A Filipino Christmas- Advent #5
Welcome to the fifth in a series of Advent posts. I will be sending these out every few days, some will be paywalled, and you should think of them as a kind of literary advent calendar. Today, we’re looking at Clinton Palanca, the brilliant Filipino writer who died too young, and Christmas in his homeland.
“Enjoying retro food is like eating nostalgia—but you can’t have too much of it, and at the end of the meal you have to come back to the present. And that’s a good thing because in the present is where we have to live,” wrote Clinton Palanca in his essay ‘Why we enjoy retro food’ for the Philippine Daily Enquirer. “I don’t view these as signs of a retrograde cultural heritage, but just a willingness to let good things from the past hang around,” he added.
Palanca’s childhood was dominated by the effects of Ferdinand Marcos’s years in power, “a time when roads would go unpaved for years, and our street was dubbed “surface of the moon” (though this didn’t stop us from riding our bikes outside).” And, of course, it was martial law, and there were “checkpoints and ‘salvaged’ bodies covered with newspapers.”
Against this backdrop of oppressive rule and a history of colonialism and occupation, he has asked, “What’s an authentic Filipino way of celebrating Christmas? Because we don’t belong to any community, or because we belong to too many communities, we don’t have a prescribed way of observing the holidays. Who knows? Traditions were meant to be broken or at least tinkered with. The world alternates between Apollonian and Dionysian moments, and the last few years have certainly been the latter: upheaval, breaking with the past.” A country with a history of colonial rule, foreign interference, and intersecting trade interests is fertile ground for the new. Hence, its people have to be extra tenacious about the traditions they want to keep. And sometimes, this means redefining them, so they become benign, stripped of their sometimes-painful history. This is especially true at Christmas. It’s how kitsch works too.
Palanca died in 2019, aged just 49. His works include The Mad Tea Party: The Pleasures of Taste and The Gullet: Dispatches on Philippine Food, and he won awards for his short stories. In a tribute, writer Rafael A. S. G. Ongpin remembers: “More than a decade ago, in casual conversation, I congratulated Thelma San Juan for recruiting Clinton to Inquirer Lifestyle for him to write about food. She, however, was not entirely convinced at the time (as I was) that Clinton would be “the next Doreen Fernandez.”
“Sure, he writes well,” said Thelma, “but he doesn’t stay on topic. The more I remind him to write about food, the more he writes about everything else but food!”
Fernandez certainly had academic rigour, and Palanca was a student of hers; he has been clear about her influence on his work. I don’t believe in ‘the next’ anything, though. Fernandez had her beat, Palanca had his, and their voices remain contemporary. (For example, read Palanca’s essay ‘Bite Me, I’m Brown and Oily’ in The Gullet: Dispatches on Philippine Food, where he talks about the relative scarcity of Filipino food in London where he once lived and its generally low profile around the world: “Look at this! It’s all brown! How are we going to market this abroad?”) He’d surely have written for Vittles had he lived.
The paradox of being Filipino is to love the foreign. There are Spanish and Mexican influences, and Hindi-Indian, American, French, Japanese, and Chinese from a trading relationship that has lasted over half a millennia. “As Filipinos, we like to bring things home,” he writes. [Also, see Amy Besa’s framework which, and I paraphrase here, can be summarised as food that was always ‘theirs’ and ‘food Filipinos borrowed and made their own.’] It was impossible for Palanca to “stay on topic” when his own nation’s food had a history of not doing so.
The Buko Pie, made with sweet young coconut and a butter or shortening crust, is a marvellous example of how local ingredients have married American pie traditions. My friend Benilda buys hers from a baker in Batangas for Christmas. She makes her version of a Spanish Leche flan and, with her neighbours, prepares Lechon (roast suckling pig) in their shared courtyard for Noche Buena, a Filipino feast held on Christmas Eve, just before midnight. They eat bibingka – rice cakes sprinkled with Edam cheese, eggs, butter and sugar, wrapped in banana leaves and baked, and bright fruit salads that remind her of the Ambrosia she was served in the American South.
“Pinoy Spaghetti is always served,” she told me. “It has even more sugar in it at Noche Buena in my home. The sweetness is very American, the noodles from our history with China and other countries in the east, and we use banana ketchup instead of the Italian sugo because when the spaghetti was popularised here, tomatoes were in short supply.” Sugary snacks are much-loved at Christmas, although she has to limit them because of diabetes. “As a child, I would be awake late for carols and mass, and we would buy bags of bichu (churros) flavoured with sweetened powdered milk to eat from kiosks near the church.”
Benilda sometimes cooks Tinolang Manok, the gingery chicken soup served for Christmas that is so loved it has earned a place in a Filipino Christmas song. It has been mentioned in Noli Me Tangere, José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda’s first novel. In it, we see “how a chicken wing and neck in a friar’s dish of tinola can disturb the joy of a feast” after Kapitan Tiago serves it up to Crisostomo Ibarra upon his arrival from Spain. Tinola is considered a simple dish, and its serving at a formal dinner symbolises the Filipino desire for self-rule and determination.
And so we return to Palanca, who worked in the tradition of viewing food as a lens through which to understand everything else, including his country’s struggle to be free. “Saying that Clinton Palanca writes about food is kind of like saying Marcel Proust wrote about remembering stuff,” said fellow Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Ruel S. De Vera said. Benilda agrees. “I understand this most when I travel. I can eat the food I grew up with and celebrate Christmas as a proud Filipina wherever I am because we are globalised now. I am not saying this is always a good thing, though,” she tells me in an email.
“Palunca’s writing made me consider distance, nostalgia and homesickness and my relationship to Filipina food, politics, and culture, especially during festival times. I am a person born in a country that has so many different cultural cuerdas [strands, bonds, tethers) I sometimes have to be Filipina elsewhere to truly feel Filipina en casa. At Noche Buena, I feel this even more strongly.”
Further reading: Benilda recommends this piece on Palanca by Manuel L. Quezon III on identifying with cuisine and identity, away from home.
Returning home for Christmas in National Geographic. Disney’s Christmas advert from 2020 highlights a Paskong Pinoy (Filipino Christmas)
Some Noche Buena recipes.
Filipino food in London via The Adobros.
How Edam became a Noche Buena tradition by Bettina Makalintal.
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