Q&A | Brian Castro, australian writer: ‘Macau is still an enclave in the past’

Brian Castro is an author and academic in Australia who has published 11 novels and a volume of essays, some of which have connections to Macau. He was invited to speak this week at the “Macau Literary Festival – The Script Road.”

Born in Hong Kong of Portuguese, Chinese and English parentage, Castro did not explicitly refer to himself as “Macanese” during the session, though acknowledged that he has connections to Macau. He added that identity is somewhat of a “confusing” issue for him, but he regards his “troublesome identity” as an advantage.

Castro has previously claimed that he was born on a boat traveling between Hong Kong and Macau, however when pressed for details during the discussion this week, Castro was elusive, stressing that he is a fiction writer and noting that “authenticity has a very foggy [unclear] meaning.”

The Times sat down with Castro to understand his perspective of Macau and his thoughts on the city’s development since he last visited about 10 years ago.

Macau Daily Times (MDT) – Can you tell us a little about your history and how you came to be a writer?

Brian Castro (BC) – I was born in Hong Kong and sent to boarding school in Australia when I was 11 years old. My father was Portuguese and my mother was Eurasian [Chinese and European] and that made me interested my whole life in what it means to be so mixed. Other people consider it a disadvantage, but I consider it an advantage as a writer to [be able to] cross all of these boundaries of nationalities and language. I first started writing in 1981 and had no interest from publishers except for a competition that I entered. [… After winning the competition] I started as a full-time writer and I was always half a writer and half an academic – working in the university and teaching students creative writing… not that you can really teach someone that, but you can mentor them.

Macau Daily Times (MDT) – Having lived in Australia for most of your life, do you regard your connection to Macau as a little romantic?

BC – I think so. Macau [retains] a place in my memory. My father spent some time here and he used to tell me things […] and I became thrilled with revisiting his past. […] So, it is about the past, and I am concerned that China will just swap everything here in the future – and I hope that doesn’t happen. The preservation of culture is very important. I think that the really old Macau has great stories to tell; great stories that can turn into novels.

MDT – What do you make of the city’s development in the past decade since you last visited?

BC – It was a surprise to me. It’s fine as long as the casino world doesn’t consume and destroy what is of value – and this question of value is ineffable and cannot be measured in money.  [The old Macau] needs to be preserved and not developed over, even though I know a lot of people won’t be pleased with [the reminder of] Macau’s colonial history. I think that it is essential that we value what we have and don’t dismiss it for the sake of the next skyscraper.

This [land] reclamation came as a shock to me because this used to be water, it used to be a harbor. And now it has been filled in. It used to be this grand ‘sea wall’ and now that’s five street back. I haven’t been here for 10 years and I am quite surprised. I see this kind of unrestrained development as a real danger.

MDT – How is Macau portrayed to the rest of the world in art, literature and film?

BC – Macau is still an enclave in the past – that’s how people see it. Not so much has changed in that respect. My take on it is to preserve the food, the music and the family photographs [in terms of culture]. These are memories.  I don’t know much about art, but I think that visual artists tend not to recall memory so much. They are recording the present and the future and I would like to see more art and texts that use the idea of [historical] Macau.

In literature, I actually don’t see a lot of themes [when it comes to] Macau. I think that there is only now an identity starting to be formed. After the handover in Hong Kong [in 1997], there was an eruption of Hong Kong culture. Now that’s faded away quite dramatically and has become political. One would hope to see that happen in Macau… this efflorescence of Macau culture, that doesn’t fade away once China takes the whole [territory] back.

MDT – You said in the discussion that the Chinese influence on Portuguese culture is often neglected. Why do you think this is?

BC – There is a lot of talk about the Portuguese influencing the Chinese [in Macau], but not so much about the other way around – the Chinese influencing Portuguese culture; the great imperial trading power in this part of the world.

I think because literature is language-based, not like painting or visual arts. I guess in terms of the European [conception] of great literature, there are not many Chinese writers and poets [that meet these standards]. The Chinese were, after Confucius at least, quite embedded in certain classics. In order to become a civil servant [mandarin] you needed to pass all of these exams on these particular authors and so on. So it was very restricted in terms of experimentation.