In Macao, a Culture on the Cusp

Henrique Pedruco was born in this tiny enclave and has lived here for all of his 56 years.

But on Monday, Pedruco will wake up a stranger in his native land as Macao reverts to Chinese rule after 442 years under Portuguese control.

“All of a sudden, I’m a foreigner in my own homeland,” laments Pedruco, who will maintain Portuguese citizenship after the hand-over. “That’s the worst part.”

Pedruco is certain he’ll stay on in Macao. He is less certain, however, that the distinctive culture he grew up with will do the same.

Lost in all the political buzz over Macao’s imminent return to the Chinese fold lies the fate of a dwindling community of residents like Pedruco that has helped stamp this sleepy territory with its unique brand as a meeting place of East and West.

They are the “Macanese,” people of mixed Portuguese and Chinese descent who have played a key role in the history of Macao as its translators, civil servants and mediators, a living bridge across the cultural divide between Lisbon and Beijing.

Over the centuries, the Macanese have created their own special “in-between” niche here, blending Portuguese and Chinese customs and traditions into a rich cultural melange unlike anything else found in East Asia, despite the region’s long history of European colonization.

But with only 10,000 Macanese left out of Macao’s population of 430,000, some fear that special way of life may be under threat after flowering in so many forms and directions for hundreds of years.

There’s Macanese patois, a hybrid of Portuguese and Chinese words still spoken by older members of the community. Macanese artists and writers explore issues of Eurasian identity and belonging in paintings, plays and poetry. Roman Catholicism and Buddhism mix and match.

And, as with the people of so many other cultures, the Macanese would simply be lost without their food, which combines not just Portuguese and Chinese elements but also throws in influences from India and Malacca, places where intrepid Portuguese sailors stopped to buy the pungent and exotic spices they never encountered at home.

“In the last two decades, all the hoo-ha in the First World has been about ‘fusion’ cuisines,” says Jorge Smith, a food and beverage director at one of Macao’s top hotels. “Well, look, Macanese cuisine was the original fusion cuisine. We’re talking 400 years ago, not just the last two decades or the latest fusion restaurant that opens in Sydney.”

“This place is the result of a long encounter between two different cultures,” adds Jorge Rangel, Macao’s secretary for public administration, education and youth. “It’s not Portugal, it’s not China. It’s a little bit of each.”

As the highest-ranking Macanese in the executive government, Rangel is required by Macao’s post-hand-over constitution to step down after the transfer of power, which was negotiated in the late ‘80s according to the same formula of “one country, two systems” that was pioneered for Hong Kong’s return to China. A Chinese official will replace Rangel, which many fear will become a metaphor for the eventual lot of the Macanese community: to be displaced over time as more migrants settle here and turn Macao into another Chinese city.

Already, Chinese nationals make up 68% of Macao’s residents, though the actual number of ethnic Chinese--taking into account those who have been issued Portuguese passports--is far higher. About one-third of Macao’s population is Chinese immigrants who crossed the border from south China within the past 20 years.

By contrast, the number of Macanese has declined in recent years as many families, apprehensive about the hand-over’s political or economic fallout, moved away.

In fact, some think that the Macanese diaspora, including tight-knit communities in California, Australia, Brazil and Canada that have developed over the past several decades, may be larger than the Macanese community in Macao itself.

“The Macanese refer to themselves as ‘sons and daughters of the land.’ They think of this as their land,” says Jane Camens, an Australian writer based here. But after the hand-over, “they’ll be like a dispossessed people. On Dec. 20, China will suddenly inherit a new ethnic minority.”

In ways similar to the struggles of minorities to preserve their heritages in the U.S., members of the Macanese community are now scrambling to find ways to perpetuate their patrimony. The post-hand-over constitution guarantees general protection for Macao residents of Portuguese ancestry, but active promotion is necessary, many Macanese say, for their culture to survive amid the graceful colonial buildings of Macao, with their unmistakable Old World elegance and cheerfully pastel Mediterranean colors.

Miguel de Senna Fernandes works as a lawyer by day and a playwright by night. His father, Henrique, is a well-known Macanese novelist whose tales of interracial romance have been turned into feature films.

The younger De Senna Fernandes’ plays are liberally spiked with the patois he heard his grandmother speak when he was a boy, a dialect he didn’t always understand but which he mentally filed away. The patois weaves together Portuguese and Cantonese words in combinations like compra som, meaning to buy groceries (compra is Portuguese, som Cantonese), or avo gong, which joins together the Portuguese and Cantonese terms for “grandfather.”

“For me, it’s one of the most important things of the [Macanese] identity. You have something that can link everybody,” De Senna Fernandes says. “What we’re doing is constantly reminding people that there is such a thing as patois, reminding our people that we have this identity and reminding people outside the community that we are a community.”

His works explore themes of biracial identity. In “Mano Beto Goes to Portugal,” staged a few years ago, the title character confronts the widespread dilemma of whether to stay in Macao or emigrate, a question the Macanese have confronted throughout their existence as a small enclave in a far-flung outpost of the Portuguese empire.

Mano Beto chooses to go West--but finds he doesn’t quite fit in, and begins to question his cultural identity.

“This is very typical” in Macanese writing, says Wong Chon, a lecturer at the University of Macao who studies Macanese literature. “There’s always this question, ‘Who are we?’ ”

The late poet Leonel Alves reconciled the two cultures within him this way: With “Chinese eyes and Western nose,” an “Oriental back, Portuguese chest,” and a “Chinese heart and Portuguese soul,” Alves wrote, “this [is] the authentic son of Macao.”

It is with the newest “sons and daughters of the land” that the future of Macanese culture rests, and it is they who are most in danger of breaking with the past.

Geraldina Pedruco, 28, the second of Henrique and Vitoria Pedruco’s four daughters, feels that something has already been lost in transmission to her generation, whether out of laziness or neglect. Unfortunately, she acknowledges, the trend will inevitably continue with her 2-year-old son.

“He’ll know even less. I can’t teach him,” says Pedruco, the reigning Miss Macao in 1995. Each of the four Pedruco daughters has won the pageant--hence the name of the family restaurant, Restaurante Miss Macau (the Portuguese spelling of Macao).

“You can’t learn a culture from a book,” Pedruco adds. “You have to have a context”--which Pedruco fears she and her husband, who is also Macanese, cannot properly provide.

In particular, despite the family business, Pedruco does not know how to cook Macanese food, which includes dishes that can take days to prepare.

Though still served in local restaurants, hybrid delicacies such as African chicken, grilled in a succulent marinade, and tacho, a simmering blend of cabbage, potatoes and Chinese sausage instead of Portuguese sausage, are less common in Macanese homes than before. Nor is cha gordo, a sort of Macanese version of English high tea, as big a staple of life as it once was.

“It’s quintessentially Macanese,” says Smith, the hotel food and beverage director. “The idea of cha gordo [literally ‘fat tea’] is that it’s an endless, massive spread of the things you’d like to eat,” including fried rice, noodle dishes, Chinese turnip cakes and other snack foods.

Pedruco’s father is retired from 35 years in Macao’s civil service, which has traditionally been peopled by the Macanese, whose ability to speak Portuguese and Cantonese provided the Portuguese administration with the continuity it needed to run the enclave.

Two-thirds of Macao’s civil servants still hold Portuguese passports. But the historic primacy of the Macanese in those jobs has declined, leading to questions about what kind of role they will play, beyond lending Macao a flavor that will draw tourists, after the hand-over at midnight Sunday.

“We’ll have to be a bridge not just between China and Portugal, but from China to all Portuguese-speaking countries--for example, Brazil,” the elder Pedruco says.

“I’m sure that they’ll have a role to play, [just] maybe not in the administration,” says Anabela Ritchie, the Macanese president of Macao’s legislative assembly, a post she also must relinquish after the hand-over.

“The Macanese are going through a very strong transformation themselves in their rapprochement with Chinese language and culture,” Ritchie says. “This is a step that the Macanese are taking because they want to integrate in this society more and more. That’s part of the need we feel for adaptation.”

The ability to adapt has been present from the start for the Macanese. Many believe that the first Macanese centuries ago were not of Portuguese and Chinese blood, but rather the product of intermarriage between Portuguese sailors and women from other parts of Asia, such as India and Malacca, that had already been Catholicized by Portuguese or other Western missionaries.

By contrast, no mixed-race community sprang up in neighboring Hong Kong--just an hour’s ferry ride away--during British rule, which ended 2 1/2 years ago. British control there lasted just one-third as long as the Portuguese presence in Macao, and institutional and individual segregation between the British and the local Chinese was far more pronounced.

When the Chinese in Macao began to convert to Christianity from religions such as Buddhism and Taoism, mixed marriages with local women became permissible, which explains the strong Catholic component of Macanese culture. Still, in addition to icons of Christian saints, many Macanese such as Ritchie display statues of popular Buddhist gods in their homes--mostly for cultural expression, part of their heritage from the Chinese side, and not for worship.

Over the past two centuries, the Portuguese-Chinese combination grew within the Macanese community and eventually became the dominant group.

Now, in the face of dwindling numbers, some say the key to survival will be to redefine once again what it means to be Macanese, broadening the concept to de-emphasize blood ties and include those who identify closely with Macanese traditions and with Macao as their home.

“Besides the Macanese, there’s a group of local Chinese who have a stronger and stronger sense of belonging here,” says Rangel, the high-ranking official. “We should not count only on older Macanese or even younger Macanese to fight to preserve Macao’s unique culture.”

Macanese associations have sprung up, with international branches, and so far there have been three “Encontros” in Macao since 1993, reunions of hundreds of Macanese from all over the world.

But the culture itself, if not the people who will have to work hard to keep it alive, will remain at root a biracial one, Portuguese and Chinese.

Victor Hugo Marreiros, a graphic design artist from a prominent Macanese family, tries to show that marriage of cultures in his work through the use of both Asian and Western aesthetics, sometimes in jarring juxtaposition.

“I’d like [my audience] to think, ‘This guy’s strange--it’s not West or East.’ That’s good, because that’s me,” says Marreiros, 39, whose brother, Carlos, also produces paintings and designs buildings melding Portuguese and Chinese influences.

“If you pick up the best of both sides, you have more than 100% reason to be proud.”