Trumpets: The Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and Filipino Jazz

In an unnamed Shanghai dance hall, “an American was holding a German. A Spaniard was holding a Russian. Portuguese bumped into people of mixed blood; inebriated people from Siam, France, Italy, Bulgaria” danced to their hearts’ content. Yokomitsu Riichi painted this exhilarating and romanticized picture in his 1925 novel, Shanghai. On the stage of this dance hall, “trombones and coronets swung about. Teeth were exposed from the dark skin of a band from Manila.”Footnote ¹ Though blurred by the constructed reality of fiction, the Filipinos on stage in Yokomitsu’s novel reflected a historical reality during Shanghai’s jazz age.Footnote ² If you entered a jazz club in Shanghai in the 1930s, chances are you would be doing the foxtrot to the beat of a Filipino band.

While some Shanghai residents might have associated Filipinos with the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and mercenary armies, many more associated them with classical music and jazz, and some historians have followed suit. Historian Chen Chen goes so far as to write, “Filipino musicians had become synonymous with jazz in old Shanghai.”Footnote ³ Another scholar, with similar pomp, notes that the “Filipino bands dominate[d]” the jazz scene in Shanghai.Footnote ⁴ Journalist Chang Hsiangyi, meanwhile, writes that, among the five or six hundred active musicians in Shanghai, “Filipino bands are the most famous.”Footnote ⁵ Popular Filipino bands sprouted up across the city in the 1920s and 1930s, becoming an important part of the cultural ecosystem of Shanghai. Before Filipinos became connected with jazz, however, they had made a name for themselves in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.

This section pieces together a social history of Filipinos in the city using archival documents of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra from the 1880s to the 1920s and published memoirs and newspaper accounts of the jazz club night scene from the 1920s to the 1940s. Together, these documents show a vibrant and visible community that crossed paths with both the city’s elite and the city’s underclass. Challenging received assumptions about Western cultural influence on China, this section argues that Filipinos, who became closely connected with classical music and jazz in Shanghai, acted as one of the primary translators of these mediums to China.

Filipinos first gained fame as musicians in the city through the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra.Footnote ⁶ The first conductor, Spanish musician Melchior Vela, led a trip to “Manila where he recruited 19 men” for the band three years after its founding in 1878.Footnote ⁷ Spanish imperial linkages created opportunities for Filipinos in Shanghai just as they had created opportunities for Filipino seafarers and musicians in the Americas, and Filipinos took full advantage of those opportunities by uprooting their lives and starting over in a new land.Footnote ⁸ From Vela’s first recruiting trip up to the mid-1920s, Filipinos accounted for the majority of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra’s members.

Leaders of the Shanghai Municipal Council, which sponsored the ensemble, had many reasons to direct administrators to recruit Filipino band members. Historian Robert Bickers notes that “the most likely reason for the recruitment of Filipinos was that Spanish rule had fostered the development of a tradition of Filipino involvement in the colonial administration’s military and civil bands and musical life.”Footnote ⁹ While this certainly factored in, practical concerns like the physical proximity of the recruits also shaped the decision. The Philippines was considerably closer than other talent pools.Footnote ¹⁰ Why send a recruiter to Italy, Mexico, or France when the Philippines was a four-day steamship ride away?

Shanghai ratepayers also viewed the hiring of Filipinos as an affordability issue because Filipinos received less compensation on average than European players.Footnote ¹¹ As with the unnamed “Manilamen” who were assaulted by lekin runners, the Filipino band members were both visible and invisible, central yet overlooked, at least from white eyes. They shared some aspects of foreign privilege, which helped them land jobs in the first place, but they could not hide their physiognomy, which shaped the fates of many humans during this era of pseudo-science–infused racism. The governing class expressed no moral qualms when prying wages out of their dark complexion.

The advantages of hiring Filipinos ensured that the Orchestra remained a Filipino band for the first four decades of its existence. However, when Mario Paci, the institution’s most famous and longest tenured conductor, took charge in 1919, Filipinos gradually yielded their positions to Russians and Italians.Footnote ¹² After the Great War and its accompanying budget shortfalls, the Orchestra employed only seven European musicians and nineteen Filipinos.Footnote ¹³ In 1920, a year after Mario Paci’s ascension, the number shifted dramatically to seventeen Europeans and twenty-two Filipinos.Footnote ¹⁴ From that point on, the numbers began to favor players of European descent. In 1927 the band consisted of thirty Europeans and fourteen Filipinos, and in 1940 it had forty-three Europeans, three Filipinos, and four Chinese people.Footnote ¹⁵

Why did Paci, with the support of Shanghai Municipal Council members and ratepayers, weed out Filipino musicians? Most institutions evolve if they survive over half a century, and the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra was no exception. What was a limited music scene with few standout performers and a small listening audience in the 1880s had blossomed into a field of abundant talent and fierce competition by the 1930s, especially after the Depression set in and more people searched for work.Footnote ¹⁶ By 1929, 13,000 Russians lived in the city, and many of them needed a job and possessed musical ability.Footnote ¹⁷ In other words, the availability of Russian and other musicians in Shanghai made recruitment abroad unnecessary, or as Paci himself put it, “Manila offers no more advantages from a musical standpoint than those already obtainable in Shanghai.”Footnote ¹⁸

Logistics of recruitment and the growth of local talent aside, transforming into a more European-looking band had become a selling point for Mario Paci and other government officials. Authors of the Annual Report of the Shanghai Municipal Council, for example, delightedly informed Shanghai ratepayers that “the Orchestra never rendered better music than at the concerts towards the end of 1925,” noting that “this is due, particularly to the increase in the number of good European musicians, to compensate for the decrease in Filipino musicians of less skill.”Footnote ¹⁹

Though Mario Paci and his backers ostensibly replaced Filipinos with Europeans to increase the “skill” of the Orchestra, it does not take a trained historian to read between the lines. I contend that British, American, and other privileged white members of the Shanghai community intentionally whitewashed the public band to claim control and ownership of the medium of classical music, which had, up to that time, been stewarded by Filipinos. To put it another way, adhering to the circular supremacist logic of imperialism, they wanted to “restore” Europeans to their “proper” place as progenitors of music and civilization. In this regard, the leaders of the Shanghai Municipal Council were partially successful in the short term, but tremendously successful in the long term, as we will explore in this chapter’s conclusion on erasure and distortion.

Though largely lost in the wildfires of popular memory and controlled burns of historiography, the lives of Filipino and other band members endured in flame-resistant seeds found deep in the recesses of the archives.Footnote ²⁰ The records of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, for instance, give us unique insights into their lives. They show how Claro Legaspi, who carried the name of the Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi, cultivated a new career by moving to Shanghai and landing a white-collar job in the Orchestra in 1905.Footnote ²¹ Like any white-collar job, work at the Orchestra had its perks, but it also demanded mental and physical devotion.

During his long career in Shanghai, Legaspi only managed two trips back to the Philippines. It was simply too difficult to find time for the trip. He applied for a leave of absence in May of 1920, for instance. However, due to the Orchestra’s packed summer schedule, the conductor asked him to put his plans on hold until September, knowing full well that it had been ten years since he had last stepped foot in his homeland.Footnote ²² After some foot-dragging by the Band Committee, Legaspi and his wife and children finally received permission to take the Empress of Asia steamship back home later that year. Legaspi and his family traveled second class, of course, but at least the Municipal Council footed the bill.Footnote ²³

Claro Legaspi received several raises over the years.Footnote ²⁴ A June 30, 1923, notification from the band’s conductor recommended the continuation of his employment and an increase in pay to $160 per month.Footnote ²⁵ However, three years later, in the midst of the Orchestra’s transformation, Conductor Paci wrote to the Band Committee, “Mr. Legaspi, after 21 years service [sic] and being aged at 52 years, has not any longer that grade of efficiency required to fill the place of third Trombone-Player in the Orchestra.”Footnote ²⁶ Although Legaspi received a year and a half of severance pay, he did not enjoy the same retirement pension as white employees. This disparity in compensation would become a major point of contention between the band’s Filipino and European players.Footnote ²⁷

In response to his sudden change in fortune, Legaspi sent a plea to Assistant Conductor A. de Kryger, who appears to have been closer to the band’s Filipino players than Conductor Paci. It read,

At age 52, distant from both the vigor of youth and the land of his ancestors, Claro Legaspi found himself unemployed. The nimble hands that had so adroitly navigated the curves of his trombone to create and sustain a career and livelihood in Shanghai had abandoned him as they took up the pen to write a heartfelt plea. The tone of his words suggests that he knew the appeal would land on deaf ears. All he had left were his wits and a small stipend to support his family.

Legaspi could have turned to jazz like some of his colleagues, but instead, relying on the same entrepreneurial spirit that had brought him to Shanghai in the first place, he pioneered a different path. He found a new job as conductor. Jinan University, a Shanghai-based school that catered to overseas Chinese students, hired him as the “Conductor of the University Orchestra.”Footnote ²⁹ In an interesting twist, at Jinan, he taught “returned” overseas Chinese students, including some from the Philippines. After holding the position for several years, Legaspi returned to the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra on a temporary basis. Perhaps things were turning around for him, but it was hard to say with the state of the global economy during the Great Depression. He could only play music; the rest was up to God.

The Shanghai Municipal Orchestra files reveal much that the International Settlement census could not. Personal stories of family, misfortune, prejudice, and community come to life in the private letters of the conductor and assistant conductor. The death of an employee always impacts an institution, and when well-regarded violinist Benito C. Sado died suddenly in 1932 while still an active member of the Orchestra, the assistant conductor wrote, “Sado has been a member of the Orchestra and Band for nearly 20 years and has always given his best, he was a very good musician and also a very honest and reliable man, whose death means a great loss to the Municipal Orchestra and Band.”Footnote ³⁰ After what was no doubt a frustrating back-and-forth with the Shanghai Municipal Council, Benito Sado’s wife Mary Kou Sado eventually received her husband’s full superannuation.Footnote ³¹

Other band members and their families were less fortunate. P. Natividad, a talented player fluent in two instruments, became sick in 1933 with a growth in his throat. Unable to perform due to the nature of the illness, he lost his source of income and had trouble making hospital payments. In a highly contested business decision, the Band Committee declined to support Natividad financially because he no longer worked for the band. He died in November, a few months after becoming ill. To help their colleague and his family, Filipino members of the Orchestra financed his funeral, and the Municipal Council eventually granted six months’ pay to his widow.Footnote ³²

Though the snapshots into the lives of Natividad and Sado are brief and incomplete, they provide valuable information. Judging from Mary Kou Sado’s name, she was likely ethnic Chinese, which hints at the romantic relationships formed in Shanghai. The way the Filipino band members rallied around their ailing mate suggests a vibrant support network much like the more formalized Chinese network in the Philippines. As far as I could tell during my research, apart from one World War II-era musicians’ union, there was no community newspaper or organization uniting Filipinos, but this anecdotal evidence hints at a type of unity.Footnote ³³ On a different note, one chronicler alluded to a different type of communal cohesion when he described the “Manila cock-pit in bamboo town” that was “in full swing every Sunday afternoon.”Footnote ³⁴ The disputes over pensions, severance, and health insurance show how Filipinos faced an uphill battle fighting for basic rights with the Euro-American–Japanese-dominated Municipal Council.

Let us turn finally to Filipino achievement and Chinese viewership. C. de Castro and F. M. Calibo, two long-tenured and particularly well-regarded Filipino band members, set the bar for achievement. During his twenty-seven-year career, to the chagrin of some of his European peers, de Castro became the assistant conductor, occasionally conducting the half band on his own when both halves were requested for concurrent performances.Footnote ³⁵ In 1908, before the rise of Conductor Paci, the Band Committee even entrusted Mr. de Castro to travel to Manila to recruit additional band members, but de Castro declined due to poor health.Footnote ³⁶ F. M. Calibo played the piano and clarinet. He served on the Orchestra for thirty-seven years from 1905 to 1942. Unlike other Filipino players who retired due to old age, whitewashing policies, or underperformance in the 1930s, Calibo remained in the Band until its disbandment in World War II.Footnote ³⁷

The Orchestra initially served only foreigners and the city’s super wealthy, but after the success of the Northern Expedition of 1927, the Municipal Council expanded access to the Orchestra, allowing ordinary Chinese residents to attend. However, even before this expansion, the half orchestra or individual band members would play at private gatherings, which led to considerable exposure of the Filipino band members to Shanghai locals. The Chin Woo Athletic Association, for example, requested the services of a “Manila pianist” on April 9, 1921.Footnote ³⁸ The Orchestra sent F. M. Calibo. Apparently satisfied with his services, the Chin Woo Athletic Association requested Calibo’s services twice more over the ensuing years, the second time also requesting Claro Legaspi.Footnote ³⁹ Although restrictions prevented Chinese individuals in Shanghai from viewing Orchestra performances before 1928, private shows opened spaces for personal interactions.Footnote ⁴⁰

During the summer season, weather permitting, the band performed outside in Jessfield Park, and in the winter, they played in the regal Lyceum Theater. However, during downtimes, with the Band Committee’s sanction, Filipino band members performed for the city’s Chinese elite at weddings, dance parties, and other gatherings. In 1923, for instance, Claro Legaspi, a rather popular private performer, served as bandmaster for a Chinese band at a meeting of the Shanghai Charitable Societies.Footnote ⁴¹ This no doubt served him well when he later applied to be the conductor at Jinan University. Two years earlier, Lord Robert Lee, the grandson of Li Hongzhang (李鴻章), requested the “Municipal Filipino Band” to perform at his mother’s funeral.Footnote ⁴²

In this interesting but telling slip of tongue, Lee hinted at a general association between the Orchestra and Filipinos among Shanghai’s residents. And these examples represent only a fraction of the requests received by the Orchestra over the years. The number of private performances ensured that the Orchestra and its Filipino band members gained visibility and renown. The Orchestra also frequently played for the Shanghai Volunteer Corps, which exposed the Filipino bandmembers to even wider audiences. As a result, for many of the city’s residents, Filipinos came to epitomize classical music. The omnipresence of Filipinos in the cabarets and nightclubs further expanded the link between Filipinos and cultural innovation.

Consul General Mariano Ezpeleta stated upon his arrival in Shanghai in 1947 that “more than half of the Filipino residents in Shanghai dabble in music in the evenings.”Footnote ⁴³ Most Filipino jazz musicians did not play at Shanghai’s most prestigious facilities, which hosted the city’s wealthiest and most famous patrons or, as famous jazz pioneer and former Shanghai resident Whitey Smith called them, the “International 400.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Instead, Filipino jazz musicians worked in places that “catered less to foreigners and the native elite than to the Chinese urban petit bourgeoisie (xiao shimin),” like the city’s other famous jazz musicians, African Americans.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many onlookers and fellow jazz musicians, like Yokomitsu Riichi, Buck Clayton, and Whitey Smith, attested to the ubiquity of Filipinos in nightlife.

In a city where “movie actors and actresses were national celebrities and popular idols,” many Filipino musicians gained the trappings of fame.Footnote ⁴⁶ Pomping Villa headed “a good Filipino band of 12 people” at the Mandarin Club, a prestigious Shanghai nightclub.Footnote ⁴⁷ A big fish, he was “acknowledged as the foremost xylophone player in Shanghai.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Similarly, Apolo Dila, whom many considered “the best jazz trumpet player in the late 1930’s,” led a band called the Shanghai Swing Masters.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, the most famous Filipino musician, and “acknowledge[d] musical leader” of the community, was Don Jose Alindada.Footnote ⁵⁰ In an interview, Don Jose’s son recalled how his father leveraged his wealth and fame to cruise through Japanese checkpoints during World War II without showing his identification.Footnote ⁵¹

When Filipinos did not headline, they, along with the city’s Russian and Japanese musicians, filled out the cast of aspiring bands. Some Japanese bands, for instance, “employed Filipino bands with a few token Japanese members until the number of Japanese musicians in Shanghai made all-Japanese bands feasible,” again hinting at the ubiquity of Filipinos in the night scene.Footnote ⁵² Whitey Smith also formed an “International Band” that contained American, Filipino, Russian, and German players.Footnote ⁵³ The presence of Filipinos in the prestigious Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and Band only enhanced the status of Filipinos who played jazz. In this international city, Filipinos became jazz, and jazz became Filipino. However, this did not always carry a positive connotation, with some Chinese referring to Filipinos as “foreign piano devils.”Footnote ⁵⁴

Archival letters provide snapshots into the lives of Filipino orchestra players and their families, and memoirs and newspapers tell us colorful anecdotes about Filipino jazz musicians, but these sources remain fragmented and incomplete. Women’s voices are absent or derivative, and Filipinos who did not fit the middle-class mold outlined above have fallen through the cracks. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Filipinos had a vibrant and visible community that served a valuable function in the ecosystem of one of Asia’s most unique cities. Historical records also demonstrate how Filipinos overseas, or Feiqiao, lived different lives from both the seafaring mariners or “Manilamen” and the sojourning medical workers who have dominated research on Filipino mobile societies more recently.Footnote ⁵⁵ Restoring and situating the Shanghai Filipino community helps grow our understanding of the cosmopolitan city and Filipino migrations, and a similar approach toward the Chinese community in the Philippines helps us better understand migration and the new art of gatekeeping.

Ledgers: Banking, Import–Export, and the Bookkeeping Law

Chinese exclusion has long influenced conversations in Chinese-American and Asian-American studies in the United States, and recently, the topic has sprouted fresh interpretations and insights.Footnote ⁵⁶ Scholars have recast the earliest rendition of the 1882 nationwide act as an experimental “restriction” act that probed the limits of sovereignty, reserving the term “exclusion” for the revamped and better funded 1888 law.Footnote ⁵⁷ They have noted that businesspeople and educators in the United States vehemently opposed the legislation, lobbying for exemptions for students through the so-called side door and for merchants through the VIP door.Footnote ⁵⁸ Other scholars have linked American exclusionary measures with a global tide of anti-Asian sentiment and innovative gatekeeping techniques.Footnote ⁵⁹ The infamous but short-lived Philippine Bookkeeping Act, which banned Chinese business owners from maintaining their ledgers in Chinese, pioneered the next step in this xenophobic global movement, but it has fallen under the radar of researchers.

For their part, historians of the Philippines have recently begun to examine the consequences and logics of American exclusion in the archipelago. General Elwell S. Otis provisionally extended exclusion to the Philippines in 1898, and legislators cemented the policy in 1902.Footnote ⁶⁰ In banning the migration of Chinese laborers to the archipelago, architects of America’s empire deliberately distinguished themselves from their British and French peers, who turned to Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indian labor in their colonies after the end of the global slave trade.Footnote ⁶¹ When one American businessman attempted to recruit coolie laborers from China for a new rickshaw business in Manila in 1902, American administrators and Filipino union leaders lambasted him and shut down the project.Footnote ⁶² One by-product of this exclusionary policy, as mentioned before, was the formation of a comparatively small and wealthy Chinese community in the Philippines.

The population of Chinese in the Philippines hovered around 100,000 during the American colonial period, but, as mentioned before, that figure paled in comparison to communities in other colonies and polities in Southeast Asia where independent Chinese and global companies activated business, native-place, and kinship networks to recruit Chinese laborers. Historian Adam McKeown calculates that while 4 million Chinese people traveled to Thailand, 2 to 3 million crossed into Indochina, 4 million made it to the Dutch East Indies, and a staggering 11 million went to the Straits colonies, fewer than 1 million embarked for the Philippines.Footnote ⁶³ Colonial policy largely caused this discrepancy as both the Spanish and American colonial regimes took measures to reduce Chinese migration.

Filipino legislators during the American colonial period, following in the footsteps of Spanish and American colonial officials, took the next logical step in legal gatekeeping wizardry with the passage of the Bookkeeping Act of 1921. This act built on the foundation of the Exclusion Act in the United States and the Head Tax and White Australia Policy in Canada and Australia, but Filipino legislators acted as its main stewards. The law, Act No. 2972 of the Philippine legislature, required that all businesses maintain their financial transaction records in Spanish, English, or a native language of the Philippines – or in other words, any language other than Chinese.Footnote ⁶⁴ Legislators ostensibly passed this law to prevent tax evasion by Chinese and other foreign merchants who could have theoretically obscured their records by maintaining them in their native languages, but, as one economist sardonically retorted, “Dishonesty can be committed in any language.”Footnote ⁶⁵

What, then, was the actual intention of the legislation? It is hard to see the Bookkeeping Act as anything other than an attempt to disadvantage the remaining Chinese people in the Philippines. As with other forms of legislative gatekeeping, its designers hid their objectives behind the veil of sovereignty. Jaime C. de Veyra, a Filipino legislator who championed the School of Forestry in Los Baños, which we will return to in Chapter 4, described the Bookkeeping Act as an innocent attempt to correct for “irregularities of books of Chinese firms.”Footnote ⁶⁶ By making this argument, he, like the drafters of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States and the Chinese Head Tax in Canada, described the passage of the law as an act of sovereignty, writing, “it is a sovereign right for a country to enact laws to protect the well-being of its citizens.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The Bookkeeping Act differed from exclusionist legislation in white settler states, however, because it targeted wealthy Chinese merchants instead of laborers. This represented a radical shift from legislation that built on the prejudices of white working-class settlers but preserved a hushed alliance among the world’s most wealthy. By targeting capital flows instead of the movement of people, the Bookkeeping Act more directly threatened the bottom lines of wealthy Chinese businesspeople in the archipelago and, therefore, potentially wealthy Filipino and Americans elsewhere. The class-sensitive nature of the law threatened to destabilize the unspoken class alliance that allowed a wealthy global elite, like those of the “International 400” in Shanghai, to grow their profits while avoiding some of the distastefulness of global xenophobia.Footnote ⁶⁸

Proponents of the Act defended it in one of two ways. The few American colonizers who supported the law viewed it as an opportunity for the United States to distinguish itself from imperial peers, like Japan, France, and England, by demonstrating a commitment to Filipinos first even if it entailed financial costs. Filipino legislators and businesspeople who designed and defended the Act viewed it as a form of affirmative action, using the same types of arguments that proponents of the New Economic Policy in Malaysia and the Filipino First Policy in the Philippines would use after independence. Instead of receiving preference, however, Filipino businesspeople gained a distinct legal advantage over their Chinese business competitors under the Bookkeeping Act.

Historian John E. Murray has meticulously pieced together economic reports to estimate Chinese wages in the Philippines during the early American colonial period, and his research helps shed light on what appears to have been a common Filipino perspective. According to Murray, Chinese wages in Manila exceeded those in Xiamen by “a factor of two or more,” making it an obvious draw for those who could make it to the archipelago. Once in Manila, “Chinese workers except the semiskilled were paid significantly more than Filipinos in the same occupation.”Footnote ⁶⁹ This discrepancy, mixed with the visibility of Chinese storefronts around the capital, likely led to native Filipino animosity toward the successful migrants, which begins to explain the willingness of legislators to experiment with the law. Just as some Chinese in Shanghai viewed Filipino jazz musicians as “foreign piano devils,” some Filipinos in Manila viewed Chinese businesspeople as foreign bookkeeping devils.

The American-appointed Philippine Commission proposed early versions of the Bookkeeping Act in 1912 and 1913 without success.Footnote ⁷⁰ Filipino legislators updated and rewrote the Bookkeeping Act in 1921 and passed it into law with the approval of the Governor General. After undergoing several court-ordered delays, the law went into effect on January 1, 1923. Failure to comply with the bookkeeping translation requirement resulted in imprisonment, or a fine of up to ₱10,000, which was a considerable sum at the time, especially for mom-and-pop store owners. As the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines noted in a letter to the Governor General, Chinese small businesses, which made up 90 percent of Chinese businesses in the archipelago, would suffer the most because they could not afford translators.Footnote ⁷¹

Although it could have undermined the community, the passage of the Bookkeeping Act appeared to unify Chinese in the Philippines. It helped them transform from a marginalized in-between community into a self-sufficient and activist one, just as wage discrimination in the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra and in Shanghai’s cabarets had for Filipinos in that city. In Manila, coordinated by the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce, community members tapped into their diverse acquaintance and business networks to challenge the law. The resistance campaign began with a high-stakes meeting of local leaders to discuss strategy.

At the meeting in 1921, Chinese leaders began to lay out a multilayered campaign to combat the Act in the Philippines, the United States, and around the world.Footnote ⁷² In the first phase of the plan, they drafted and submitted a protest memorial to the high-stakes Wood–Forbes Mission, which was at that time touring the Philippines to ascertain whether the Philippines was “ready” for independence.Footnote ⁷³ They also sent Albino Sycip (Xue Minlao 薛敏老), Dee C. Chuan (Li Qingquan 李清泉), and six other prominent members of the Chinese community to testify against the bill before the Philippine Senate Committee on Justice.Footnote ⁷⁴ Finally, they engaged native-place associations, business networks, and personal acquaintances to grow awareness of the new law.

As the Bookkeeping Act approached implementation, community leaders enacted phase two of their campaign, dispatching the young lawyer Albino Sycip and the veteran stalwart Rafael Machuca Go Tauco (Wu Kecheng 吳克誠) overseas to lobby for international support. Their ultimate destination was the United States Supreme Court, but they made many stops along the way, including one in China where they coauthored a stinging critique of the Bookkeeping Act in the Banking Journal. In the article, stressing the global ramifications of the law, they mused about what would happen if Chinese leaders passed a parallel law requiring American and Filipino merchants in China to keep their ledgers in Chinese.Footnote ⁷⁵

Careful to avoid making any unnecessary enemies, veiled threats against American businesses in China aside, Sycip and Go Tauco stressed camaraderie between Chinese and Filipinos in the article, reminding readers of the support mainland Chinese had offered to Philippine anti-imperial movements in the past.Footnote ⁷⁶ They informed Chinese readers that Filipino opinion toward the law was divided, noting that the editors of the Philippine Spanish dailies El Comercio, La Nation, and El Mercantile all opposed the law.Footnote ⁷⁷ Seeking to light a fire under the feet of their Chinese compatriots, they argued that should China wait for the law to pass before taking countermeasures, it would be too late.Footnote ⁷⁸

A well-organized cable and letter campaign accompanied the lobbying of Sycip and Go Tauco. Dee C. Chuan, a leading figure in this campaign, penned a personal letter to the Tianjin Chamber of Commerce where he outlined the details of the law and introduced Sycip and Go Tauco.Footnote ⁷⁹ Others took the campaign to the popular press in the Philippines, China, and the United States, securing the support of many American newspapers.Footnote ⁸⁰ In newspaper op-eds, Chinese in the Philippines systematically refuted the premise that Chinese cheated on their taxes. In a detailed analysis of import and export volume by Chinese merchants in the Philippines in the Shenbao, Gan Bun Cho (Yan Wenchu 顏文初) argued that the accusations that Chinese cheated on their tax reports were categorically false.Footnote ⁸¹

The concerted efforts of Chinese leaders in the Philippines and allies around the world secured the support of the Shanghai Chinese Chamber of Commerce, the Shanghai Bankers’ Union, the Shanghai Education Group, the Jiangsu Ministry of Education, the Nanjing Chamber of Commerce, the American Chamber of Commerce in China, and many other associations and organizations.Footnote ⁸² The American Chamber of Commerce in China communicated:

The American Chamber of Commerce might have been motivated to support their Chinese counterparts in the Philippines by the prospect of Chinese reprisals against American business interests in China, but, motivation aside, they became an ally in the campaign.Footnote ⁸⁴ Because of these initial lobbying efforts, colonial officials postponed the promulgation of the law to January 1, 1923. After going into effect, the campaign against the law shifted to the courts.

The Philippine government levied its first bookkeeping charge on the Chinese merchant Yu Cong Eng (Yang Kongying 楊孔鶯). With the assistance of Albino Sycip and Rafael Go Tauco, Yu Cong Eng sued. After two years in insular courts, the Philippine Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the law. This led to a final appeal to the United States Supreme Court that culminated in the June 7, 1926, ruling. Supreme Court Justice William Howard Taft, who had previously served as Governor General of the Philippines and the president of the United States, wrote the majority opinion. Taft struck down the law, writing,

This hard-fought victory for Chinese in the Philippines would not have been possible without the unity of the community and the support of allies across the globe.

Yet chirps of criticism about the anti-Bookkeeping campaign could be heard in the archipelago, and those critiques help historians better understand the complex position of Chinese in the Philippines. Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wenqing 林文慶), a prominent educator from Singapore who served as president of Xiamen University from 1921 to 1937, argued that Chinese in the Philippines should not have taken the dispute to the United States but instead resolved it locally by working with Filipino legislators.Footnote ⁸⁶ Lim felt that by bypassing the Philippine Senate, local Chinese leaders undercut the authority of Filipino elected representatives, creating a rift between the Chinese and Filipino communities in the archipelago.

Sycip and Dee, key architects of the resistance campaign, defended themselves by declaring that they did not intend to undermine the authority of Filipino legislatures, and that they had only turned to the courts and the United States as a last resort.Footnote ⁸⁷ Chinese in the Philippines had to address and negotiate through multiple layers of sovereignty. By internationalizing the campaign, engaging the popular press, and utilizing the court system, Chinese in the Philippines risked alienating potential allies in the postindependence world. It was a tough decision to make, but community leaders likely felt they had no other choice.

In the same way that Filipinos became linked with jazz and music in China, Chinese became intertwined with business and capital in the Philippines. Labor and financial disputes rocked both communities. The precarious position Chinese and Filipinos found themselves in left them with few options for formal redress.Footnote ⁸⁸ Under pressure, Filipinos in Shanghai turned to union action and flight to other industries such as jazz. Chinese in Manila, on the other hand, reached beyond imperial networks, tapping into business relationships, kinship networks, personal acquaintances, and the courts to challenge the Bookkeeping Act. In both circumstances, despite grave challenges, the communities remained intact if a little unsettled. World War II and the Cold War proved to be gamechangers, however.

Exodus and Entrenchment

Alfonso Z. Sycip (Xue Fenshi 薛芬士) stayed in the Philippines, while Honorio Evangelista packed his bags and left Shanghai after World War II. The conflict turned life on its head for many in Asia. Life savings dissolved, multi-generation homes succumbed to incendiaries, and necessities such as food and water evaporated. Many people, meanwhile, faced execution or imprisonment without pretext or recourse. The Cold War, instead of resolving the conflict in Asia, divided the region into camps, further complicating matters for families and individuals who had to either uproot themselves or weather the storms. The postwar choices of Sycip and Evangelista reflect some of the larger trends of the two communities. For the most part, Filipinos in Shanghai fled the reds, while Chinese in Manila feared the reds.

Alfonso Sycip, a community stalwart and prominent businessperson, was approaching retirement age when the war came, but that did not stop him from rallying the Chinese community in the Philippines to support the fight against Japan. As head of the Chamber of Commerce at the outbreak of the Sino–Japanese war, he organized the “Philippine Resist-the-Enemy Committee” to raise funds to send medicine, munitions, and aid to Chinese soldiers in occupied China.Footnote ⁸⁹ His anti-Japanese activity put him, along with many other prominent Chinese merchants and leaders in Manila, in a position of great peril when the war expanded to the archipelago on December 8, 1941.Footnote ⁹⁰

Japanese officials had already known about the Sycips before the invasion. Alfonso’s driver was a Japanese man who ended up serving as a Captain in the Imperial Army, and both Alfonso and his brother Albino were outspoken community leaders.Footnote ⁹¹ So, after the Japanese army occupied Manila, they promptly captured and imprisoned Alfonso and Albino. Some of Alfonso’s colleagues, like Gan Bun Cho, a reporter and educator who will appear again later in this book, were executed by Japanese soldiers.Footnote ⁹² Other Chinese in the Philippines took up arms against the Japanese invaders, joining both left- and right-leaning guerilla movements in the Luzon countryside.Footnote ⁹³

Alfonso Sycip, due to his advanced age, received a pardon from his Japanese captors, and, before they could change their minds, fled with many other members of the Sycip family to a remote island in the northern Philippines.Footnote ⁹⁴ In exile, Alfonso and his family lost touch with his brother, Albino, who had elected to go into hiding in Manila. After the liberation of the Philippines, but before the end of the war itself, Albino Sycip used his personal connections with General Douglas MacArthur to dispatch a rescue boat to Fuga Island where Alfonso and his family had isolated themselves.Footnote ⁹⁵ Fortunately, everyone was alive and well. Despite experiencing many hardships, the Sycips had more or less made it to the other end of the war unscathed, which was a boast few of their Chinese colleagues could make.

Filipinos in Shanghai had largely avoided critiquing Japan, theoretically decreasing the probability of Japanese reprisals against them, yet they likely felt insecure during the war nonetheless. Agapito Celis, a former Shanghai Volunteer Corps lieutenant, founded the Filipino Musicians Union of Shanghai in 1942 to “promote the welfare of Filipino musicians and to help destitute musicians.”Footnote ⁹⁶ As citizens in Shanghai turned their attention to the necessities of daily life during the war, the music industry withered, leaving Filipino musicians to fend for themselves. While it is difficult to gauge the reach of the Musicians Union, one document listed at least twenty-four members, including the Filipino celebrity, Don Jose Alindada.Footnote ⁹⁷

A brief cabaret revival spread across Shanghai after the war, and many Filipino musicians returned to their old grazing grounds. The Consul General of the Philippines in Shanghai, Mariano Ezpeleta, noted sardonically, “The smutty nightclubs and dancing parlours which suffered physical paralysis during the war had a biblically mystical resurrection when peace came.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Former Shanghai Volunteer Corps corporal and Caltex employee Guillermo Luchangco was elected president of a new community organization.Footnote ⁹⁹ After years of uncertainty and living in the margins, Filipinos finally had a government-like body representing them in Shanghai. However, even as the community regenerated after the drought, new storm clouds rumbled on the horizon that threatened to wash out the community entirely.

When “red shadows” descended upon Shanghai in 1949, many Filipinos, following Consulate directives, fled the city. Veterinarian Captain Honorio C. Evangelista of the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and his wife Nancy Ting Evangelista, with special permission from the US Congress, attained permanent residence in the United States for making “an extremely valuable contribution to the cause of the United States during and since hostilities ended in the Pacific.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Unfortunately for us, the American lawmakers did not elaborate on what the “valuable contribution” was, but it no doubt had something to do with the budding Cold War.

Leaving Shanghai was a tough decision, especially for those “raising a family of third generation Filipinos in this city of irresistible allurement.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ For many Filipinos, Shanghai had become home. And besides, the airlines were fully booked for a year and passenger ships like the Presidential Liners were booked for six months at that point, making departure difficult even after Filipinos accepted that necessity.Footnote ¹⁰² On the other end of the journey, when and if they finally did make it “home” to the Philippines, “many of these Filipinos brought with them their families of different nationalities and for the first time, they saw the land of their husband.”Footnote ¹⁰³

Instead of going to the Philippines, some Filipinos, like their privileged Kuomintang and rightest Chinese counterparts, left for Hong Kong and Taiwan. Victoria and Vicente Padilla, on the other hand, remained in the People’s Republic of China through the Cultural Revolution before finally deciding to move to Hong Kong.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The Padillas shared diplomatic pedigrees – Victoria having spent a few years in Manila with her father, who served as the Chinese Consul General, and Vicente having served as a Filipino diplomat in China. Many years later, after Reform and Opening, the Padillas came full circle, making their way back “home” to Shanghai to retire.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The “reds” were also on people’s minds in the Philippines in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For Chinese people living there, the success of the Chinese Communist Party proved problematic. During the war, many Chinese people in the Philippines had taken up arms to fight against the Japanese invaders, but for many of them, especially those who had joined left-leaning militias, that asset quickly morphed into a liability as people began to suspect them of harboring communist sympathies.

Squadron Number 48 of the Hukbalahaps, or “Huks,” a group of communist guerilla fighters from central Luzon who fought during and after World War II, consisted of Chinese fighters, many of whom had seen action in China before coming to the Philippines.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Soon after World War II, when the Cold War began to heat up, Chinese in the Philippines became convenient targets for nativist nationalists due to their perceived connections with “red” China and the Huks. Legislation such as the 1958 Filipino First Policy, which displaced many Chinese people from the retail industry, left more Chinese on the defensive. Costly naturalization barriers that priced people out of citizenship, meanwhile, left some Chinese men and their wives in legal limbo.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

It was not until the dictator Ferdinand Marcos restored relations with China and instituted his mass naturalization policy in 1975 that Chinese in the Philippines finally felt some measure of security.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ After Marcos’ policy shift, some Chinese chose to move to the Republic of China in Taiwan, where their previous citizenship was tied, while some ventured to their ancestral homes in the People’s Republic of China. The majority, whose roots had long since matured, however, chose to stay in the Philippines despite the remaining legal and cultural obstacles.

Part I Conclusion: The Agenda of Memory

In his oft-cited 1934 guidebook to Shanghai, All About Shanghai, Henry J. Lethbridge provides a comprehensive overview of the city, covering topics such as the government structure, demographics, neighborhoods, newspapers, transportation, and nightlife. Curiously, in the sections where he discusses cabarets, nightlife, and the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, despite Filipinos having become “synonymous with jazz,” as we established earlier, Lethbridge does not mention them.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this regard, his guidebook set a trend for later histories and memoirs of the city, which uprooted Filipinos from the field of historical memory.

In his much more recent history of dance in Shanghai, Andrew Field mentions Filipinos in passing on several occasions, but he largely marginalizes them in a story for which they were so critical.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Prominent historians of Shanghai Hanchao Lu and Joshua Fogel similarly omit Filipinos entirely in blanket statements about Shanghai’s foreign residents.Footnote ¹¹¹ But while English-language scholarship has sometimes downplayed the role of Filipinos in the city, Chinese-language scholarship denigrates or removes them. For example, in her account of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, echoing the uncritical sentiments of Conductor Mario Paci, Wang Yanli writes, “Paci advanced the conversion to European musicians, while gradually eliminating unqualified musically deficient (逐渐削弱演奏水平欠佳) Filipino players, and in the 1930s added talented (优秀) Chinese musicians.”Footnote ¹¹² Others, like Zhao Xiaohong, Hu Nan, and Wang Zhicheng, opt for erasure by either ignoring the ethnicities of the players or privileging the history of the European and Chinese players.Footnote ¹¹³

Filipinos presented these scholars with a paradox. If, as Wang Yanli argues, “The Shanghai Municipal Orchestra, through a variety of methods, gradually completed Chinese acceptance of Western symphonic music,” then how did Filipinos fit into the story?Footnote ¹¹⁴ How could Chinese people learn and adopt “Western” music if it was played by the hands of Filipinos? Was it still “Western” music? The solution to the paradox that these scholars adopted was simple – they wrote the Filipinos out of history.

It was much harder for historians and scholars of Chinese in the Philippines to erase Chinese people from history, even though many historical individuals like José Rizal attempted to exorcise Chineseness from their personal histories. Many Chinese people still live in the Philippines, and their historical numbers made them impossible to expunge discursively. The memory and history of Chinese in the Philippines, therefore, is less a battle for existence and more a struggle over meaning. Alfonso Felix’s 1966 work represents a pattern of early scholarship that was largely descriptive and prescriptive. He argues that the history of Chinese in the Philippines was defined by struggle, and that, to escape from that cycle, Chinese should assimilate into Philippine society.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Later, historians began to grapple with nationalism and identity, writing histories of gradual awakenings and competing allegiances. More recently, scholarship has taken on an activist-like engagement with the concepts of “loyalty” and belonging. Given the long history of discrimination that we glimpsed through our discussion of the Bookkeeping Act, crafting a longue-durée narrative of loyalty seems like a logical mechanism to bolster a vibrant but still contingent community. In the conclusion of her work on hybridity in the Chinese community in the Philippines, Juliet Lee Uytanlett felt it necessary to write, “They are Chinese in ethnicity and Filipino in nationality. They are Chinese whose loyalty resides in the country [the Philippines] and not China or Taiwan.”Footnote ¹¹⁶

Perhaps no scholar has done more to use her academic platform to ameliorate the condition of Chinese in the Philippines than Teresita Ang See, a respected scholar-activist who founded Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran – a heritage center, library, and museum dedicated to Chinese in the Philippines. The Kaisa Para Sa Kaunlaran credo states, “Our blood may be Chinese, but our roots grow deep in Filipino soil; our bonds are with the Filipino people.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ See popularized the term, “Tsinoy,” which comes from “Tsino,” or Chinese, and “Pinoy,” or Filipino.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Tsinoys in the Philippines or any sympathetic to their condition, history has become a tool with which to offset or balance the discrimination and prejudice that are still endemic in Philippine society. Perhaps historians of Filipinos in Shanghai should take note.

The past offers important lessons and can sometimes act as a salve for the present. Despite their facing overt discrimination, legal uncertainties, questions about loyalty, and citizenship limbo, and despite their lacking imperial protection, Filipinos in Shanghai and Chinese in Manila built stable, visible, and flourishing communities in the early twentieth century. Manila and Shanghai, unique and diverse urban centers, lured sojourners and settlers with jobs and opportunities. Imperial networks and the steamships that linked them served as the trellis connecting the cities and their peoples. These unique circumstances created a mirrored diaspora of nonaligned foreign Asian communities that challenge our notion of what imperial networks, diasporas, and cities looked like. By restoring this complex and muddled history, we can approach the politics and prejudices of the present with more levity and patience. Recognizing what we do not know is always a humbling experience.