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{
}
Foreign or Filipino?
Old Manila Walks leader Ivan Man Dy is happy to take a
mallet to people’s perceptions of Binondo, a place close to
his Pinoy heart, but also one that he claims to be persistently
foreign to Filipino visitors. “People think Binondo is so
Chinese, in the sense that you think it’s exactly the same
as in Hong Kong or Shanghai or whatever,” Ivan laughs
incredulously. “Binondo is more Filipinized than Chinese! It’s
a Chinese immigrant thing that became part of our culture.
And yet people see it as very foreign.”
Ivan begins to tick off the “foreign” elements in our culture
that seem to have a hard time dissolving into the Pinoy
psyche: “Why do we have this comparison mentality? It’s
always ‘Spanish’, it’s always ‘Chinese’, it’s never Filipino. It’s
always a distant, foreign thing, without realizing that these
elements have been here for so long.”
Ivan’s Old Manila Walks takes visitors on tours of some
of Manila’s most storied districts: Intramuros, Binondo (a
food-oriented cultural tour), Malacañang Palace, the Chinese
Cemetery, and soon, Corregidor Island. All of these tours
come with Ivan’s signature nuanced take: “We don’t just do
ordinary city tours that take you around and give you basic
facts,” explains Ivan. “Our tours are not really tours, they’re
more historical, cultural narratives, with a lot of
local perspective… At the end of the
day, we want to show that these
things that we think of as
foreign, they’re not really
foreign anymore.”
Binondo? For Ivan
Man Dy, it’s as
Pinoy as balut and
pancit
