The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong: A Century of Transimperial Drifting

In Catherine Chan's first monograph, she focuses on Hong Kong's Macanese diasporic community: the product of sustained patterns of interracial intimacy among European, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and Malay people in Portuguese colonies like Macau, Goa, and Timor. Focusing on the first century of Hong Kong's history as a British colony, The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong joins a rich body of recent scholarship illuminating Hong Kong's history as a vibrant site of encounter for not just Chinese and British settlers but people from across Asia and the rest of the world. Chan pursues the traces of Macanese lives and practices of community in family records, English- and Portuguese-language newspapers, and colonial state archives, at once drawing attention to the transcolonial, global circuits of Macanese Hong Kongers’ diasporic imaginings and detailing the local associational cultures so characteristic of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Asian middle-class port city life through which their projects of self- and community-making were articulated, enacted, and contested. In the process, Chan explores the limits and possibilities of identity as a tool for navigating “unequal, racialized, and biased systems” under European colonial rule (9).Across five tightly organized and lucid chapters, Chan thinks with the life stories of diasporic Macanese in exploring how Macanese Hong Kongers positioned themselves in relation to Hong Kong, Macau, and the global empires at whose intersection they dwelled. Chapter 1 follows the clerks, merchants, missionaries, and journalists who left Macau for Hong Kong beginning in the 1840s, helping to fuel the fledgling colony's rapid development as a center of trade and political ferment, while chapter 2 focuses on the ambitions and dissatisfactions of the Macanese men who took up white-collar positions in British-run offices during the second half of the nineteenth century. Building on Vivian Kong's and Su Lin Lewis's accounts of colonial-era port city associational culture, chapter 3 attends to the role of clubs like the Club Lusitano in fostering Macanese social life, community identity, and public influence throughout this period. In chapter 4, Chan charts the “rise of [a new generation of] local-born urbanites” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “whose ambitions and imaginations,” expressed through publications like Historic Macao and new associational platforms like the League of Fellowship and Service, “transformed the city from just another British colony to a home” (156). Chapter 5 investigates the tensions that began to emerge between this anglicized, even pro-British segment of Macanese Hong Kong society and another group comprising more recent arrivals from Macao: clustering in the newer suburbs of the Kowloon peninsula, they established new associational institutions (such as the Club de Recreio) that welcomed a more diverse group of diasporic Macanese to explore the community's histories ties to Portugal. An epilogue considers how Macanese Hong Kong mobilized or rethought such strategies of self-definition and community-making during the 1940s under pressure from Japanese imperial aggression and occupation.Among the strengths of the book is Chan's emphasis on intracommunity heterogeneity and debate, differences of class, status, generation, and personal history prompting divergent responses to the question of how their ties to Macau, Portugal, or Hong Kong itself could and should matter to Macanese diasporic people living in Hong Kong. As she herself acknowledges, Chan's account reflects the gendered limitations of her archives—or perhaps how she approaches them—which center the stories of bourgeois men. Even so, the book productively intervenes in scholarly conversations that too often frame the experiences of colonial subject people(s) in terms of their struggles with colonial systems and their representatives. Chan's claim that doing justice to the complexity of such experiences requires us to look “beyond” race is welcome insofar as it reminds us that the traumas of racial ascription do not determine how and with whom people forge meaningful lives (9). At the same time, it risks obscuring how colonial racial logics informed Macanese diasporic experiences, associational practices, and sense-making projects in colonial Hong Kong, even ones that may appear not to have had anything to do with race at all. How did they condition the terms in which diasporic Macanese mobilized for influence and visibility through appeals to Britishness or Portugueseness but not (for example) Chineseness? In chapter 2, Chan argues that the failure of some nineteenth-century Macanese white-collar workers to advance in their chosen careers is better ascribed to personal shortcomings of skill and training than to racial discrimination (as if assessments of qualification and performance did not reflect colonial hierarchies of value). But what does it tell us that even at the time, Macanese professionals identified the workings of colonial racism as impediments to Macanese success? How and why did this come to be the way they made sense of their experiences, and with what consequences? Rather than seek to get “beyond” race in our analyses, we might reground our understanding of race and its operations in the particulars of how racialized subjects (who are also classed, gendered, and so on) move in their singularity through the world. In this project, the stories, methodological tools, and analytical frameworks that Chan develops in The Macanese Diaspora in British Hong Kong have much to offer historians of Hong Kong and other readers who might be curious about the textures of diasporic life and imagining in a colonial place.

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