Macanese Identity after World War II

This article was originally written as the conclusion of a chapter for an upcoming book on the history of Luso-Asians and Macanese. In this version, I am revising it as the first installment of a two-part series on Macanese identity. The article below deals with issues among the pre-war generation who eventually migrated after World War II. The second article, which is very different, will be on how the post-war generation maintains cultural ties through traditions such as family dinners.

The end of World War II was in many ways a defining moment for the Macanese, especially for those who had been in Macau as refugees. As we saw in other articles, pre-war hierarchies that separated them from their colonial “superiors” in Hong Kong seemed less relevant in neutral Macau during the war. Despite living in dire conditions, many Macanese played important roles in the war effort, including Dr. Horacio Ozario, his younger brother Alberto Ozorio, a medical student, and Dr. Eddie Gosano, who were all involved with the British and Chinese undergrounds. Many others used their contacts and language skills to circumvent Japanese embargos, the military police, and the Axis network of collaborators.

Even those straddling ethical lines as black market profiteers, such as Pedro Lobo and Stanley Ho, could support the feeding and education of refugees while also flaunting their new status as “entrepreneurs” in local cafes for all to see. Under less pressure than in occupied Hong Kong, the Macanese exercised a high degree of autonomy in their ancestral home, many exhibiting purpose and resolve to defeat the common enemy, while redefining pre-war identities as colonial underlings by reverted to traditional roles as “intermediaries” between antagonists, who in some instances were forced to deal with them.

A similar kind of upheaval was occurring in other pre-war colonies. Throughout Southeast Asia during the war years, especially in Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, and in Macau’s sister colony Timor, the Allies depended on local populations for intelligence, harassment of the enemy, and armed resistance to prepare for their return in the future. Like the Macanese, many Eurasians asserted themselves in guerrilla groups and other clandestine efforts, undermining the occupying army, and holding fast until liberation. In the process, their sense of purpose (for who had more to lose?), sustained a new outlook on the world after the war.

If, as the historian Felicia Yap writes, the war highlighted the “tensions of empire” in Asia, the assertion of new roles and identities that occurred as a result may have been the final step in destabilizing Britain’s and Portugal’s already weak colonial systems.[1] The rise of “liberation” movements in former colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the end of the 20^th century provide ample evidence that such changes in ideology had as much force as the deployment of weapons. 

The challenge to the Macanese during the period was best captured in an observation by Fr. Henry O’Brien, the wartime head of the Jesuit community in Macau. Reggie Pires, one of O’Brien’s students, recalls:

…  I remember his words to this day. “You Portuguese Boys have the best of both worlds. You have the minds of the Asian and the stamina of the Europeans. The problem with you is that you have accepted your place in this world.  You are happy to spend your lives subservient to the British in Hong Kong.[2]

Many Macanese took the essence of Fr. O’Brien’s reproach to heart. Most in the youngest generation were not content to be subservient any longer, especially after taking prominent roles in helping the Allies win the war. Many believed that they deserved to reap the benefits of the victory that they had achieved. Similar sentiments were shared by ethnic minorities around the globe. Indeed, accounts of Japanese-American, African-American, and Latino-American soldiers who served the Allies with distinction were similar to the Macanese experience.[3] 

Our perspective from many decades removed should not diminish the fact that, rather than exhibiting a sense of entitlement, such sentiments suggest deeply felt emotions and “debts” that were thought to be “owed” to those who reconsidered their own priorities during the war. As with other cultural minorities, many Macanese re-imagined their value to society, given their roles in the recent global crisis, and employed such attitudes to support perceptions of their own identity after the war. Those reassessments led many returning to Hong Kong, Shanghai and other regions to begin the process of leaving behind a painful past and looking to the future.[4]

As a result, many families eventually left Southeast Asia seeking new lives as immigrants in unfamiliar countries. Their ability to “break” from the past, however, proved more difficult, and followed the experiences of other exiled groups. In research on the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, for example, survivors similarly sought to move quickly beyond the pain of personal loss as a mechanism of individual survival. This led, in later generations, to a collective loss of confidence and optimism.  Like them, the Macanese diaspora has had similar and often conflicting repercussions on survivors and their descendants. [5]

In my own research involving the children of Macanese immigrants born before World War II, there is an acknowledgement that older relatives often avoided discussions of their past lives in order to accommodate themselves in new societies to which they migrated. The underlying and unspoken reality, however, may have been their collective “shame” of being traditionally slighted as racially-mixed colonials, often referred to as “inferior” or “subaltern” in historical accounts, with little knowledge of their own history to define themselves.

This is understandable if we consider that ecclesiastic and colonial administrations over five centuries elevated Portuguese and British values to high culture, while often diminishing Asian traditions as “pagan” and “barbaric”. As a people somewhere “between” Europe and Asia with ancestors from both continents, there have been few attempts to place Luso-Asians and other racially-mixed groups into this cultural space.[6] In the case of the Macanese who survived World War II, many carried this cultural baggage, in addition to suffering the loss of loved ones, property, social status, and their dignity in the aftermath of a foreign invasion and diminished circumstances as refugees.

In many cases, it was only years later that children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren born in the Post-war period who were interested in family histories began gathering documents, conducting informal interviews, creating genealogies, and obtaining DNA summaries. Only then did Macanese elders still living reluctantly begin to recount their war-time experiences in more detail. As in the case of other exiled groups, younger Macanese often discovered meticulously written accounts, photos, and other documentation that had been hidden for years by relatives, whose reluctance to acknowledge their heritage as “mestizos” underpinned troubling memories of the war that were uncomfortable to recall, and often too painful to recount, even to members of their own families. [7]

Beginning in 1945, many Macanese who were unwilling to live and work in the confines of the old colonies started a four decade long migration to western countries, including to the United States, Canada, Australia, Brazil, and Portugal.[8] Their exodus in the post-war period, and the relation of expatriate Macanese to the emergence of China as an economic power, suggests that the history of Macanese development has yet to run its course. Their potential roles in the global economy and reconnection to Macau in the 21st century will be the subject of a future article.

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Notes

[1] Felicia Yap, “Eurasians in British Asia during the Second World War”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2011, Series 3, 21, 4, p. 485.

[2] Reggie Pires correspondence with the author, May 2, 2014. 

[3] For example, see Linda Tamua, Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River, University of Washington Press, 2012, Neil A. Wynn, The African-American Experience during World War II, Rowman and Littlefield, 2010, and Rogelio Saenz and Aurelia Lorena Murga, Latino Issues, Santa Barbara, 2011.

[4] Dr. Eddie Gosano was a case in point. Despite his medical degree and training, Gosano noted in an autobiography his lack of acceptance as a doctor and surgeon in post-war Hong Kong and England due to racial discrimination. Left with little choice to support a wife and a young family, he immigrated to the United States in 1960 and spent an additional three years studying to pass American medical examinations. Eddie Gosano (Eduardo Liberato Gosano), Hong Kong Farwell, Hong Kong, June 1997:36,41,56.

[5] I am not arguing that the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 was similar to the fate of the Macanese after WW II. My point is that the aftermath of upheavals such as mass migrations and genocide have effects on later generations in unexpected ways. For example, many Luso-Asians, including the Macanese, suffered from slavery and genocide following their flights from the Portuguese Inquisition in Goa after 1560. As Rouben Adalian wrote: “When the struggle for survival is so individuated as during genocide, the confidence in the strengths of the collective is sapped. For the Armenians the sapping of their societal confidence and their cultural optimism was perpetuated by the fact that they did not return to their former spaces”. Rouben R. Adalian,“A Conceptual Method for Examining the Consequences of the Armenian Genocide”, Studies in Comparative Genocide, eds. Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian, St. Martin’s Press, New York:1999:54.

[6] See the writings of Jorge Morbey, “Aspects of ‘Ethnic of Identities’ of the Macanese”, Review of Culture, 1994, Instituto Cultural do Governo da R.E.M. de Macau, and Joao de Pina y Cabral, Between China and Europe, Person, Culture and Emotion in Macao, Continuum, London, 2002.

[7] I am deeply indebted to many community scholars who continue to gather those materials, and for many who have shared their family accounts and stories so that the world can appreciate the extent of their contributions.

[8] One of the earliest immigrants was Rafael Alfonso Duarte, of Spanish-Portuguese heritage married to a Macanese woman, who survived the war in Manila, and migrated to Southern California in May 1945. Based on Correspondence with his granddaughter, August 2016.