Filipino identity in the diaspora, and it seems to move away
from its Chinese-segregated past. But even in the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries and a contemporary global Philippines,
especially in North American multicultural cities, its similar-
ities to char siu bao and dim sum foods are too obvious to
ignore. If siopao is truly to be sariling atin, then a Filipino iden-
tity resembles a collection of diverse culinary contributions—
not a monolithic melting pot.
GASTRONOMICA
52
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Acknowledgments
This research paper was supported by the University of
Toronto Excellence Awards in the Social Sciences and
Humanities, from 2013–14. Many thanks to Lissa Caldwell and
Carla Takaki Richardson at Gastronomica for working with
me on this piece from submission to finish. My heartfelt grati-
tude goes to Martin F. Manalansan and Dawn B. Mabalon, for
incredible insights and wonderful reviews. Also thanks to the
many Filipino cooks, bakers, restauranteurs, business owners,
servers, and students for their generous time for interviews and
new directions. In particular, thanks to the wonderful Camille
Galindez for giving me an insider scoop regarding the intrica-
cies of Filipino local businesses and trade. I thank Daniel
Bender, Jeffrey Pilcher, and Rick Halpern for inspiring this
project, and introducing me to the field of food studies, start-
ing with the rich histories right at home in Scarborough, On-
tario. Finally, my many thanks to Daniela for her inspiring
intellectual passion in food politics and culinary passion in
eating all things carbohydrate—especially the many versions
of my pork buns.
NOTES
1. Irene Tinker’s Street Foods Project in the 1970s–1990s offers a
good launching pad for thinking about street foods, but as
classifications these heuristics are far too restrictive for this essay
(Tinker 1997).
2. With the story of Ma Mon Luk later in the essay, the move from
exclusively street food to restaurant fare (and, subsequently, school
lunches and home snacks in the diaspora) suggests a pattern of social
elevation that might be synonymous with increasing migrant
affluence in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
3. Thanks to Martin F. Manalansan for this insight.
4. Of course, this is not limited to the Filipino case; in Honolulu,
manapua is associated with the manapua man of local nostalgia,
who is a street vendor of pork buns, noodles, and pork hash. Many
myths—similar to the ones in this Manila case—appear with
regard to the manapua man, though this is beyond the scope of
this essay.
5. These anxieties stretch across the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, as a result of Western aggression and imperialism in the
Far East and elsewhere in the world. Scholars have productively
explored the links between Chinese immigration anxieties and
African slavery in recent years in terms of labor and empire (Jung
2006). These anxieties as they manifest in the Philippines, therefore,
are part of an even larger set of global “intimacies across four
continents,”as the critic Lisa Lowe (2015) suggests.
6. As I developed this project and brought up Ma Mon Luk to
interviewees and others in the Filipino community in Toronto, the
mere mention of the restaurant prompted many to ask me: “So do
they really serve cat meat?”
7. “Mami at Siopao ng Ma Mon Luk: ABS-CBN,”YouTube video,
uploaded 2009.
8. Jeffrey Pilcher’sPlanet Taco (2012) meditates on carne asada,asa
celebratory dish in Mexico; its methods of preparation and serving
do not resemble “pork asado”at all.
9. Contemporary online recipes cite these as common ingredients.
I compared recipes on Google for “siopao asado”and “char siu,”
using links such as allrecipes.com and Panlasang Pinoy.
10. The quotidian place of these Chinese vendors in Manila under
the Japanese occupation is beyond the scope of this essay.
11. I am indebted to Martin F. Manalansan for these insights.
12. In the summer of 2014 I surveyed thirteen Filipino stores in
Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. While several had noodles and
other viands ready on a hot tray, not a single store had siopao for
public display. The buns were to be found in freezers in the sari-sari
section of the store for separate purchase to take home. In contrast
with a prolific take-out or casual dine-in siopao culture in Manila
(Guevarra 1997), siopao preparation and consumption in
Scarborough seems to be almost exclusively a private and personal
affair.
13. I thank Dawn B. Mabalon for this wonderful local history and
her transnational insights.
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