For many readers in Macau (especially the younger generation), the essayist “Ling Ling” may not sound very familiar. But in my opinion, her collection of essays, Love of Heaven and Earth, is definitely not-to-be-missed for Macau readers. The book describes a chapter of bitter and lesser-known history of Macau: until the 1970s，，, Portuguese soldiers were stationed in Macau; the monotonous military life away from home drove the soldiers to desperately find an emotional outlet, resulting in a strange “market”. Some local Macanese women from the lower social strata, who shared the same language and cultural background with the Portuguese, began to show up beside the soldiers, becoming a special sight of the era and leaving us with stories of happiness and sorrow.
If the stories hadn’t been documented by Ling Ling, we would never have been able to imagine what had happened between the Portuguese soldiers and the Macanese girls. It was probably fate that led Ling Ling to the stories. Ling Ling’s maternal grandfather founded the “A Vencedora” restaurant on Rua do Campo, and her mother owned the “Va Seng Fai Kei” café on Rua da Esperança (both of which are still in business today). At that time, the area around the two eateries was frequented by Portuguese soldiers and Macanese women. These people, who came and went, were engraved in the memory of the young Ling Ling, and eventually emerged in her essays.
In 1991, Ling Ling, then working for the Chinese-language newspaper Jornal Va Kio, published her first collection of essays in Chinese, Love of Heaven and Earth (Seng Kwong Bookshop & Publisher). In 2014, the Cultural Affairs Bureau selected 12 stories from the Seng Kwong edition, mainly about the Macanese women, plus Ah Tou, another Ling Ling’s essay in the Pen of Macao magazine (Issue 4), and published a Chinese-Portuguese bilingual version of the book, Amores do Céu e da Terra, Contos de Macau. The new edition was translated by Lee Shuk Yee and adapted by Fernanda Dias. Each story in the book, though short, is like a vivid sketch that allows both Chinese and Portuguese readers to catch a glimpse of the life stories of a group of “nobodies” who have silently disappeared into the mists of history.
Born in the 1940s, Ling Ling (who used the pen name Lei Im Fong) worked as a teacher, journalist (the first female journalist in Macau) and editor. Love of Heaven and Earth is not her only publication, of course; she has been writing columns for Jornal Va Kio and Macao Daily News for many years, faithfully documenting the society and the voices of ordinary people in the city through the vicissitudes of time. In 2014, local director Tracy Choi’s documentary Farming on the Wasteland presented the life and writing of three local female writers, Ling Ling, Chow Tung and Yuk Man. This year, the Macao Archives has published a book of interviews with Ling Ling, My Writing, My Life. The book records the author’s life and memories through her own oral history accounts and is a real treasure for Macau and its people.
