Gastronomy becomes highlight of Macanese Communities Meeting

In Macau until this Friday, the 2019 Macanese Communities Meeting has brought over 1,300 people to the city from all corners of the world.

About 1,000 people have come from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Portugal, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Hong Kong. The U.S. and Canada delegations are the most numerous, counting a total of over 700 people.

As announced by the organizers, this year’s event taking place between November 23 and 29 will have gastronomy as the centerpiece with several events including tasting, touring and even Macanese culinary competitions held.

Explaining the focus on this year’s event, the president of the Permanent Council of the Council of Macanese Communities (CCM), José Luis de Sales Marques, said, “In general terms the Meeting will not be very different, but obviously we celebrate the 20 years of the Macau SAR, which will be a strong, thematic point of the Meeting.”

He added, “another [of the main topics] is the tribute to Macanese gastronomy. Since now Macau is a creative city of UNESCO cuisine we will pay special attention to it.”

In addition to the traditional events and tours, the program of this year’s edition includes a two-day trip, to be held today and tomorrow, comprising a tour through several cities of the Guangdong-
Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area (GBA). This visit, which has the support of the Central People’s Government Liaison Office in Macau, however some of the participants have chosen not to participate.

José and Auzenda Enes are two participants who opted for a different event. To the Times, the participants from the Lusitano Club of California said that they preferred to dedicate more time to exploring Macau.

“We are not going on the two-day China tour. We chose another [option] that only spends a half-day in China so we can have more time to explore Macau,” the couple said.

Participating in the triennial Meeting for the first time this year, the couple came to Macau in the company of other friends and relatives. “It has been wonderful so far. We are really happy to be here,” they told the Times.

Questioned previously on the inclusion of the GBA visit in the program of the 6th edition of the Meeting, Sales Marques explained that CCM sought to give the participants in the Meeting this year a better understanding of the current reality of Macau and a more informative event, “so participants can better understand the dynamics of the region in which the MSAR is inserted.”

To the newspaper Tribuna de Macau, Sales Marques, who is also presiding over the organizing committee of this year’s event, noted that one of the issues the committee currently has to deal with is the number of participants which, at some occasions this year has reached 1,500.

“The biggest difficulty is to get room for everyone in certain activities; the problem is that there are practically no more places for the closing dinner, so it is somehow complex,” he said. “The room [at the Macau Tower] has only space for about 1,200 people, so there are at least around 100 people or more that won’t be able to join.”

The triennial event will close on Friday with a dinner hosted at the Grand Hall of the Macau Tower, in a form that allows the participants to meet with families and friends.

Bringing back memories from the past

The Meeting has the purpose of keeping alive memories from the past so that they may be passed on to future generations as a cultural and identity legacy, said the chairman of Council of the CCM, Leonel Alves, in an interview with Tribuna de Macau.

For Alves, the Meeting has the goal of allowing the participants to revisit some of their own memories and learn from the memories of others. In addition to historic facts and the experience of previous generations, these memories can be passed on to be kept alive by newer generations.

“The stories of Macau, all the past of the city, and all the existing culture buildup by our ancestors must be perpetuated and transmitted. I think this is one of the main tasks for the new generations that live in Australia, Canada, Brazil, and other countries, to keep this cultural ‘umbilical cord’.”

Alves added that the future of cultural assets such as the Macanese patois language (Patuá) might be preserved or kept in some form through other assets such as gastronomy.

“I think gastronomy can play an important role. The Patuá [revitalization] as a communication language is a goal almost impossible to achieve […] But we hope that at least some expressions can be perpetuated so we have a link to the past,” Alves said.

Acknowledging that the event has been evolving with the times and adjusting to the new realities and roles of the region, Alves highlighted that the most important task is to keep it as a way to reconnect with roots so that individuals who do not often return to the region are reminded that it is time to visit Macau again.

The same purpose applies for the meetings and gatherings held by the young Macanese Communities that, besides the heritage and identity value, can attract the new generation to invest in new projects that can bring new challenges and opportunities, such as the ones allowed by the creation of the Greater Bay Area.