This oral history project documents the stories, memories, and experiences of the Filipino-Chinese community, preserving voices that are often left unheard or unrecorded. Through conversations with people across generations, I explore what it means to be Filipino-Chinese and what “home” means across borders.
Immigrants of Chinese Descent
Participant IM01; Age 67
Participant IM03; Age 60
First and Second Generation
Participant FG01; Age 25
Participant FG03; Age 45
Participant IM02; Age 49
Participant IM04; Age 62
Participant FG02; Age 60
Participant SG01; Age 70
Our Stories: An Exhibition
After conducting these interviews, I didn’t want my recordings to simply sit in a random folder on my laptop. Knowing that my family was part of a well-established Fil-Chi community, I wanted to bring these stories back to the people who had lived alongside them. On August 16, I presented my findings, hoping to shed light on the experiences and stories that often remain unspoken within our community. After the event, I was surprised by how many people related to what I had shared. Some had last seen me when I was ten, before COVID and my move to China, yet they were now listening to me speak about experiences that had shaped who I became. Standing in front of them, I felt empowered by the realization that my own voice could create space for stories that are so often overlooked. By the end of the event, I knew that I loved discovering and sharing the stories of people who too often go unheard.
I didn’t want the exhibition to end when the event did. I reached out to local newspapers and actively pursued opportunities to have my exhibition published, hoping to bring these stories to an even wider audience.
A Chinese-language Philippine newspaper covering current affairs, business, culture, and stories relevant to the Filipino-Chinese community.
The Philippines’ oldest continuously operating Chinese-language newspaper, founded in 1919 and long serving the country’s Chinese-Filipino community.
A major Chinese-language Philippine newspaper founded in 1981, providing news and perspectives for the Filipino-Chinese community and broader Chinese-speaking readership.
Letter Writing Activity:
Dear...
In the film Dear You, a grandfather originally from Chaoshan writes letters to his wife from Thailand after leaving home, sharing his memories and experiences from afar. Inspired by this movie, I prepared an activity for audiences to write a letter to their ancestors, parents, and younger selves as a way to reflect about their own immigration journey.
Transcript from the exhibition
Good Day! 大家好! I want to first invite you to think of this question. What is something special or something you learned about the Filipino culture? What about Chinese culture? And what about the Filipino Chinese culture?
After looking at these responses, notice how we do not reveal much about the Filipino Chinese cultures as opposed to the other two. After living in China for six years, I felt disconnected from the community that has raised me and solidified a big part of my identity. This is one of the few reasons why I started an oral history project aimed at interviewing different generations of the Filipino Chinese community. I will share three interviews that stuck with me and what I learned from it today.
For one my of my interviews, I spoke to someone who was born and raised in the Philippines. It was their parents and grandparents who first immigrated here from China. They shared the story of how their grandparents started out with a small sari-sari store which eventually grew into a large business. After this interview, I thought of how our minds and way of thinking is something all of us in the Filipino Chinese community share. Many, like my parents, came to the Philippines with almost nothing and worked extremely hard to get to where we are today. Lessons and values of being hard working and being smart with our money is something that is universal, yes, but also a defining characteristic of our community. It’s hard to picture Filipino Chinese without the business aspect of our lives.
For another interview, I invited someone who came to the Philippines when they were only 9 years old. In their interview, they revealed cultural shocks they had experienced. Coming here, the food was different, everything was fried and heavily involved oil as opposed to how daily Chinese cuisine was mostly steamed. The language was obviously different as well because Filipino and Chinese are vastly different languages with different syntax and way of writing. But most of all, the people were different. It was hard interacting with the larger Filipino community because they would have assumptions about us because of the way we look and being Chinese. For many immigrants, there was always a survival mask they had to wear, which even their own children had to wear even if they were born here. This is another similarity between everyone in our community.
I then spoke to someone else who also came to the Philippines when they were also young and brought up a perspective I think is worth sharing. As with many of my interviews, we talked about the hardships of why this person came to Manila and the challenges they had endured. Towards the end of the interview, they revealed to me that there are so many stories that are not talked about enough in the Filipino Chinese community.
In all the interviews i had conducted, I realized there is a lot I still do not understand about the Filipino Chinese culture. It is in part because I don’t talk to my parents a lot because I am busy with school and preparing for college. Even now, I do have some trouble presenting today because my Chinese is not as fluent as my English. Being a child in this modern era, we spend so much time online, on our phones and social media — this effect is unavoidable. We are therefore exposed to cultures that are not our own — for example, I grew up watching American movies and shows, listening to American music, and reading stories about American characters. While at times there would be Filipino representation or Chinese representation in the media I consume and surround myself with, there was never a time that I saw a Filipino-Chinese character represented in American nor Filipino nor Chinese media. I only grew up hearing about stories of our community through my parents during dinner. And when I started going to an international school, no one knew about our community.
We often hear stories about Filipino Chinese families who came to the Philippines, built businesses, worked hard, and eventually found financial success. These stories are important, but they are not the whole story. Behind that success are stories of loneliness, loss, family separation, and the pressure to constantly prove ourselves. Sometimes, we become so focused on the parts of our identity that are visible from the outside that we forget about the experiences that shaped them.
That is what I began to understand through these interviews. There is no single Filipino Chinese experience. We share values, traditions, and struggles, but every generation experiences them differently. Some grew up entirely in the Philippines. Some arrived as immigrants. Some feel more Chinese, some more Filipino, and some, like me, feel somewhere in between.
After six years away from the Philippines, these conversations helped me realize that belonging does not mean having one clear identity. Sometimes, it means recognizing the different stories, places, and people that have shaped you. And perhaps that is what makes the Filipino Chinese community so special. We are not defined by one story, but by thousands of stories that continue to cross borders, generations, and cultures.