Carmen One evening after dinner at a friend's home, I was introduced to Carmen. When I mentioned in passing my interest in researching orphan-child education in Macau, she candidly said, "My mother was educated in an orphanage". I asked if I might interview her about her family and herself, and she agreed.
Carmen is an intense person to speak with and her words are often filled the emotion and elegance. She is bilingual and our conversations would meander in and out of both Portuguese and English. She is in her mid-forties and is a health professional. Having spent much of her life in both elite schools in Macau and later universities in Lisbon, she projects herself as a liberated European intellectual. The combination of freckles, olive skin and wavy hair, in contrast with her Chinese features, hint to her mixed heritage.
Her first words, in a melodious voice faintly tinted with the lilt of Portuguese are: "Both my parents were not, strictly speaking, Macanese". Her mother was born in Portugal, but as a young girl moved to Macau with her parents. Growing up in Macau, her mother was greatly influenced by her family's amah and emulated her. After her death, for reasons still unclear to Carmen, her grandparents left her mother to the care of the Canossian school run by Catholic nuns. Carmen's father also could not be considered strictly Macanese, as he was ethnic Chinese. As a young boy he was educated in the Seminary, completely acculturated Portuguese and converted to Christianity. As a student of Western pharmacology he met and married Carmen's mother and together they opened a small drugstore.
The marriage between Carmen's mother and father caused a great stir on both sides of the family. Her paternal grandparents had wanted Carmen's mother to marry a Portuguese military officer, but she refused and stated she had fallen in love with "that New Christian". The father's parents were just as indignant at the marriage, wanting their son to marry a "nice Chinese girl". Even after the birth of four children, both sets of grandparents never came to terms with the marriage - a common tale, I am told, of mixed marriages in Macau.
When speaking to Carmen about marriage in her family, I learned that she herself was not married. She tells me that she avoided the traps of marriage as it subordinated women:
"Women still have this very well defined role toward men: they are brought up to please men, to be 'good wives' and to tolerate infidelity and so on as 'behavior proper of men'. In short, they feel and are thought not to be themselves, to be submissive and apparently agreeable with all their husband's wishes. It is a common practice for women to hide money away from their husbands 'just in case' the husbands leave them for somebody else. Because of their feelings of uncertainty, social and economic dependency, women tend to be other women's worst enemies. They are seen as each other's potential rivals all the time".
Life for Carmen as a Macanese women is a constant battle where every other woman is a potential enemy. She relates that women are constantly suspicious of other women 'stealing' their husbands or boyfriends, creating a base of tension where friendships are kept a safe distance from other women - fragmenting and weakening the relations between women. Asking Carmen where she fits into the equation, she says that she is "too smart to be trapped by a state of warfare driven by jealously and envy between other women".
Carmen was reluctant to speak about her own memories she "thought she had long suppressed". As she puts it, "it was a period both physically and emotionally stifling". Her family was filled with internal contradictions,constantly sending mixed messages to the children. Although fluent in both Portuguese and Cantonese, her father would demand that Portuguese be spoken around him. She recalls that:
"My older siblings were often beat if they were heard speaking Cantonese in his presence. He would often tell them that if they wanted to speak Chinese, they were 'no longer my children and should roam the streets and beg for a living'".
Carmen's mother, on the other hand, encouraged the opposite behavior. Whenever her husband was not around she would tell the children Chinese folk-tales or invite Cantonese women over for a few games of Mahjong. She would always defy her husband by speaking Cantonese at home and in public. It was a constant battle between her parents who were both striving toward grasping control over the children's lives.
Further compounding the situation at home was the issue of religion. Carmen's father was an ardent Catholic and would attend Church services each Sunday. The mother, although educated in a Church setting, was more amenable to going to the Chinese temples and burn incense. In the family living room, Carmen tells me, at one end of the hall there is an image of the Mother Mary, and at the other, the Chinese Earth god.
In her youth Carmen came to identify closely with her father and took on a more Portuguese identity. Cementing this cultural identity was an education in a Church setting. Calculating the social import, her father forced her to attend the Santa Rosa de Lima school. Carmen's memories of her youth are not happy ones:
"It's curious, but I don't have happy memories of this period, nor do my school-mates. I was very afraid to go to class, the nuns would hit and castigate me very much. The school was dark with mysterious corridors, and I remember the strong impression of being afraid of both the school and the nuns".
Despite her father's attempt to erase his and his children's Chinese heritage, throughout her youth Carmen felt trapped between two worlds, not knowing exactly where she belonged. She recognized the fact that she was of "mixed blood" of both Portuguese and Chinese like many people around her, but she did not seem to fit in. She was continually taunted by her peers for her Chinese appearance and Portuguese ways. As an escape she sought refuge in her studies; it was there, she thought, she would lose her ethnic identity. As a young adult, Carmen traveled to study in Portugal.
Unlike other youths whose concepts of Macanese ethnic identity were galvanized in the wake of the "1, 2, 3" riots, those events had no historical resonance nor significance for her since she was abroad at the time. She was, however, shocked and unprepared by the overt discrimination she encountered in Portugal.
While studying in Lisbon, Carmen recalls going to a café in a small village and ordering something to eat. The server stared back at her in bewilderment and then replied to her in broken English. Carmen repeated her order once more in Portuguese, this time slowly and he continued to speak to her in incoherent English phrases. This was not an isolated episode. What Carmen learnt from that moment is that the metropolitan Portuguese did not recognize nor accept her as a native Portuguese speaker and were quick to judge her based upon her physical appearance despite her elegant articulation of the language.
Toward the end of our interview I asked Carmen how she feels about the state of Macanese identity when Macau us transferred to the People's Republic of China. She gave me an answer outlining power relationships between the three groups that constitute Macau.
"All three groups are closed and do not relate easily to each other, I mean the Portuguese, the Chinese and the Macanese. There is no right or wrong in either side, it depends a lot on personal experiences. The Portuguese are the most comfortable group given that they have always been in Macau with the power positions. They defined right and wrong, they abused their power. The Macanese and Chinese were two groups competing for the favors of the powerful, the first by being closer ethnicity, culture and language, and the second by the shear power of money. They bought their way into the power structure, despising those who they pay for, the Macanese and Portuguese. The Macanese were the middle group, taking advantage of their intermediate position and being subservient to the most opportune god: money and/or power. Ultimately I believe that the Macanese were the most despised of all, they were not allowed the highest positions, and they were never the wealthiest. The Macanese were neither meat nor fish, ethnically, financially, politically".
For reasons left unknown to me, Carmen would not explain her bitterness toward the Macanese, she simply stated that she is "a citizen of the world first. Then Portuguese and lastly Macanese". She will be observing the fate of her homeland with interested detachment, she claims. She also points out that the Chinese will attempt to erase a Portuguese cultural presence in Macau with as much vehemence as her father tried to deny his "Chinese-ness". The Macanese were never one single unified group as she alludes, and the impending transfer will only serve to exacerbate the existing divisions.
Conclusion This age of transition carried with it profound change for Macau. The intersection of people, ideas and technologies inspire new and urgent questions about history, culture and social relations that highlight the ways in which people interpret the conditions of their lives. Listening to Macanese women tell their life histories in their own words only further emphasizes these points
In the course of the interviews, several complex sets of issues about family and history came to the forefront. While history is used to call attention to certain facts that speak to their lives, Macanese identities are built by and woven with the totality of experiences and other external forces both within and outside the family. Theirs is a consciousness heightened by the knowledge of the determination and dignity of their antecedents.
In summarizing the three women, Lin does not regard her ancestors as an integral part of her life nor component of her identity, rather a convenient way to escape from Macau. She relies on current cultural dynamics to define herself and others. Physical appearance is a facet used to codify these distinctions. Her discussions of facial features is telling of the criteria she uses in classifying herself as not looking the part of a Macanese, although claiming she is one. For Teresa, race is transformed into a commodity: the whiter the individual, the higher the social status. She links herself to past family connections and unsullied heritage to feel secure. Although she recognizes trouble brooding on the horizon, she eulogizes the present with nostalgic memories of glory. Finally, like Lin, Carmen is also anchored firmly in the present. Paradoxically, her persona is built around a carefully fashioned Portuguese identity that is not recognized as valid in the metropolis. Frustrated by the marginalization of her cultural identity in both Macau and Portugal, she reacts with a cool detachment when speaking of future events.
These Macaense women are determined by a rich historical narrative, which they reproduce, protest and ultimately transform in their everyday lives. Their historical narratives are used within this configuration by each individual to selectively choose and mold her identity. Although sharing the same physical and temporal space, their understandings of Macanese ethnicity and identity both conflict and complement each other, bringing truth to the phrase that Macanese are "neither meat nor fish".
The discrimination that all of these women experienced, at one point or another in their lives, is marked by distinguishable parts, such as race, class and gender. In other words, their identities are reduced to the barest essentials. It should go without saying that these recognizable parts or even the sum of these parts, do not constitute their identity, rather it is the astonishing variety of ways they live their unique and useful lives.
Notes 1. My use of the term "Macanese" follows from the gloss of the Portuguese term, "Macaense" who are the Portuguese-based community of Macau. Several English texts use Macanese to refer to all people from Macau, and recently is being appropriated by the Macau Chinese to describe themselves. 2. q.v. Porter, Jonathan, Macau, the imaginary city: culture and society, 1557 to the present , Boulder: Westview Press, 1996 offers an excellent treatment of the social history of Macau and its changing human and spiritual landscape.
3. q.v. Teixeira, Manuel, Os Macaenses , Macau: Imprensa Nacional, 1965, Amaro, Ana Maria, Filhos da Terra , Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1988, pp. 4-7 and Pina-Cabral, João de and Lourenço, Nelson, Em Terra de Tufões: Dinâmicas da Etnicidade Macaense , Macau: Instituto Cultural de Macau, 1993, for three varying, yet converging discussions on the definition of the term Macanese. Also particularly helpful is Review of Culture No. 20 July/September (English Edition) 1994, which is devoted to the ethnography of the Macanese.
4. Marreiros, Carlos, "Alliances for the Future", Review of Culture , No. 20 July/September (English Edition) 1994, 162-172.
5. There are many pretenders who have claimed to be Macanese. Although one's ethnic identity is a personal project, ultimately, any claim to a Macanese identity is either accepted or refuted by the already existing Macanese community on criteria dependent upon shared cultural heritage and collective notions (these criteria shift with each emerging generation). As Turner and later Bhabka suggest, identity is a layering of experiences unraveled through contact with others and is only decipherable within the social sphere. There are limits to a Macanese identity, and Pina-Cabral and Lourenço, 1993 offer a broad-based definition delineated by family and community acceptance as two basic denominators for a tentative definition of the Macanese.
6. Pina-Cabral and Lourenço, 1994. Tentatively, I suggest that language is not so much a key determinant to Macanese identity, but rather the alliance with the Portuguese cultural system that knowing Portuguese entails. A great number of Macanese families of Hong Kong only speak English but are still considered Macanese. Along these lines, knowledge of Portuguese is preferably, but not absolutely necessary for a Macanese identity. It should be mentioned, however, that Portuguese language use is only one of several criteria that are used by other Macaense to determine other Macanese, not the sole determinant.
7. I write "breaking down" not in the sense of deconstruction of the identity definition, but a re-formulation of the definition as each rising generation dictates. The current generation is looking toward the transition and finding themselves deciding upon their cultural/identity alignments. However, as Pina-Cabral and Lourenço explain, this is the nature of the Macanese community.
8. Wolf, Margery, Women and the family in rural Taiwan , Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972 and Jordan, David K., Gods, ghosts, and ancestors: the folk religion of a Taiwanese village , Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Both authors write that it is tradition in Chinese families for the woman to honor her husband's patrilineal ancestors and not her own.
9. q. v. Lopes-Ferreira, Isabel, O Olhar em Guerra: o metamorfose da vis&atiilde;o em Um Mar de Ruínas , unpublished A. M. thesis, Brown University, 1997.
10. A personal identity as being Macanese is as dependent upon one recognizing oneself as Macanese as well as other Macaneses accepting that identity. Please see footnote 5.
11. Of interest is the role that the amah plays in Macanese society. It is well known that local Cantonese women were often hired by the Catholic Church in Macau to act as wet-nurses for orphans in the Church's charge. These women were also hired by Macanese families to clean their houses, cook meals and care for their children. It is in these early encounters that Macanese children are first introduced to the Cantonese language and culture. Families are known to keep long-standing friendships with their amahs and in the past, young brides would sometimes bring them along with them to their new home. Nowadays Filipinas fill the role. c.f. Soares, José Caetano, Macau e a Assistência (Panorama médico-social) , Lisbon, Agência Geral das Colónias Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, 1950 and Jorge, Edith de, The Wind Amongst the Ruins: A childhood in Macao , New York: Vantage Press, 1993.
12. Teresa still claims that she does not understand nor speak Cantonese very well.
13. Dicks, Anthony R., "Macao: Legal Fiction and Gunboat Diplomacy" in Leadership on the China Coast , Goran Aijmer (editor), London: Curzon Press, 1984, pp. 101-102. c.f. Guedes, João, As seitas: histôrias do crime e da política em Macau, Macau: Livros do Oriente, 1991.
