BacoLaodiat 2008 happens in ‘Shopping’

Not too many people in Bacolod know how this district north of the city, a few minutes ride away from downtown, got its name “Shopping.” Ironically, it’s not where they’d go shopping, unless they’re looking for Chinese herbal medicines and such other exotica at Hua Kong. Or looking for the best cappuccino in the edgy cafés and the most scrumptious seafood dishes in the fine Chinese restaurants that are starting to sprout in the area.

Never mind that the taxi driver or your host from Mansilingan has no idea how Shopping got its name, but get yourself there. It’s where the BacoLaodiat, the celebration of the Chinese New Year in Bacolod, is happening on Feb. 7-10.

The BacoLaodiat (from “Bacolod” and “laodiat,” in Fookien meaning great celebration and good fortune) may be the only Chinese New Year in the world that has a distinctive name tacked to it. On its third year, BacoLaodiat 2008 will transform Shopping into the “Chinatown” that it has always aspired to be. It will feature a tour of the Chinese temples (there are three splendid ones in Bacolod), a tiangge-style Chopsticks Alley, a Tsinoy Olympics, a street-dancing competition including the parade of the lanterns and the 12 Chinese horoscopy animals, a Chinese cookfest at Robinsons Galleria, a business conference, and a city-wide fireworks show.

The best part of the festival will be discovering how much the Chinese culture has become part of the Filipino culture, in Bacolod and elsewhere in the Philippines, and realizing how it has been so evocative, complex and enriching for us.

But how did Shopping get its name?

Shopping has no long and colorful history like Binondo, but it has a poignant start that in Bacolod meant a lot in its march to modernity. In April of 1955 a big fire, said to have started in an eatery at the corner of Lacson and Locsin streets, laid waste whole blocks in the commercial and business district of the city. The landed gentleman, Alfredo Montelibano Sr., first mayor of Bacolod and national defense secretary under President Osmeña, opened up a 27-hectare sugarcane plantation north of the city to entice the mostly Chinese businessmen and storeowners displaced by the fire. Montelibano called the new commercial district the Capitol Shopping Center, which the locals and jeepney drivers quickly shortened to “Shopping.” It comprises four blocks bounded by Burgos street to the south, Lopez Jaena to the northeast, and North Drive and Sixth street to the north.

The new tenants built two-story wooden structures like one finds in old Binondo, the ground level serving as the store and the upper level as family quarters. It was the best they could do as most of them had not insured their properties that went up in the conflagration.

Here in Shopping, the enterprising and hardworking Chinese tried to rebuild their lives. One of them was the old man Coo, who lost his hardware store to the unfortunate fire; he put up a dried-shrimps business, assisted by his young son Coo Teng Thiong (Carlos Javellana) as his two other sons were studying in Mapua in Manila. Every day, soon after the stroke of midnight, Carlos got up from bed to accompany his father to the Banago port to buy the shrimps. The shrimps were washed, dried and shelled and then shipped to Manila to the wholesalers in Elcano and Sto. Cristo in Binondo. “Very fresh, best quality, our dried shrimps commanded higher prices than those coming from other places,” boasts Carlos Javellana.

Javellana, on his own, later put up in Shopping the Sanitary laundry soap factory and he himself drove the truck to deliver his product to his outlets out of town; later he ventured into rice-and-corn and sugar trading.

Such undaunted entrepreneurial spirit and individual courage are what BacoLaodiat hopes to rally again in its dream to revive Shopping as the city’s Chinatown and an investment and tourism haven. “We realize of course that a Chinatown is not made,” weighs in Crispin Chua, vice chairman of this year’s BacoLaodiat. “It happens.”

It’s happening, slowly. Beginning with the new coffeeshops and Chinese restaurants in Shopping that have taken over the renown of the old landmarks in the city. There’s Mei Wei and Apollo (with their specialty gourmet fares) and City Lunch (popular for its siopao and lumpia) that are reminiscent of bygone Old Manila in the old downtown and Antigua which was owned by a Taiwanese Chinese. And there’s Kuppa, the tastefully designed coffeeshop, with excellent offerings of coffees and teas and pastries, run by the children of the owner of Café Mabuhay, whose freshly brewed coffee would fill the morning air for blocks around with its full-bodied aroma. Kuppa stands right where Café Mabuhay used to be.

Also worth the visit to Shopping is the incomparable Hua Kong, the Chinese drugstore owned by the Yap family, where you will find, in delirious tumbles, the fabled herbs and concoctions of Chinese apothecaries along with aromatic spices and exotic cooking and baking ingredients, fresh and candied fruits, teas, noodles and hard-to-find goods from China, Thailand, Cambodia and other neighboring countries. If you’re looking for serenity and meditation, and a bout of fortune-telling, there are three Chinese temples in Shopping — the Yong Tho Taoist temple, the Fa Zhang Buddhist temple, and the Foguangshan Bacolod Yuan Thong temple. Not to be missed is St. John’s Institute, also known as Hua Ming, one of the biggest Chinese schools in the country, established by Chinese Catholic priest-refugees from communist China in the ’50s.

There are a number of other original businesses that have resolutely stayed on in Shopping even when, five years after the fire, many of them scurried back downtown. But says the BacoLaodiat chairman, businessman and land developer Walter Ong, “BacoLaodiat will open the door for business to come into Shopping.” There are also plans for the dreamt-of Chinatown to be defined geographically with ornate arches, a la Binondo, at both its south and north boundaries. A proposal is being seriously considered that would convert a one-hectare lot inside Shopping that used to be a bus terminal into a Chinese park-garden where cultural programs would be held on weekends.

Shopping, however, seems to be too dull, generic and unimaginative a name (compared to the inspired coinage “BacoLaodiat”) for Bacolod’s would-be Chinatown. Perhaps they should consider giving the place another name. Something like BacoLaodiat Town? Or Laodiat Village? Whatever it is, the locals and jeepney drivers no doubt will pick it up fast.