The Word Tree, by Teolinda Gersão: a novel of colonial Mozambique.*
Last month saw the launch, in English translation, of Portuguese writer Teolinda Gersão’s novel, A Árvore das Palavras, first published in Lisbon in 1996. The Word Tree, rendered from the original by prize-winning translator, Margaret Jull Costa, and published by Dedalus, is the first novel by Gersão to appear in English. It is set in Mozambique during the late colonial period, but unlike Lídia Jorge’s The Murmuring Coast, or António Lobo Antunes’s South of Nowhere, set respectively in Mozambique and Angola during the height of the colonial war, Gersão’s novel has as its background the city of Lourenço Marques (now called Maputo) in the early 1960s, on the eve of the conflict that would only end with the overthrow of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974.
The novel’s central character is Gita, a young girl born in Mozambique to white parents from Portugal. It is about her growing up and coming of age, but it is also about her own identification with the country and continent of her birth, facilitated in part by the presence of the black maid and Gita's former wet nurse, Lóia, and her daughter Orquídea, a kind of adopted sister with whom Gita finds the freedom from the inhibitions placed upon her by her biological mother, Amélia, who is obsessed with being accepted into the higher echelons of colonial society. Indeed, in some ways, Amélia is the novel’s most intriguing character because she represents an attitude towards her surroundings that is generally overlooked or dismissed by mainstream postcolonial literature. Amélia arrived in Lourenço Marques as a mail-order bride to Laureano Capítulo, a surname that translates into English as 'Chapter', the significance of which becomes apparent as the story progresses. ‘Casamento por procuração’ (marriage by procurement) was a common practice in Portuguese Africa, for it allowed impoverished women in Portugal to exchange hardship and lack of prospects back home for greater comfort and privilege in the tropics, through marriage to a white colonial male. What she discovers is that Laureano cannot match her ambitions to rise socially and enter the ‘grande bourgeoisie’ of the colonial capital. Instead, all she can do is live on its fringes as a seamstress, while compensating for her lack of status by dyeing her hair blond, enrolling her daughter in ballet classes, and eventually entering into a correspondence, under the fantasy name of Patricia Hart, with an Australian Portuguese who is looking for a wife, and takes her back to Sydney, so closing her Mozambique ‘chapter’. More suburban Madame Bovary than Moll Flanders, and certainly less raunchy than Defoe’s distant heroine, Amélia nevertheless illustrates the interface between home and empire in her journey from the stagnant gloom of Salazar’s Portugal to the open possibilities of a wider colonial world.
By the time Amélia abandons the family, Gita is in secondary school. She experiences romance with a wealthy school friend who lets her down, dabbles in student politics, and as the colony lurches towards its remote bush war, leaves for Portugal to stay with distant relatives and work her way through college. It is perhaps a paradox that while Amélia had left the imprisonment of rural Portugal in pursuit of freedom, Gita abandons the cosmopolitan freedoms of her native land, for the constraints of a motherland she has never known, but which inevitably now represents the next chapter in her own life, and a possible route to her own freedom as a young woman. And if Gita’s mother, resentful and fearful of blacks when in Mozambique, has taken flight to Australia, the last bastion of white settler safety, the abandoned Laureano, whose lack of social ambition was only matched by his love of Africa, has gone native in the autumn of his existence, by fathering a child with the local woman who has taken over as his live-in housekeeper. Unable to cater for Amélia's aspirations in the highly stratified society of colonial Lourenço Marques, Laureano has also unwittingly embarked on another, perhaps final chapter in his life. The novel is a snapshot of Portugal and Portuguese Africa in the middle years of the twentieth century as the country’s elderly and embattled regime sought to maintain order at home, and its ailing empire intact.
Above all, The Word Tree is an atmospheric novel, which evokes a time and a place in impressive detail. The contours and topography of the city are precisely mapped, and there are myriad references to neighbourhoods, streets, squares, buildings, shops, cafés and beaches, which lend the narrative greater authenticity. Gersão never lived in Mozambique for any length of time, but only visited it during long summer holidays in her youth. The narrative is therefore, to some extent, an exercise in memory. Perhaps its most abiding quality is its evocation of the space, freedom and open possibilities that Africa represented for the sons and daughters of a colonial population that has now largely been displaced, and who, like Gersão, only have memories of the environment in which they grew up. In recalling Africa, it is simultaneously recalling the innocent idealism of youth. Gita’s thoughts, as she embarks for Lisbon, speak to the memories of many who, like her, identified more with the land of their birth than they did with that from where their parents had originally migrated, a mother country they had only heard about: “The world that I’m leaving behind. Rivers, plantations, savannahs, palm groves, wide open spaces, broad horizons, and a tree that used to grow in my dreams and that reached up to the sky – what do they know of all that, how can they understand?”
DAVID BROOKSHAW
* Publsihed in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 April, 2010.
Saturday 19 June 2010
Monkey kings and other picaresque heroes: the novels of Timothy Mo*
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950, to a British mother and a Cantonese father. He was educated from the age of ten in England, and took a degree in History from the University of Oxford. After graduating, he worked briefly as a journalist before re-locating to his native Hong Kong, which served as a springboard for his growing interest in the hectically hybrid world of Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, which form the backdrop to his most recent novels, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), and Renegade or Halo2 (1999). He is a writer of considerable wit and colour, who possesses a strongly satirical eye. His characters often border on the picaresque, and through them he examines the effects of migration, psychological loss, cultural hybridization and social and economic exploitation, which are the stock-in-trade of what we have come to know as postcolonial literature.
Three of his novels relate in some way to the Portuguese presence in this hemisphere. His first novel, The Monkey King, published in 1978, is set in Hong Kong, and in the figure of Wallace Nolasco, we have a type of blueprint for the hapless, outsider/insider hero that will be a feature of his later novels. Wallace is a Macanese, or Hong Kong Portuguese, with links back to an impoverished but blue-blooded Macau family. He has married May Ling, the daughter of the rich Chinese businessman, Mr Poon. But his expectations of a life of luxury are disappointed when he discovers that the mansion he thought he was going to live in is no more than a flat in a tenement building, and that Poon is as miserly as he is wealthy. As for Poon, he has other plans for Wallace as his ambitions turn increasingly towards the construction boom during the Korean War, and he finds his son-in-law a clerical position in the Public Works Department where he hopes the family interests will be defended by Wallace’s signature being strategically appended to contracts approved by the government. When things go suddenly awry, Wallace and May Ling are bundled off to an isolated village in the New Territories to lie low until the scandal blows over, and it is here that Wallace redeems himself, showing leadership and flair in a series of projects that will improve the lives of the village inhabitants, while paving the way for his eventual return and taking command of the family business from the increasingly frail Mr Poon. Wallace’s journey from slothful, impotent and resentful son-in-law at the very base of the family hierarchy, to minor civil servant (a traditional occupation of the Macanese and Hong Kong Portuguese), to self-confident entrepreneur and diplomatic healer of village rivalries, is narrated with satirical irreverence and comedy, which places the novel well within the picaresque tradition. Wallace is a survivor, like the monkey king of Chinese tradition.
Mo’s second novel, Sour Sweet, was published in 1982, and was the first literary work to focus on the Chinese diaspora in England. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in the same year, and turned into a film in 1988, directed by Mike Newell and starring Sylvia Chang and Soon-Tek Oh. But it was in his third work of fiction that Mo again highlighted the inter-relationship between his native city and Macau: An Insular Possession (1986) was described by Tariq Ali in the Guardian as a ‘powerful, beautifully written narrative… a potent amalgam of history and fiction’. The novel, which again featured on the Booker shortlist, is set in the Pearl River estuary during the Opium War in the years leading up to the British occupation of Hong Kong. Like James Clavell’s blockbuster, Tai-Pan, coincidentally published exactly twenty years before, the novel is partially set in Macau and contains Portuguese characters. But here, any comparison with Clavell must end, for while Tai-Pan contains all the features of an empire-building novel, with strong plot line, omniscient narrator, and relationships driven by romance, lust and entrepreneurial rivalry, Mo’s work moves forward at a leisurely, occasionally light-hearted pace, blending different literary forms, including newspaper accounts, letters, and straight narrative. It is a period piece, in which Mo demonstrates sensitivities and skills obtained from his academic training as a historian, as well as considerable linguistic versatility. Moreover, our view of events leading up to the seizure of Hong Kong, is filtered through the eyes of two young American expatriates who, to some extent, incarnate Mo’s attachment to the figure of the outsider, the observer who is not centrally involved in the business of militaristic, colonial conquest.
His fourth novel, The Redundancy of Courage, published in 1991, is set in the fictional island of Danu during the invasion and occupation by the neighbouring expansionist ‘malais’, and is a scarcely disguised account of the Indonesian military invasion and occupation of East Timor after the Portuguese effectively abandoned the colony in 1975. Adolph Ng is a Chinese Timorese, who has returned to his native land to run a hotel after being educated in Canada. Adolph, rather like Mo’s other fundamentally placid heroes is swept up in the resistance to the invaders, rubbing shoulders with ex-seminarians turned Marxist guerrillas and experiencing the dangers, cruelties, betrayals, and moral adjustments of an insurgency hidden from the international limelight. Captured by the ‘malais’, he becomes the servant of an army colonel, eventually negotiating his release into exile away from Danu. The end of the novel sees Adolph fail to adapt to life in the former imperial capital, as he comments, ‘I wandered up the maze of cobbled alleyways to the city’s most venerable quarter. This was the old world, and you could keep it’. Eventually, he chooses to settle in Brazil under the name of Kawasaki, thus suggesting an intention to blend into the country’s large Japanese community. The novel, which involved a considerable amount of research on the part of the author, was praised by none other than the future president of East Timor, José Ramos Horta, who makes a cameo appearance as Joaquim Lobato, the penniless representative of the Danu nationalist movement in New York. The Redundancy of Courage was a unique novel for its time, the only work of literature to engage with a brutal military campaign on the extreme periphery of a former European empire, which is why it also has a special place in the development of East Timorese literature.
Mo’s most recent anti-hero is Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, son of a black American GI and a Filipino bar-girl who herself was ‘half-lowland Malay, half-highland aboriginal, with a trace of philandering Chinese trader somewhere in the family tree’. Castro, the protagonist of Renegade or Halo2, is educated by an eccentric Jesuit, and forced to leave the Philippines in a hurry after being scapegoated for a crime. His travels as a sailor take him to Hong Kong, the Middle East, England and Cuba. He experiences violence and semi-slavery, but as a kind of postcolonial everyman and observer of the world around him, his life is one of continual cultural adaptation and re-invention, even though he never loses the central core of his personality. It is a rich, mesmerising literary tour-de-force that coincidentally ties together two extremes of an old Iberian empire: the Philippines and Cuba, which Rey finds strangely familiar, and where he rapidly learns to make himself understood. Mo’s interest in the Hong Kong Portuguese, Macau, East Timor and the Philippines, suggests some sort of an affinity with the hybrid cultures of these ancient corners of empire on the part of an author who identifies them as mirroring his own experience as a person through whom flow the cultures of Asia and Europe. Wallace, Adolph and Rey, ever more flamboyant intermediaries between mutually misunderstanding cultures, are both survivors and victims, but also the recipients and agents of modernity on their journey through life.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 28 November, 2009.
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong in 1950, to a British mother and a Cantonese father. He was educated from the age of ten in England, and took a degree in History from the University of Oxford. After graduating, he worked briefly as a journalist before re-locating to his native Hong Kong, which served as a springboard for his growing interest in the hectically hybrid world of Southeast Asia, in particular the Philippines, which form the backdrop to his most recent novels, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), and Renegade or Halo2 (1999). He is a writer of considerable wit and colour, who possesses a strongly satirical eye. His characters often border on the picaresque, and through them he examines the effects of migration, psychological loss, cultural hybridization and social and economic exploitation, which are the stock-in-trade of what we have come to know as postcolonial literature.
Three of his novels relate in some way to the Portuguese presence in this hemisphere. His first novel, The Monkey King, published in 1978, is set in Hong Kong, and in the figure of Wallace Nolasco, we have a type of blueprint for the hapless, outsider/insider hero that will be a feature of his later novels. Wallace is a Macanese, or Hong Kong Portuguese, with links back to an impoverished but blue-blooded Macau family. He has married May Ling, the daughter of the rich Chinese businessman, Mr Poon. But his expectations of a life of luxury are disappointed when he discovers that the mansion he thought he was going to live in is no more than a flat in a tenement building, and that Poon is as miserly as he is wealthy. As for Poon, he has other plans for Wallace as his ambitions turn increasingly towards the construction boom during the Korean War, and he finds his son-in-law a clerical position in the Public Works Department where he hopes the family interests will be defended by Wallace’s signature being strategically appended to contracts approved by the government. When things go suddenly awry, Wallace and May Ling are bundled off to an isolated village in the New Territories to lie low until the scandal blows over, and it is here that Wallace redeems himself, showing leadership and flair in a series of projects that will improve the lives of the village inhabitants, while paving the way for his eventual return and taking command of the family business from the increasingly frail Mr Poon. Wallace’s journey from slothful, impotent and resentful son-in-law at the very base of the family hierarchy, to minor civil servant (a traditional occupation of the Macanese and Hong Kong Portuguese), to self-confident entrepreneur and diplomatic healer of village rivalries, is narrated with satirical irreverence and comedy, which places the novel well within the picaresque tradition. Wallace is a survivor, like the monkey king of Chinese tradition.
Mo’s second novel, Sour Sweet, was published in 1982, and was the first literary work to focus on the Chinese diaspora in England. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in the same year, and turned into a film in 1988, directed by Mike Newell and starring Sylvia Chang and Soon-Tek Oh. But it was in his third work of fiction that Mo again highlighted the inter-relationship between his native city and Macau: An Insular Possession (1986) was described by Tariq Ali in the Guardian as a ‘powerful, beautifully written narrative… a potent amalgam of history and fiction’. The novel, which again featured on the Booker shortlist, is set in the Pearl River estuary during the Opium War in the years leading up to the British occupation of Hong Kong. Like James Clavell’s blockbuster, Tai-Pan, coincidentally published exactly twenty years before, the novel is partially set in Macau and contains Portuguese characters. But here, any comparison with Clavell must end, for while Tai-Pan contains all the features of an empire-building novel, with strong plot line, omniscient narrator, and relationships driven by romance, lust and entrepreneurial rivalry, Mo’s work moves forward at a leisurely, occasionally light-hearted pace, blending different literary forms, including newspaper accounts, letters, and straight narrative. It is a period piece, in which Mo demonstrates sensitivities and skills obtained from his academic training as a historian, as well as considerable linguistic versatility. Moreover, our view of events leading up to the seizure of Hong Kong, is filtered through the eyes of two young American expatriates who, to some extent, incarnate Mo’s attachment to the figure of the outsider, the observer who is not centrally involved in the business of militaristic, colonial conquest.
His fourth novel, The Redundancy of Courage, published in 1991, is set in the fictional island of Danu during the invasion and occupation by the neighbouring expansionist ‘malais’, and is a scarcely disguised account of the Indonesian military invasion and occupation of East Timor after the Portuguese effectively abandoned the colony in 1975. Adolph Ng is a Chinese Timorese, who has returned to his native land to run a hotel after being educated in Canada. Adolph, rather like Mo’s other fundamentally placid heroes is swept up in the resistance to the invaders, rubbing shoulders with ex-seminarians turned Marxist guerrillas and experiencing the dangers, cruelties, betrayals, and moral adjustments of an insurgency hidden from the international limelight. Captured by the ‘malais’, he becomes the servant of an army colonel, eventually negotiating his release into exile away from Danu. The end of the novel sees Adolph fail to adapt to life in the former imperial capital, as he comments, ‘I wandered up the maze of cobbled alleyways to the city’s most venerable quarter. This was the old world, and you could keep it’. Eventually, he chooses to settle in Brazil under the name of Kawasaki, thus suggesting an intention to blend into the country’s large Japanese community. The novel, which involved a considerable amount of research on the part of the author, was praised by none other than the future president of East Timor, José Ramos Horta, who makes a cameo appearance as Joaquim Lobato, the penniless representative of the Danu nationalist movement in New York. The Redundancy of Courage was a unique novel for its time, the only work of literature to engage with a brutal military campaign on the extreme periphery of a former European empire, which is why it also has a special place in the development of East Timorese literature.
Mo’s most recent anti-hero is Rey Archimedes Blondel Castro, son of a black American GI and a Filipino bar-girl who herself was ‘half-lowland Malay, half-highland aboriginal, with a trace of philandering Chinese trader somewhere in the family tree’. Castro, the protagonist of Renegade or Halo2, is educated by an eccentric Jesuit, and forced to leave the Philippines in a hurry after being scapegoated for a crime. His travels as a sailor take him to Hong Kong, the Middle East, England and Cuba. He experiences violence and semi-slavery, but as a kind of postcolonial everyman and observer of the world around him, his life is one of continual cultural adaptation and re-invention, even though he never loses the central core of his personality. It is a rich, mesmerising literary tour-de-force that coincidentally ties together two extremes of an old Iberian empire: the Philippines and Cuba, which Rey finds strangely familiar, and where he rapidly learns to make himself understood. Mo’s interest in the Hong Kong Portuguese, Macau, East Timor and the Philippines, suggests some sort of an affinity with the hybrid cultures of these ancient corners of empire on the part of an author who identifies them as mirroring his own experience as a person through whom flow the cultures of Asia and Europe. Wallace, Adolph and Rey, ever more flamboyant intermediaries between mutually misunderstanding cultures, are both survivors and victims, but also the recipients and agents of modernity on their journey through life.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 28 November, 2009.
LOVE AND BETRAYAL IN OCCUPIED HONG KONG: JANICE Y.K. LEE’S THE PIANO TEACHER*
The continuing thematic appeal to contemporary English writers of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, in particular the Second World War, has often been the subject of debate among critics and scholars. War as a watershed phenomenon, during the course of which, old routines are turned upside down, or as a result of which, major social changes occur, seem to offer writers opportunities for comment about social conundrums or national history, while introducing dramatic tensions, unforeseen romance, episodes of brutality and betrayal, that make for strong story lines as well as providing readers with reasons for reflection about the nation’s present in relation to its past. War as an agent of drama and of change is also a feature of some of the literature set in Macau and Hong Kong, not to mention other parts of Asia that have experienced widescale conflict during the last century. It is, of course, present in the short stories of Deolinda da Conceição and of Henrique de Senna Fernandes, Macau’s two main Macanese fiction writers . It is also the subject of a recent bestselling novel set in Hong Kong, The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee.
Lee’s novel featured as a New York Times bestseller earlier this year, and has been translated into no less than twenty-four languages. It is the first novel by this Hong Kong-born, American-educated writer of Korean parentage, who has returned to live in the city of her birth. The Piano Teacher is ostensibly about Hong Kong in the early 1950s, and focuses on a love affair between Claire Pendleton, a recently-married Englishwoman, who has fled the grime of post-war England to live in Hong Kong, and Will Truesdale, a colonial who had arrived in the city on the eve of the Japanese invasion of the territory at the end of 1941. The dramatic tension and interest of this atmospheric novel are maintained through a series of flashbacks to the years of the Japanese occupation, and the slow progress on the part of Claire in uncovering the truth about Truesdale’s involvement with the enigmatic Eurasian beauty, Trudy Liang, the daughter of a Shanghainese father and a Portuguese mother. As this split-level novel develops, it becomes apparent that while Claire is perhaps the heroine of the story in so far as she goes through a life-changing set of experiences, she could hardly have achieved this without her growing understanding of the personality and motivations of Trudy, her lover’s wartime lover.
As the author stated in an interview, Trudy is ‘the truest symbol of East-West culture because she’s Portuguese and Chinese’. It is not entirely clear whether Lee was merely referring to Trudy’s multi-cultural identity, or whether she meant to highlight the historic role of the Portuguese in the encounter between Europe and the East, but something in her words seems to suggest a recognition of Portugal’s position as the first bridge builder between China and the West. Certainly, no one who knows the history of Hong Kong or the Chinese Treaty Ports of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can deny the pivotal role played by the Portuguese from Macau as intermediaries between colonial administrators and the Chinese population. Trudy is the result of this melting-pot. Brought up in Shanghai, she is fluent in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, while possessing ‘conversational’ French, and a ‘smattering’ of Portuguese. Abandoned by her Portuguese mother as a child, she and her father fled Shanghai for Hong Kong, where she lives the life of a wealthy socialite, while her father has retreated to a large mansion in Macau. She is a woman in transit between worlds, but is conscious of not being fully accepted, either by the Europeans or the Chinese, for to the Europeans she looks Chinese, while for the Chinese, she acts too much like a European. This is the root of her ambiguity and, for Truesdale, the mark of her allure, for he sees in her the misfit that he, deep down, would like to be.
When the Japanese arrive, the lovers are separated, for Truesdale is interned in a concentration camp, while Trudy, as a Portuguese Eurasian, remains free, to survive as best as she can in occupied Hong Kong. It is from this point on that Trudy allows herself to be sucked deeper and deeper into a web of deceit and betrayal, involving the Japanese police chief, Chinese collaborators, and European civilians, a process that will transform her into a tragic heroine. It is the truth behind what happened and why, that Claire Pendleton sets out to establish as part of her own journey of self-discovery. In so doing, the author is able to raise questions about the nature of cowardice and betrayal. Was Trudy a coward for appearing to collaborate with agents of the occupying power? Or were the real cowards those who adapted too comfortably to their imprisonment, protected at least notionally by the Geneva Convention? Was it more dangerous to be imprisoned in a concentration camp, or to live by one’s wits in the bigger prison of the occupied city governed by whim? The Piano Teacher is a novel that begs to be made into a film, and one can well imagine Ang Lee, the director of ‘Lust, Caution’ rising to the challenge, for Trudy’s dilemma bears some resemblance to that of the enigmatic Chia Chi in Lee’s film: deep down, hers is a conflict of loyalty in a world that appears to offer her none, and the novel suggests that the final outcome of her life may be the result of her own failing as much as it is the failing of other characters.
As the novel draws to its close, and Claire uncovers a plausible truth about Trudy’s life, she abandons both husband and lover, and resigns from her job as piano teacher to the daughter of an upwardly mobile Chinese couple, who are also linked through kinship to Trudy and therefore party to the secret surrounding her fate. But she decides to stay in Hong Kong, to disappear into its Chinese but cosmopolitan society, while turning her back on the constricting circles of the British colonial elite. Is it Hong Kong that has changed her, given her a new lease of life, or is it her association with the story of Trudy Liang? The book allows us, the readers, to decide, but at the end it is perhaps no coincidence that Claire Pendleton, the blond Englishwoman, has somehow taken steps to enter the culturally hybrid, international world once inhabited by a lively, forthright Portuguese Eurasian woman with a Chinese face.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 October, 2009.
The continuing thematic appeal to contemporary English writers of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, in particular the Second World War, has often been the subject of debate among critics and scholars. War as a watershed phenomenon, during the course of which, old routines are turned upside down, or as a result of which, major social changes occur, seem to offer writers opportunities for comment about social conundrums or national history, while introducing dramatic tensions, unforeseen romance, episodes of brutality and betrayal, that make for strong story lines as well as providing readers with reasons for reflection about the nation’s present in relation to its past. War as an agent of drama and of change is also a feature of some of the literature set in Macau and Hong Kong, not to mention other parts of Asia that have experienced widescale conflict during the last century. It is, of course, present in the short stories of Deolinda da Conceição and of Henrique de Senna Fernandes, Macau’s two main Macanese fiction writers . It is also the subject of a recent bestselling novel set in Hong Kong, The Piano Teacher, by Janice Y.K. Lee.
Lee’s novel featured as a New York Times bestseller earlier this year, and has been translated into no less than twenty-four languages. It is the first novel by this Hong Kong-born, American-educated writer of Korean parentage, who has returned to live in the city of her birth. The Piano Teacher is ostensibly about Hong Kong in the early 1950s, and focuses on a love affair between Claire Pendleton, a recently-married Englishwoman, who has fled the grime of post-war England to live in Hong Kong, and Will Truesdale, a colonial who had arrived in the city on the eve of the Japanese invasion of the territory at the end of 1941. The dramatic tension and interest of this atmospheric novel are maintained through a series of flashbacks to the years of the Japanese occupation, and the slow progress on the part of Claire in uncovering the truth about Truesdale’s involvement with the enigmatic Eurasian beauty, Trudy Liang, the daughter of a Shanghainese father and a Portuguese mother. As this split-level novel develops, it becomes apparent that while Claire is perhaps the heroine of the story in so far as she goes through a life-changing set of experiences, she could hardly have achieved this without her growing understanding of the personality and motivations of Trudy, her lover’s wartime lover.
As the author stated in an interview, Trudy is ‘the truest symbol of East-West culture because she’s Portuguese and Chinese’. It is not entirely clear whether Lee was merely referring to Trudy’s multi-cultural identity, or whether she meant to highlight the historic role of the Portuguese in the encounter between Europe and the East, but something in her words seems to suggest a recognition of Portugal’s position as the first bridge builder between China and the West. Certainly, no one who knows the history of Hong Kong or the Chinese Treaty Ports of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, can deny the pivotal role played by the Portuguese from Macau as intermediaries between colonial administrators and the Chinese population. Trudy is the result of this melting-pot. Brought up in Shanghai, she is fluent in Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin and English, while possessing ‘conversational’ French, and a ‘smattering’ of Portuguese. Abandoned by her Portuguese mother as a child, she and her father fled Shanghai for Hong Kong, where she lives the life of a wealthy socialite, while her father has retreated to a large mansion in Macau. She is a woman in transit between worlds, but is conscious of not being fully accepted, either by the Europeans or the Chinese, for to the Europeans she looks Chinese, while for the Chinese, she acts too much like a European. This is the root of her ambiguity and, for Truesdale, the mark of her allure, for he sees in her the misfit that he, deep down, would like to be.
When the Japanese arrive, the lovers are separated, for Truesdale is interned in a concentration camp, while Trudy, as a Portuguese Eurasian, remains free, to survive as best as she can in occupied Hong Kong. It is from this point on that Trudy allows herself to be sucked deeper and deeper into a web of deceit and betrayal, involving the Japanese police chief, Chinese collaborators, and European civilians, a process that will transform her into a tragic heroine. It is the truth behind what happened and why, that Claire Pendleton sets out to establish as part of her own journey of self-discovery. In so doing, the author is able to raise questions about the nature of cowardice and betrayal. Was Trudy a coward for appearing to collaborate with agents of the occupying power? Or were the real cowards those who adapted too comfortably to their imprisonment, protected at least notionally by the Geneva Convention? Was it more dangerous to be imprisoned in a concentration camp, or to live by one’s wits in the bigger prison of the occupied city governed by whim? The Piano Teacher is a novel that begs to be made into a film, and one can well imagine Ang Lee, the director of ‘Lust, Caution’ rising to the challenge, for Trudy’s dilemma bears some resemblance to that of the enigmatic Chia Chi in Lee’s film: deep down, hers is a conflict of loyalty in a world that appears to offer her none, and the novel suggests that the final outcome of her life may be the result of her own failing as much as it is the failing of other characters.
As the novel draws to its close, and Claire uncovers a plausible truth about Trudy’s life, she abandons both husband and lover, and resigns from her job as piano teacher to the daughter of an upwardly mobile Chinese couple, who are also linked through kinship to Trudy and therefore party to the secret surrounding her fate. But she decides to stay in Hong Kong, to disappear into its Chinese but cosmopolitan society, while turning her back on the constricting circles of the British colonial elite. Is it Hong Kong that has changed her, given her a new lease of life, or is it her association with the story of Trudy Liang? The book allows us, the readers, to decide, but at the end it is perhaps no coincidence that Claire Pendleton, the blond Englishwoman, has somehow taken steps to enter the culturally hybrid, international world once inhabited by a lively, forthright Portuguese Eurasian woman with a Chinese face.
DAVID BROOKSHAW
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine), 10 October, 2009.
Austin Coates, City of Broken Promises
Where history meets fiction: Austin Coates’s City of Broken Promises*.
This year has seen the welcome re-edition by the Hong Kong University Press of books by Austin Coates, an author who lived and worked for many years in Hong Kong, and who wrote a number of seminal works on Macau, a city whose history fascinated him. Born in 1922, Coates, after serving in RAF Intelligence in South East Asia during the War, later became a magistrate in Hong Kong, after which he briefly joined the British colonial service in Malaya. In 1962, he returned to Hong Kong in order to devote his time to writing, and indeed, his books on Macau and other works, such as his biography of the Philippine nationalist, José Rizal, date from this period. Like the older Charles Boxer and the younger John Villiers, Coates represented a breed of British ‘gentleman scholars’, whose interest in the history of the Portuguese in East and South East Asia stemmed from their direct experience of living and working in that part of the world. It is perhaps fitting that Coates should have spent the last years of his life between Hong Kong and a home near Sintra, in Portugal, where he died in 1997.
A Macao Narrative, which was originally published in 1978, is still the most readable account of the history of Macau and an excellent introduction for students or the interested visitor. His later work, Macao and the British, 1637-1842, focuses rather more specifically upon British involvement in the city, from the first recorded visit by the Cornish traveller, Peter Mundy, in 1637 through to the opium wars and the eventual seizure of neighbouring Hong Kong by the British. But perhaps Coates’s most fondly remembered work relating to Macau is his City of Broken Promises, first published in 1967 and now re-issued with the two other books just mentioned, for it is the product both of the author’s energy as a scholar, involving research undertaken in the libraries of Macau, Portugal and Britain, and of his imagination, being a re-creation of stories heard in Macau. His interest in the figure of Martha Merop is said to have stemmed from having seen her portrait on a visit to Macau’s Santa Casa da Misericórdia, or Holy House of Mercy. This same painting is reproduced on the book’s cover. City of Broken Promises is a historical novel set roughly between the years 1780 and 1795. The age of Macau’s great prosperity, when it was the hub for the trade in silks and silver between China and Japan, has long gone. But it has assumed a new, cosmopolitan character, with the arrival of the British East India Company along with other Europeans who have been allowed by the Chinese to establish themselves in Macau so as to limit their presence in Canton to the trading season.
In this at once international and provincial environment, European expatriates and Portuguese and Macanese lead largely separate lives, at most viewing each other with suspicion, while the Chinese who service the settlement during the day, leave it at night to an uncanny silence. Behind the shuttered windows of Macau’s Mediterranean villas and mansions, intrigues and conspiracies abound, and foreign traders consort with their local mistresses or ‘pensioners’, whom they will abandon when they return to Europe, thus breaking their promises of marriage. These promises, along with those of quick profit, give the novel its undertow of deceit, and of course justify the title of the story. Into this social pot pourri step the two main characters, Thomas and Martha, both of whom are, to some extent, outsiders and therefore exceptions to the norm. Thomas van Merop is an Anglo-Dutch functionary of the East India Company, an organisation that proved to be the proverbial cuckoo in the nest, breeding resentment among the local Portuguese, but at the same time guaranteeing Macau’s continuing status as Europe’s main commercial entrepot in the Far East. Through his English mother, Merop is cousin of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and therefore a man of liberal, reformist pedigree. His relationship with his fellow functionaries will be strained by his opposition to the opium trade, in which many are privately involved, among them, Abraham Biddle, a country trader of Dickensian proportions, whose fall from grace is as disastrous as are his attempts to accumulate wealth and improve his lowly status.
Martha da Silva is a Chinese orphan, who has been brought up by the Abbess of the local convent. At a certain age, she has been attached to a local Macanese family, has been mistreated, and has fallen out with the woman who is supposed to protect her, but instead resents her. Unable to return to the convent, she has ended up as the pensioner of Thomas van Merop’s predecessor. She is therefore passed on to Merop along with the Company house and servants. In this unusual domestic arrangement, Martha stands out as a teenager of unusual intelligence and initiative, while also possessing a type of childlike innocence. She speaks fluent French and Portuguese, and has an insatiable curiosity about the world beyond the narrow confines of Macau, and it is this ambition, coupled with one or two strokes of luck, and her own savvy, not to mention a secret marriage to the dying Merop, that result in her becoming Macau’s first native trader, shipowner and wealthy benefactress. The way she achieves this is, of course, the substance of the tale, with all its twists, turns and moments of drama.
One of the novel’s most abiding qualities, apart from its vivid depiction of a particular place and time, is the way it demonstrates the inner workings of colonial society in Portugal’s overseas empire. In the manner of Chica da Silva, the Brazilian slave woman who ended up free, rich and powerful, Martha manages to short-circuit the colonial hierarchy based on class and colour, allowing her to slip into a social role that would normally have been denied her. This is not to say that the Portuguese were by nature non-racist, as thinkers like Gilberto Freyre would have led us to believe, but that caste systems based on race and skin colour were, in pratice, unsustainable in distant realms and at times of social change. In the context of Macau, Martha, the illiterate Chinese orphan girl brought up on the fringes of colonial society to speak its languages and worship its God, is, in any meaningful sense of the word, Macanese, and this reality flies in the face of those whose definition of this group insists on the presence of a Portuguese blood line. Like many intermediary groups that emerged during colonial rule, the determining power of culture over genetics is a reality that Martha readily exemplifies, and this in itself produces a profound identity crisis that she has to overcome in order to survive socially and gain the respect of both the Europeans and the Chinese. Nowhere is this process of learning more vividly illustrated than in the episode in which Martha allows herself to be taken to a Chinese temple in the city, with a view to rejoining the world of her biological parents, and escaping the insecurities of life among the Portuguese and the British, for whom her only use is as a bed mate. It is this struggle between how she is outwardly perceived as a Chinese girl, and how she feels as someone whose upbringing has propelled her into the creolised world of the Macanese that is handled so perceptively by the author. Equally, the ties of kinship between Chinese ‘adopted’ children and extended Macanese families, are amply illustrated in the links between Martha and Teresa da Silva, whose surname she is allowed to adopt, and who is herself in cohabitation with an expatriate French trader, and Teresa’s cousin, Pedro Gonçalves Siqueira, whose commercial dealings and social aspirations in turn link him into the world of the Portuguese administrative elite on the one hand, and the British traders on the other.
This elegantly written novel evokes the multi-cultural roots of modern Macau, but it also offers us a glimpse of the East India Company in its declining years, as old state-backed monopolies gave way to the demand for free trade that would pervade notions of liberalism in the following century. It is also not unreasonable to assume that Coates’s novel formed a type of blueprint for Portuguese writers in Macau in later decades to tap the rich vein of oral history, the tales of forbidden love and scandal that abound in this city. Macau may be a small world, but it contains within it the world.
David Brookshaw
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine, 5 September, 2009)
This year has seen the welcome re-edition by the Hong Kong University Press of books by Austin Coates, an author who lived and worked for many years in Hong Kong, and who wrote a number of seminal works on Macau, a city whose history fascinated him. Born in 1922, Coates, after serving in RAF Intelligence in South East Asia during the War, later became a magistrate in Hong Kong, after which he briefly joined the British colonial service in Malaya. In 1962, he returned to Hong Kong in order to devote his time to writing, and indeed, his books on Macau and other works, such as his biography of the Philippine nationalist, José Rizal, date from this period. Like the older Charles Boxer and the younger John Villiers, Coates represented a breed of British ‘gentleman scholars’, whose interest in the history of the Portuguese in East and South East Asia stemmed from their direct experience of living and working in that part of the world. It is perhaps fitting that Coates should have spent the last years of his life between Hong Kong and a home near Sintra, in Portugal, where he died in 1997.
A Macao Narrative, which was originally published in 1978, is still the most readable account of the history of Macau and an excellent introduction for students or the interested visitor. His later work, Macao and the British, 1637-1842, focuses rather more specifically upon British involvement in the city, from the first recorded visit by the Cornish traveller, Peter Mundy, in 1637 through to the opium wars and the eventual seizure of neighbouring Hong Kong by the British. But perhaps Coates’s most fondly remembered work relating to Macau is his City of Broken Promises, first published in 1967 and now re-issued with the two other books just mentioned, for it is the product both of the author’s energy as a scholar, involving research undertaken in the libraries of Macau, Portugal and Britain, and of his imagination, being a re-creation of stories heard in Macau. His interest in the figure of Martha Merop is said to have stemmed from having seen her portrait on a visit to Macau’s Santa Casa da Misericórdia, or Holy House of Mercy. This same painting is reproduced on the book’s cover. City of Broken Promises is a historical novel set roughly between the years 1780 and 1795. The age of Macau’s great prosperity, when it was the hub for the trade in silks and silver between China and Japan, has long gone. But it has assumed a new, cosmopolitan character, with the arrival of the British East India Company along with other Europeans who have been allowed by the Chinese to establish themselves in Macau so as to limit their presence in Canton to the trading season.
In this at once international and provincial environment, European expatriates and Portuguese and Macanese lead largely separate lives, at most viewing each other with suspicion, while the Chinese who service the settlement during the day, leave it at night to an uncanny silence. Behind the shuttered windows of Macau’s Mediterranean villas and mansions, intrigues and conspiracies abound, and foreign traders consort with their local mistresses or ‘pensioners’, whom they will abandon when they return to Europe, thus breaking their promises of marriage. These promises, along with those of quick profit, give the novel its undertow of deceit, and of course justify the title of the story. Into this social pot pourri step the two main characters, Thomas and Martha, both of whom are, to some extent, outsiders and therefore exceptions to the norm. Thomas van Merop is an Anglo-Dutch functionary of the East India Company, an organisation that proved to be the proverbial cuckoo in the nest, breeding resentment among the local Portuguese, but at the same time guaranteeing Macau’s continuing status as Europe’s main commercial entrepot in the Far East. Through his English mother, Merop is cousin of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and therefore a man of liberal, reformist pedigree. His relationship with his fellow functionaries will be strained by his opposition to the opium trade, in which many are privately involved, among them, Abraham Biddle, a country trader of Dickensian proportions, whose fall from grace is as disastrous as are his attempts to accumulate wealth and improve his lowly status.
Martha da Silva is a Chinese orphan, who has been brought up by the Abbess of the local convent. At a certain age, she has been attached to a local Macanese family, has been mistreated, and has fallen out with the woman who is supposed to protect her, but instead resents her. Unable to return to the convent, she has ended up as the pensioner of Thomas van Merop’s predecessor. She is therefore passed on to Merop along with the Company house and servants. In this unusual domestic arrangement, Martha stands out as a teenager of unusual intelligence and initiative, while also possessing a type of childlike innocence. She speaks fluent French and Portuguese, and has an insatiable curiosity about the world beyond the narrow confines of Macau, and it is this ambition, coupled with one or two strokes of luck, and her own savvy, not to mention a secret marriage to the dying Merop, that result in her becoming Macau’s first native trader, shipowner and wealthy benefactress. The way she achieves this is, of course, the substance of the tale, with all its twists, turns and moments of drama.
One of the novel’s most abiding qualities, apart from its vivid depiction of a particular place and time, is the way it demonstrates the inner workings of colonial society in Portugal’s overseas empire. In the manner of Chica da Silva, the Brazilian slave woman who ended up free, rich and powerful, Martha manages to short-circuit the colonial hierarchy based on class and colour, allowing her to slip into a social role that would normally have been denied her. This is not to say that the Portuguese were by nature non-racist, as thinkers like Gilberto Freyre would have led us to believe, but that caste systems based on race and skin colour were, in pratice, unsustainable in distant realms and at times of social change. In the context of Macau, Martha, the illiterate Chinese orphan girl brought up on the fringes of colonial society to speak its languages and worship its God, is, in any meaningful sense of the word, Macanese, and this reality flies in the face of those whose definition of this group insists on the presence of a Portuguese blood line. Like many intermediary groups that emerged during colonial rule, the determining power of culture over genetics is a reality that Martha readily exemplifies, and this in itself produces a profound identity crisis that she has to overcome in order to survive socially and gain the respect of both the Europeans and the Chinese. Nowhere is this process of learning more vividly illustrated than in the episode in which Martha allows herself to be taken to a Chinese temple in the city, with a view to rejoining the world of her biological parents, and escaping the insecurities of life among the Portuguese and the British, for whom her only use is as a bed mate. It is this struggle between how she is outwardly perceived as a Chinese girl, and how she feels as someone whose upbringing has propelled her into the creolised world of the Macanese that is handled so perceptively by the author. Equally, the ties of kinship between Chinese ‘adopted’ children and extended Macanese families, are amply illustrated in the links between Martha and Teresa da Silva, whose surname she is allowed to adopt, and who is herself in cohabitation with an expatriate French trader, and Teresa’s cousin, Pedro Gonçalves Siqueira, whose commercial dealings and social aspirations in turn link him into the world of the Portuguese administrative elite on the one hand, and the British traders on the other.
This elegantly written novel evokes the multi-cultural roots of modern Macau, but it also offers us a glimpse of the East India Company in its declining years, as old state-backed monopolies gave way to the demand for free trade that would pervade notions of liberalism in the following century. It is also not unreasonable to assume that Coates’s novel formed a type of blueprint for Portuguese writers in Macau in later decades to tap the rich vein of oral history, the tales of forbidden love and scandal that abound in this city. Macau may be a small world, but it contains within it the world.
David Brookshaw
*Published in the Macau Daily Times (Weekend Magazine, 5 September, 2009)
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