Like a big percentage of people living in the Philippines, I’m Chinese. Like a big percentage of that percentage, I don’t approve of the name Intsik. We were once taunted with racial slurs like “Intsik baboy,” and sometimes just even the name Intsik said a certain way is enough to offend us. Perhaps to overcome this is one of the reasons that the Chinese community has a strong sense of self-identity, such that we refer to ourselves as lan nang, which literally means “our people.” So if our race must be mentioned, the description Chinese, Tsinoy/Chinoy, or Tsino is preferred. For the older Chinese generation, Intsik is best left in the past.
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