If you were from the Visayas or unfamiliar about Hong Kong, you may wonder how the Sinulog Festival is being staged in this metropolitan city; similar with the Kalilang Festival if you were from Mindanao. But a more trivial question to ask is why this is happening in Hong Kong since it is not the Philippines.
Actually, these festivals are just two examples, which I am familiar with, of several other Filipino festivals annually held in Hong Kong–others are from Luzon. The former is being organized by the League of Visayan Association (LoVA) and the latter is by the Mindanao Migrant Alliance (MinMA). These festivals as celebrated in Hong Kong are also accompanied by beauty pageants called the Perlas ng Visayas and Mutya ng Mindanao, respectively.
I call this phenomenon as cultural performance crossing borders, which is made possible by the large community of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Hong Kong, who are mostly into domestic employment.
The Sinulog Festival that includes street dancing and staged in honor of the Holy Child Jesus tends to be more popular than the Kalilang Festival because majority of the Filipino domestic workers are Catholics with good numbers who are devotees of the Santo Niño.
The Kalilang Festival which is celebrated with traditional dances, on the other hand, is confined in some parts of Mindanao. It is held during special merry-making occasions like when pilgrims arrived home, in weddings or during the coronation of a new sultan.
While I was in Hong Kong for four months as a United Board fellow, I witnessed several cultural performances of organized domestic workers from various parts of the Philippines. I was also with some groups when they practiced traditional dances or talents for beauty pageants held in public spaces at the Central, a major business district in Hong Kong Island.
So despite their six-day domestic work schedule– Sunday is their only free day and a few statutory holidays– that OFWs still have time and enough energy to prepare and practice, and eventually to stage shows with great enthusiasm and fulfillment.
I was also invited by some groups to be one of the judges in some cultural events, which gave me opportunities to become close to the domestic workers.
Somehow, every time I was with them, I was able to forget my being homesick. Thus, my cultural engagement with them during Sundays was both intellectually-enriching and emotionally-relieving.
What is more interesting to note is that despite the fact that domestic workers are in Hong Kong not as cultural performers, they are able to stage beautiful shows that showcase their artistry, creativity, and flexibility. I presume they did it from their hearts as expressions of their desire for connection with homeland.
Interestingly, during times that their associations have some social and cultural events to celebrate or to participate in, they can always find opportunities to practice and prepare for the performance. They also perform, more or less, akin to professional artists invited from the Philippines during those public events sponsored or organized by some Filipino businesses in Hong Kong.
So why is there a reproduction of cultural performances in diaspora? The answer is now clear: the desire for homeland.
And having collectively performed in countries which they temporarily call home, these performances become unifying forces for enhancing their identity. In the case of domestic workers, they may have come from Luzon, Visayas or Mindanao but they always keep their general identity as Filipinos.
The experiences of Filipino domestic workers is very similar to those captured in the study of Jennifer Brown titled Expressions of Diasporic Belonging: The Divergent Emotional Geographies of Britain’s Polish Communities and published in Emotion, Space and Society journal (2011).
The common theme between the Polish in Britain and Filipino domestic workers in Hong Kong is emotional attachment to home expressed through cultural symbols or markers.
The foregoing study validates the idea that associating and performing with groups of similar origin demonstrate that desire to belong to a community. This is seen in the presence of Filipino associations or cliques in Hong Kong which arguably exemplify a “homeland in the context of diaspora”.
Meanwhile, nostalgia and homesickness as emotional longing are actually expressions of disrupted connections with homeland.
I likewise observed that practicing and staging cultural events were occasions by which Filipino cuisines were brought by members and shared among them. This is another manifestation of longing for home, and the consumption of Filipino cuisines within the group illustrates how the symbol of belonging is expressed.
The organized domestic workers may be too tired from performing their domestic tasks–Monday to Saturday– but Sunday is always anticipated when they enjoy that great sense of belonging in the company of groups whom they identify with, and to express their regional ethnicity, in particular, and being Filipinos, in general, through performing traditional dances in festivals that they organized, and in savoring their favorite Filipino cuisines in their regular rendezvous at the Central.
