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Introduction to Deolinda da Conceição
By Professor David Brookshaw
Bristol University
Deolinda da Conceição was a woman
both of her times and in advance of her times. Born in Macau in 1914, as a
young woman she experienced the hardships and perils of the War of the
Pacific: in 1941, she was caught up in the Japanese occupation of Hong
Kong, where she was working as a teacher and translator, later went to
Shanghai with her first husband, where she was interned in a concentration
camp before being released and returning to Macau alone, by this time a
divorcee with two young children. After the end of the war, she worked as
a journalist on the territory’s main newspaper, Notícias de Macau,
writing the women’s page, as well as literary and art reviews. But it was
in the pages of the newspaper that she also wrote “crónicas” (chronicles),
a popular genre widespread in the press of the Portuguese-speaking world
given its focus on a moral theme or contemporary issue, illustrated by the
narration of an incident drawn from everyday life. She also wrote longer
fiction and essays. In 1948, she married her fellow journalist and
long-time friend, António Conceição, by whom she had her third son in
1951. She was the lone female voice among a group of Macanese
intellectuals which emerged after the austere war years and flourished
during the 1950s. Macau at this time was still a small, provincial city,
and its society highly conservative, and one can imagine that Deolinda, a
divorced woman, and a writer into the bargain, would have stood out as a
dangerously free spirit, much as she would have done, it must be said, if
she had lived in Portugal during the same period.
Her short stories, some of which had already appeared in the press, were
published as a collection in Portugal in 1956, under the title Cheong-Sam,
A Cabaia. As suggested by the title, the unifying theme that characterizes
all the tales, is the position of women in China and Macau: educated
Chinese women, often brought up in urban Western ways, struggling for
respect and emancipation in the face of traditional patriarchy in a China
that, rather in the manner of Pearl Buck, is often portrayed in quite
abstract terms; women of the people struggling against the oppression of
grinding poverty or the effects of war, both of which the author had
witnessed at close quarters in mainland China and in Macau; and finally
women who are often the victims, and sometimes the perpetrators of
superstitious beliefs. There are also tales of love, often destined to a
sad end because they seem to cross insurmountable social and economic or
racial barriers, such as in the tragic story of a poor woman seduced by an
educated man, who sees her as a concubine and not a wife, or the tale of a
poverty-stricken girl’s love for a Portuguese soldier, who is recalled to
his distant homeland, but not before he has made her pregnant. As a
Macanese, and therefore a product herself of the long centuries of fusion,
Deolinda had a special sympathy for themes relating to inter-racial love
and its effects.
Deolinda da Conceição’s stories are exemplary tales, which invite us to
ponder on the pitfalls of material ambition, even if such aspirations are
relatively modest, such as in a little girl’s desire for a pretty pair of
shoes or a young woman’s desire for a jade ring, and to reflect on the
determinants of pride and prejudice, such as in the shame felt by a young
Eurasian boy at his Chinese mother’s behaviour, in a still stratified
colonial society. Deolinda’s world is often a bleak one, characterized by
the masculine pursuit of war, unremitting oppression and social
inequalities. Only occasionally is there a glimmer of human solidarity,
such as when a group of invading Japanese soldiers protect a new-born
child, or a colonial policeman shows a group of destitute refugees to a
bread queue, or a model, who has her career cut short by an accident,
turns to adopting orphaned children. Altruism and a happier ending seem
possible when her characters follow the path of resignation and
abstinence, or when they somehow relinquish the role by which they are
defined socially.
We cannot tell how Deolinda would have chronicled the changes that took
place in Macau and China over subsequent decades, for she died prematurely
in 1957. But her stories, and the role she played in the rebirth of the
Portuguese-language press after the War, make her a unique figure in the
literatures of Macau, China and the Portuguese-speaking world.
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