Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Macaense" in Indonesian language version.
To be a Macanese is fundamentally to be from Macao with Portuguese ancestors, but not necessarily to be of Sino-Portuguese descent. The local community was born from Portuguese men. ... but in the beginning the woman was Goanese, Siamese, Indo-Chinese, Malay - they came to Macao in our boats. Sporadically it was a Chinese woman.
When we established ourselves here, the Chinese ostracized us. The Portuguese had their wives, then, that came from abroad, but they could have no contact with the Chinese women, except the fishing folk, the tanka women and the female slaves. Only the lowest class of Chinese contacted with the Portuguese in the first centuries. But later the strength of Christianization, of the priests, started to convince the Chinese to become Catholic. ... But, when they started to be Catholics, they adopted Portuguese baptismal names and were ostracized by the Chinese Buddhists. So they joined the Portuguese community and their sons started having Portuguese education without a single drop of Portuguese blood.
I was personally told of people that, to this day, continue to hide the fact that their mothers had been lower-class Chinese women - often even tanka (fishing folk) women who had relations with Portuguese sailors and soldiers.
In fact, in those days, the matrimonial context of production was usually constituted by Chinese women of low socio-economic status who were married to or concubies of Portuguese or Macanese men. Very rarely did Chinese women of higher status agree to marry a Westerner. As Deolinda argues in one of her short stories,"8 should they have wanted to do so out of romantic infatuation, they would not be allowed to
Henrique de Senna Fernandes, another Macanese author, wrote a short story about a tanka girl who has an affair with a Portuguese sailor. In the end, the man returns to his native country and takes their little girl with him, leaving the mother abandoned and broken-hearted. As her sailorman picks up the child, A-Chan's words are: 'Cuidadinho ... cuidadinho' ('Careful ... careful'). She resigns herself to ther fate, much as she may never have recovered from the blow (1978).
Her slave-like submissiveness is her only attraction to him. A-Chan thus becomes his slave/mistress, an outlet for suppressed sexual urges. The story is an archetypical tragedy of miscegenation. Just as the Tanka community despises A-Chan's cohabitation with a foreign barbarian, Manuel's colleagues mock his 'bad taste' ('gosto degenerado') (Senna Fernandes, 1978: 15) in having a tryst with a boat girl.
As such, the Tanka girl is nonchalantly reified and dehumanized as a thing ( coisa). Manuel reduces human relations to mere consumption not even of her physical beauty (which has been denied in the description of A-Chan), but her 'Orientalness' of being slave-like and submissive.
We can trace this fleeting and shallow relationship in Henrique de Senna Fernandes' short story, A-Chan, A Tancareira, (Ah Chan, the Tanka Girl) (1978). Senna Fernandes (1923-), a Macanese, had written a series of novels set against the context of Macau and some of which were made into films.
