From Ah-tay beds to ‘gi-atay’

After a long renovation, Bahay Tsinoy, a museum in Intramuros showcasing Chinese-Filipino history and culture, recently had a soft reopening, just in time for me to bring a delegation of Taiwanese university presidents and other officials to visit.

Although the renovation is still ongoing, the visitors were very impressed with the wealth of information to be found in the museum.

Unexpectedly, we had a prolonged stop at one exhibit, an ornately carved four-poster bed which antique collectors refer to as an Ah-tay bed, after the Sangley master artisan who made and sold fine furniture out of Binondo. (Sangley was the term used for Chinese migrants during the Spanish colonial period.)

The carvings on the bed include fruits and vegetables, each with its own meaning, but what stands out are the half-squash or kalabasa carved into the four bed posts. Filipinos, Chinese-Filipinos included, had always presumed this was Ah-tay’s “brand” or signature because you find the half-squash also carved into the legs of some of the tables he built.

But during this visit to Bahay Tsinoy, our Taiwan visitors shared something new. Squash, they explained, is “nan gua” in Mandarin Chinese, or southern gourd. Now, the Chinese are known for playing with the sounds of words, the most famous example being posters with the Chinese word for good fortune, “fu” which is inverted when put on the wall. The reason is that the word “inverted” is read as “dao,” the same sound for another word which means “to arrive.” So, by inverting “fu” you end up saying “may good fortune arrive.”

The half-squash found on Ah-tay’s beds, our Taiwanese friends explained, are also inverted so in effect, you end up with “nan dao,” “nan” from the term for a southern kalabasa, and “dao,” to arrive.

But wait, “nan” is also the same sound as the word “male” so the inverted squash is not accidental, an important addition to the matrimonial beds with hopes the bed will produce sons, which the Chinese preferred over daughters. (I’m using the past tense, even if a son preference remains strong today among the Chinese.)

With time, I guess, the association of the kalabasa with the production of sons faded away in the Philippines. I grew up knowing “kalabasa” as an insult for people who were not too smart, while the next generation of Chinese-Filipinos associates it with Halloween.

After my Taiwanese visitors left, I looked up more information about Ah-tay beds and was surprised to find a YouTube post by architect Gloryrose Dy Metilla, citing a Facebook blog by Max Limpag, who, in turn, had picked up his information from the Jesuit architect Tony Abelgas.

What they shared was a case of Cebuano semantic transformation of Ah-tay, which had nothing to do with the squash, or with reproduction of sons. Instead, we had the Ah-tay bed yielding the Cebuano word “gi-atay.”

I always thought gi-atay was used like the Tagalog “peste,” to refer to avian pest or Newcastle disease, a terribly infectious and fatal disease in chickens. It is also used as an expression of dismay for human pests, or a mild cure word similar to “damn.”

(As a student volunteer in rural areas back in the 1970s, my foster nanay, to whom I had become close, would sometimes joke that we students were like peste, because when we visited, all their chickens would die, slaughtered to serve us.)

Let’s get back to the Ah-tay bed and the Metilla-Limpag-Abelgas story. It seems that with time, people who fell seriously ill and were bedridden on an Ah-tay bed would be described as gi-atay, “gi” being a Cebuano term similar to the Tagalog “na,” “na-Ah-Tay,” to be stuck on the Ah-tay bed.

Migration is the most powerful force for cultural exchange and change, the original meanings often lost with time, only to be recovered in the most unexpected of circumstances, such as a conversation in a museum, or a YouTube post.

I would love to hear from readers about additional insights into the gi-atay, the Ah-tay bed (and other furniture by the artisan, and his son Eduardo Atay), and all the carvings to be found in these fine works of art.

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mtan@inquirer.com.ph