The Stranger | Minchi politics

Sheyla Zandonai

Macanese gastronomy has once again been recognized as an integral part of Macau’s heritage, following this week’s official announcement of its inscription in the city’s repertoire of intangible cultural heritage.
The Cultural Affairs Bureau listed the local cuisine along with other cultural items that represent both Macanese and southern Chinese ways of life, including the Maquista creole or Patuá, Cantonese opera and the Drunken Dragon Festival.
The process, which culminated in this classification, has been a long one. There have been efforts to list the cuisine since 2012 at least, when Macanese gastronomy was already the subject of a public consultation. In 2017, it was integrated into the local “inventory” of intangible cultural heritage, and now, following yet another public consultation it has earned the title of local intangible cultural heritage.
Apart from this episodic way of doing things that the Macau government and heritage department have chosen to rely on, the confirmed recognition of Macanese gastronomy is important not only for its acknowledgement of Macanese culture, but also of Macau as a place of culture.
Truth be told, Macanese cuisine is one of the topics everybody agrees to disagree on. The stories of family recipes and their secrets abounds. But there is no doubt the cuisine embodies a long history of global developments, emerging from encounters and disagreements between different cultures, and their use of ingredients and ways of cooking.
Macanese gastronomy therefore emerges from the crossing of cooking influences and ingredients, making it a very early modern “fusion” cuisine. Portuguese and Chinese cooking styles blend in distinctive concoctions, with ingredients found and absorbed on the trading routes of Asia, from India and Malaysia to Japan. Reinvented by Macanese families as the city and trade developed, with the transnational links that for long have marked the Macanese ethnicity, it has matured.
What nobody seems to disagree with is that the food is good when it is good food. But that still seems to be limited to a quite closed circle of Macanese family homes and a handful of restaurants, although several books about the Macanese cuisine and its social history are now available – by Graça Pacheco Jorge, Cecilia Jorge, Fernando Sales Lopes, and António M. Jorge da Silva, to name a few authors – for those who want to try their hand at local specialties.
If, by conferring upon Macanese food the title of local heritage, the Macau government is seeking to better apply its efforts to safeguarding the cuisine while promoting it, it should know that with commitment comes responsibility. There is a need to find a good balance between respecting memory and creating routes for ensuring transmission, while unfolding flat narratives onto something more meaningful to residents and tourists – which is to say that the “East meets West” line has an expiration date.
Considering the big picture, several outcomes may emerge from this. In a way, the local listing is the first step on the way to a national and eventual international recognition; but working on the listing of Macanese gastronomy as part of China’s national heritage – and Macanese representatives have already expressed such intent – might be a much longer route. As for international classification with UNESCO, China may have preempted the option of future recognition when it supported Macau’s application as a UNESCO creative city of gastronomy, a designation it received in 2017, whereby Macanese cuisine was labelled the first fusion cuisine in the world.
Is China preparing to embrace diversity within or to keep it at a distance by inscribing “fusion” and its products in an external sphere? Politics alone will tell. Sheyla Zandonai