review

Also in this section:

Theater, I Hate Hamlet
Books, Huellas Chinas en Panamá

Books, While Europe Slept

Cool Internet sites
 

A Panamanian history that really ought to be translated into English

a book review by Eric Jackson

Huellas Chinas en Panamá:

150 años de presencia

by Juan Tam

Único Impresores, Panama (2006)

333 pp, $20 in paper

ISBN  9962-02-444-7

Book publishing is such a hard thing in Panama. It's not only too small a market, it's plagued by monopolistic distributors, wannabe censors, self-interested promoters of trash and small town jealousies. And that's too bad, because we have some writers with things to say and they do sometimes publish books that ought to get international attention, but usually what happens is that a Panamanian public that doesn't read never realizes that those books exist and their authors not only can't make a living off of them, they suffer economic hardship because of the time they devote to writing. To the extent that things get picked up for academic use, that's a degrading political patronage game in which some of the most unworthy people one might imagine make the decisions.

Juan Tam's history of Panama's Chinese community, Huellas Chinas en Panamá, has already broken out of that bind, at least to some extent. An earlier draft was translated into Chinese by Taiwan's consul in Colon, so his work is known not only to some of this country's readers of Chinese but also to people who are interested in Panama in Taiwan and in Chinese communities elsewhere.

This book really should be translated into English as well, but if you read Spanish only as a second language and are interested in Panamanian history, it's worth reading this Spanish edition. It's a history of the Chinese community here, for sure, but also in the contexts of world, Panamanian, Latin American and Chinese events. It's a history of Panama from a Chinese point of view as well as a history of the Chinese in Panama.

Victoriano Lorenzo was a cholo, not a chino, but what else was he? Liberal sensibilities may be offended by Tam's rather Confucian take on an executed guerrilla general.

Most people who know anything at all about Panamanian history know the lowest point of Dr. Arnulfo Arias Madrid's relationship with the Chinese community here. But do they know anything about efforts to patch up old wounds, and the controversy that generated in the Chinese community?

And what about the relationship between the Canal Zone and the local Chinese community? Or the Chinese take on the rabiblanco aristocracy?

On the latter point, Tam doesn't recognize any Mandate of Heaven:

...They preferred a reduced sales volume and an elevated and rapid profit, with a minimal investment. They couldn't think in terms of pennies, not recognizing the policy of giving service to the customer. The Creoles preferred to dedicate their time to lawsuits and politics and hoped that their businesses would get ahead by that alone. Curiously, at the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant bourgeois class, composed of about 80 families --- none of them Chinese --- controlled some 70 percent of the Gross Domestic Product of the nation.

...[T]e Creoles were embittered by the foreigners' prosperity, as they weren't able to emulate this foreign worker or businessman, who went about his daily chores and by force of work and struggle, after years of incessant labor, made a fortune and with it, had tranquility.

But despite all of the well researched context, this is a history of a Chinese community in its own terms, a history of a community that's more than 150 years old. That makes it a priceless, one of a kind document.

But in the end, Tam points out that "We have stopped being a colony of expatriates to become a community integrated into a nation's development." And reading this book will not only tell you about that community, but the development of this nation.

Theater, I Hate Hamlet
Books, Huellas Chinas en Panamá

Books, While Europe Slept