Winner of the Manuel da Fonseca National Short Story Prize, João Morgado's latest fiction book brings together ten short stories set in Macau. From old streets and local markets, to car races and casinos, and even famous literary figures like Camões and Pessanha, Contos de Macau (published in Portugal by Colibri) presents a polyphony of local scenes set in different time periods
The idea for this book was born out of your visit to Macau in 2017, for The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, correct?
Yes, it was the first and only time I was in Macau, and this is the sad part, because I wish I could have gone back… I went directly to the Literary Festival and spent five or six days there, which still gave me enough time to travel a little, to get to know Macau and to visit Hong Kong.
What particular aspects of the city captured your attention in the city, giving rise to these fictional stories?
At the time, I had been asked to write a short story for the Macau Literary Festival. When I finished the short story, I ended up writing another two or three, then I got excited and wrote another one. In the meantime, I started thinking about the possibility of a book, so I wrote a few more. It ended up being a book of ten short stories on the subject of Macau, obviously inspired by the trip I made to the territory, by this mixture of cultures, by the vestiges of the Portuguese presence and all that Eastern setting. Maybe those who live in Macau no longer have that notion of contrasts, but when you arrive there, that contrast is very visible. When I arrived, what fascinated me was this mixture, the fact that there was a Portuguese community with a history there, so I decided to write about that, because it was a theme that interested me, and I tried to write about very specific areas of Macau, like gambling, the presence of Camões, racing – very strong Macau themes – always trying to explore that mixture between Portuguese and Chinese culture.
In a certain way, the Macau that appears in these stories, even with different chronologies, seems to no longer exist. Is that so?
Yes, it no longer exists. The trip to Macau was the stimulus for the stories, but it is not the Macau of today. Some images are closer to what Macau was some time ago, while others are more fictional. Let’s say that Macau is just the common thread for these ten fictions.
And did you recognize these various layers of the past when you visited the city, or did you imagine these different time periods later, when writing the book?
Our perception of things is a collection of stimuli; there are things that we see, that we read, that we imagine. In fact, this book is very different from the books I usually write. I work a lot with historical novels and there I have the facility to move in time, and I do rigorous research work on dates, places, facts, but here, in this book, I was left with some creative and fictional freedom. Although there are many historical references to Macau that have obviously been studied and verified, there was a great deal of freedom in the writing, which means that this book was also a way for me to break out of the restrictions I usually work in. In historical novels, I am more attached to the characters, the facts, the dates, and I have to follow almost a predetermined script, but in these short stories, which I wrote during the pandemic, in a period when I was confined at home, I ended up having a moment of escape. So I took from Macau what I saw, what I knew, what I experienced, but also what I had read, things I had been told, and this resulted in these ten short stories of pure fiction.
In some of these stories you reflect on the cultural differences between the Portuguese and the Chinese, and perhaps on a certain lack of understanding that these differences sometimes created in communication between people. Did this theme interest you before you went to Macau, or did it emerge as a literary theme during your trip?
‘The Healer of Barefoot was the last short story I wrote and it resulted from a personal episode… I had a health problem and decided to do acupuncture. The doctor who treated me was Portuguese but trained in Chinese medicine. I talked a lot about this issue of traditional Chinese medicine with him, about how it was different from what we know, and it was from that conversation that this story was born. It is a tale that seeks to reflect on the differences between Western and Eastern cultures and how they must have clashed for many years in Macau.
I have seen so much in the world that I think we have to be open-minded to everything, so I had no problem accepting this treatment, unlike the character in my story. But I believe that at the time when this story takes place, somewhere around the 1960s, especially for a doctor trained at the University of Coimbra, like this character, this must have been very complicated. In fact, in the story, I mention that the doctor, who is the patient in the story, saw it as like a trip a witchdoctor, and I think that kind of shock must have existed. In my mind, it is fictionalized, but I suppose it corresponds to much of what happened at that time in similar situations. And that perhaps still happens today.
Camilo Pessanha is a character in one of these stories. Despite the limited poetic works of this author, it seems that Pessanha is still a figure that cannot be escaped when writing about Macau.
Camilo Pessanha really only left one book, but in his case it was enough to make a mark in literature. Although he is a renowned figure in Portuguese literature, he is not well known in Portugal among the general public. He is a somewhat forgotten poet, but in Macau is much more remembered, perhaps because there is a very strong connection to the territory. I thought it was an opportunity to bring the figure of Pessanha back to the general public, taking up his contradictions, his life, and the somewhat marginal way in which he lived. It was a short story that gave me great pleasure to write, because it forced me to return to his work and biography. And since he is an exponent of symbolism, I even tried to go a bit into his style, to pick up some of the characteristics in the way he wrote, with the repetition of words and other references. It was very interesting for me to revisit this poet and I hope it will be interesting for the readers to remember him again and to read his poems again.
If Pessanha had been a proper poet, maybe there wouldn’t have been a short story. Maybe there wouldn’t even have been poems… It is his stepping out of line, his misdeeds that makes him an interesting figure as a character. We can talk about his vices, his passions, the way he was seen as shocking in a conservative society. This is what I tried to reflect in this short story.
Are you planning to return to Macau, perhaps to write more about the territory?
I would very much like to go back to Macau, because I would come back with different eyes. When you have the habit of writing, any trip ends up being literary, because you are always collecting information to write about, even if you don’t know what it is yet.
Inspiration is nothing more than taking what you have inside and working on it, that’s why it’s so important to talk, read, watch movies, travel, because of all of this is information that is in your head. Literature is often about recycling, taking that baggage that is in your head and creating something else. These stories are exactly that, a recycling of everything I had in my head, a big part of it was drunk when I was in Macau, another part has to do with my imagination about the East, things I had read, movies I had seen, and it’s a mixture of all that. Here there was no need for deep historical accuracy. It was, as they say in music, a variation on a theme.
