1940, Metro Manila, Philippines

Mina Uychiaoco Yu
b. 1930
Binondo, Metro Manila, Philippines
Interviewed on January 31, 2025
by Gabby Uy

Officially speaking, Mina wasn’t allowed to go to the movies. Her father was a strict man, and they lived in Manila’s Chinatown during the Second World War. Mina remembers that there were very few streetlights back then. Her father believed that going to the theater was dangerous, especially for children. 

So Mina snuck out of the house. Every week, she and her older brother Robert — she was around ten years old at the time, and Robert was eleven — would ask their mother (who turned a blind eye to these afternoon escapades) for 50 centavos, equivalent to about 25 American cents at the time. To avoid being seen by their father, who usually worked in a small room next to the stairs, Mina and Robert would climb over the baluster, quietly leave the house and walk the fifteen minutes to the movies. Mina remembers frequenting two theaters, the Asia Theater and the Da Huang Ming (meaning Big, Bright and Clear), where a movie cost 25 centavos. Sometimes the theaters had double programs, where one could watch two films back-to-back for the price of one. 

Mina remembers seeing several films at the theaters — including Tarzan and the Apes, Robin Hood, and The Lone Ranger — and doesn’t recall which she saw first, but she chose to tell me about The Count of Monte Cristo. Mina doesn’t remember exactly when she saw the film, or even which film in the Count of Monte Cristo series she saw (apparently the film had several sequels and spinoffs), but a quick Google Search suggests that she likely saw Rowland V. Lee’s 1934 version of the film somewhere between 1940 and 1942. 

Mina remembers The Count of Monte Cristo today as an action film “about justice, resilience, power and revenge,” and described the film’s plot like this: a “good man” (Dantès) is put in prison by a jealous friend who is in love with his fiancée, and as a result of heresy from his peers. His co-prisoner is an old man who informs him that there is treasure nearby — “lots of jewelry and money” — which the good man uses to make himself a Count. The good man vindicates himself by taking revenge on his enemies. Mina remembers the film as an exciting action-adventure story: she and her brother Robert would sometimes sit on the handrails of the movie seats and shout and scream at the screen in delight. 

I asked her if the Count gets the girl in the end. Mina paused briefly, and said that the film “doesn’t say anything about the girl,” or if it did then she doesn’t remember — it seems that The Count of Monte Cristo’s canonical romance didn’t make an impression on her younger self as much as the film’s action sequences and themes of justice. Mina remembers this sense of justice being her favorite part of the film. “It’s about redemption for a good man.” 

Mina describes the Binondo theaters of her childhood as “not that fantastic,” which I understand to be something of an understatement. My Dad frequented the same theaters decades later, during which the theaters supposedly remained relatively unchanged, and he largely remembers them by the stray cats weaving in between the moviegoers’ legs. I asked Mina if she remembers buying concessions at the theaters, and she laughed — “We only had 25 centavos each! There was no money for snacks. Anyway the theater had no snacks.” 

Mina remembers The Count of Monte Cristo quite well, but we mostly talked about sneaking out of the house with Robert. We circle back to the details of the story at multiple points in the conversation —  her father, the baluster, the stairs, the fifteen minute walk — “my brother was eleven months older than me, so we were very close. We had a lot of fun.”

Relationship to the Interviewee: Mina is my maternal grandmother.