Thursday, January 10, 2008: Back to Chinatown	Return to Journal TOC >>
Thursday morning we’ve promised to visit Ro’s cousin Siony at her office in Ongpin, Binondo, where she’s the senior VP of a commercial bank. We’re escorted through an office filled with lots of young women (and a few men) working. I notice a Smallville screen saver one of the computers we pass by; kind of funny to be halfway around the world and see something written by someone you know. We sit in Siony’s office and chat in between currency transactions; eventually the morning’s main business is taken care of and we can all go to lunch. We leave the office and walk back to Carvajal, the tiny alley filled with people shopping for fresh fish and vegetables. Siony opens one of the little doors on the side walls of the alley, and it leads into a surprisingly large Chinese restaurant (not large, exactly, but a lot larger than you’d expect off an alley). The restaurant is apparently in its third generation with the same family, which comes from Amoy, China (where Ro’s dad was born), like many Filipinos. It’s also a restaurant Ro’s family has been visiting for generations. Ro orders lumpia for all of us made her favorite way (soft eggrolls filled with vegetables and shrimp). At Siony’s suggestion, we also order kikiam (pork wraped in tofu and deep fried), stuffed shrimp, and pancit bihon (smaller than the pancit noodles I’m used to). I have a dalandan shake, made from green relative of the orange that’s about the size of a clementine, and a little less sweet. For dessert we have “ice coffee,” which in this case means coffee with ice cream and the bottom of the glass filled with coffee jelly. Ro asks Siony where she can buy Filipino chocolate (to make the rich local hot chocolate) only to find they have packages of it for sale about three feet away from her. Back at the bank, Siony gives Ro a beautiful coffee table book on Filipino-Chinese history, Tsinoy: The Story of the Chinese in Philippine Life. I sense a lot of reading up on her family’s history in my future. And unlike my family (where, for example, one grandfather changed his name on entering the country and never told anyone what his previous name had been), Ro’s family has a deep sense of history on both sides, and a lot of close-knit relatives. Ro also got a bag full of dried mangoes and mangorind (dried mangoes and tamarind) candy that Siony's mom, Auntie Lily, had passed along for us to take to Boracay. We actually reserved all of them to take back to the States. Yum!
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