A City of refuge

Strangers on the Praia: A Tale of Refugees and Resistance in Wartime Macao is a new novel by author Paul French, telling the little-known story of Jewish refugees in Shanghai who fled to Macau during WWII, at the time a neutral Portuguese enclave. Combining historical details from his research, he creates a story of a fictionalised character, a Jewish woman from Germany who makes her way to Macau via Shanghai.

Macau CLOSER: Can you tell us how you started the process of writing this novel?

Paul French: Most of my writing is about Peking and especially Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century. I have a particular interest in the Jewish community of Shanghai and have written about various aspects of the community – long standing and refugee – in the past. When looking through the records of the refugee European Jews who arrived fleeing fascism, I saw a number of records indicating some, mostly young women in their early 20s, had moved on to Macau. I dug around a bit and found some more. It was only a small number of Jewish refugees, but it was interesting. The records in Shanghai are scant and almost non-existent in Macau. I decided to write up what I had, creating composite characters in the hope that it would prompt more memories from people or their children. I feel that literary non-fiction is a good way to reach a wider audience than a straight history book.

Did you use primary sources in your research?

The primary sources included records of the Jewish refugees in Shanghai, China coast newspapers and some (very few) mentions in memoirs. There are some magazine and newspaper articles from the time. However, it is the British and Allied records of the British Consulate in Macau under Consul John Pownall Reeves, as well as the archives of the British Army Aid Group (BAAG – now housed in Canberra, Australia), who organised some escapes from Macau. It was only when I published the work originally as a short story and then a podcast for RTHK3, that I was contacted by the children of some Macau Jewish refugees who gave me more details.

The novel is based in historical facts. But how close is it to reality?

It’s as close as I can get it right now, though it takes a lot of fragments of memory and experiences of moving from Shanghai to Macau, and then surviving in Macau during the war, and combines them into one character. It also takes the partial stories of several escapes from Macau and combines those too. This is the first time I really tried this approach. I felt with this story that the records were so few, that if I waited till I had enough to write a book like my previous ones – Midnight in Peking or City of Devils – it would just never happen. So better a semi-fictionalised account of this historical moment than none at all.

Did you get inspiration from real people and places to develop the main characters and locations of this narrative?
As I said, the characters of the Jewish refugees and the British escapees from Hong Kong are composites of real people about who I know some, but not all, of their lives in Macau. The places are all real. The Aurora is mentioned in several memoirs as a well-known billiard hall, café and Pensão that was welcoming to Jewish refugees in the war. Word got around and more Jewish refugees arriving in Macau heard of the Aurora. The most famous Jewish guest at the Aurora was Israel Epstein, born to a Polish Jewish family and raised in China. Famously, Epstein stayed on in China and became a member of the Communist Party and a citizen of the PRC. He stayed at the Aurora and remembers it in his memoirs.

Similarly, the British Consulate was run by John Reeves and his wife Rhoda during the war, and was in close proximity to both the Japanese and German consulates. Reeves wrote his memoir of Macau after the war.

What did you learn about how the Jewish community lived in Macau during those terrible years of persecution and genocide?
Well, they were, as in Shanghai, fairly safe from Nazi persecution and murder. Though there was always the chance in Shanghai that Japan would acquiesce to the Nazis and hand over the refugees to them to be killed (the Nazis in Shanghai did ask!). In Macau, the concern was that the Japanese might disregard Portuguese neutrality and take over the colony (as they did in Timor) and then life would become more dangerous for the Jewish refugees. Of course, work opportunities were limited, and so many refugees were poor and suffered the same cramped accommodations and food shortages as the rest of Macau. For the religious it was perhaps more difficult, as Macau did not have a synagogue at this time, while Shanghai had several. I think this is a factor in why it was mostly young people who moved from Shanghai to Macau – they were perhaps less observant.

This is your first novel set in Macau, but it’s not your first writing about Macau – far from it. When did you start looking to Macau as an interesting subject for your writing? What fascinates you about this city?

I’ve always found Macau fascinating and it constantly crops up in my research on China and Hong Kong. It is a fascinating contrast to super-cosmopolitan Shanghai at the time, the ancient capital of Peking and the British colony of Hong Kong. There are so many good stories in Macau – not that many have been told to an English-reading audience.

Your most successful book to date, Midnight in Peking, is being adapted for TV. Is it possible that the same will happen with Strangers on the Praia?
I’m lucky that both Midnight in Peking and City of Devils are being adapted for TV – Midnight in Beijing and Devils in LA. I am currently working with a movie co-production company in Shanghai to develop Strangers on the Praia as a Chinese-UK-Australian co-production and have already been to look at some locations in Portugal that might work as a place to recreate old Macau, which is a bit difficult in Macau today! I’ve written a script, which fictionalises a little more to add some tension and excitement. We’ll see if I can get it to ‘Green Light’! It’s high time old Macau was seen in more movies – von Sternberg’s Macao is nearly 70 years old now!

You’ve also written about the activity of Portuguese gangs in Shanghai during the 30s and early 40s. Some of them followed the same escape route to Macau as the Jewish refugees. Were they a factor in Macau during the war, namely in the underground war between patriotic Chinese and pro-Japanese triads?

Not as far as I know. Shanghai had some major Portuguese gangsters in the 1930s and WWII – mostly running casinos. It was always said that they had the Portuguese diplomats on their payrolls. They certainly did use smuggling routes between Shanghai and Macau, and also to Manila, where they felt pretty comfortable too. But I don’t think the Portuguese guys stayed in Macau long and that they got back to Lisbon before the sea lanes closed. I don’t know of them being involved in the legendary wartime smuggling. It would have been a great question to ask Stanley Ho!