Enduring fears: the monstrosity of Chinese Filipinos in Chito Roño’s Feng Shui (2004)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper examines enduring fears and anxieties about ‘Chineseness’ that widely and persistently circulate in the Philippine cultural imaginary. Chinese Filipinos have historically been implicated in a prejudicial politics of recognition within the Philippine postcolonial state, which has attempted to forge a national identity through problematic notions of ethnic and cultural purity. To undermine what Franz Fanon calls the pitfalls of national consciousness, scholars have often turned to concepts such as syncretism and hybridity, which celebrates heterogeneity and diversity as it opposes essentialism and purity. The agenda of this paper, however, is to examine the forces that generate obstacles to an affirmative politics of cultural assimilation and belonging. Toward that goal, we offer a symptomatic reading of the film Feng Shui (2004), which we suggest condenses anxieties about Chineseness that circulate in the Philippine cultural imaginary, anxieties that amplify difference and potentially undermine the reparative force of hybridity.