Pensativities: Selected Essays

The China Within Us

China was once the smallest country in the world. And the Chinese the smallest human group on the planet. It happened when I was a child. The universe was a back garden in which to play, and all the Chinese fit in just a few streets of my native city. At that time, the Chinese in Beira were not like those today, light-skinned with smooth hair. Many of them were of mixed race, with frizzy hair and brown skin, frequenting the same churches and schools as the Europeans in the colony.

It happened in Maquinino, the district where I was born. I would leave home on my way to the António Enes Primary School and would pass the shop they used to call the “Cantina Chinesa,” to buy exercise books, pencils and the recently arrived Bic pens. There I would join my classmate, the shop owner’s son. This boy, whose name was Ching, was reserved and serious, like an adult who had nothing left to dream.

For him, childhood was a task to be carried out with professional diligence. Ching’s zealous discretion was the sign of a sturdier race. To be Chinese was to be like that, consigned and devoted to silence. Ching knew arithmetic, but he had no answer when asked where China was, or what it was like. He had been born right there in that African district and his world stopped there, between Munhava, Manga and Macuti.

In 1960, there were about two thousand Chinese registered in Mozambique. More than half of these had been born in Mozambican territory and my little colleague, Ching, was one of these descendants of immigrants. Almost all the seven hundred Chinese who lived in Beira had recent or more remote links with Canton, the land of their ancestral origins. The parents spoke Cantonese among themselves, Portuguese with their children, and Chissena with their customers. A soul distributed in this way might have been sowing seeds for the future.

On Sundays, Ching and I sometimes rode our “donkeys” (that’s what we called our bicycles) along the banks of the Chiveve, to watch the fishermen catching eels and women selling shad. The little Chinese gazed at the sun going down over the muddy waters and his narrow eyes seemed to catch sight of landscapes on the other side of the ocean. One day, he invited me to go and see a basketball game. His beloved team, Atlético Chinês, were playing.

“My father doesn’t let me say the name of the club in Portuguese,” he confessed.

“So what other name does the club have?”

“It’s the Tung Hua Athletic Club.”

As he reeled off those words in one breath, it was as if he suddenly became a stranger to me. But all Ching wanted was for me to witness the matchless skills of a female player who would be playing for the Portuguese national team that same year. Her name was Sui Mei.

“My father doesn’t let me call the player by that name,” he confessed once again.

“So what do you call her, then?”

“Swi Mai, that’s what we’re supposed to call her.”

Whether she was Sui Mei or Swi Mai, she was an excellent basketball player. But it wasn’t her sporting skill that most impressed me. What left a lasting impression was the grace and elegance of her movements around the court, as if the game were a shared dance and not a contest between opposing sides. Sui Mei’s affability seemed to be curing our city of an age-old wound.

“Look at her hair,” my friend Ching suggested.

“What about it?”

“See how there isn’t a single strand out of place.”

The crowd was almost shouting the house down. The players pirouetted through the air, but the Chinese girl’s smile and hair were as neat as a pin.

One day, one of Ching’s cousins arrived in Beira from Inhaminga. He was a mulatto, the son of a black woman and a Chinese soldier who had fled Canton. His father wanted to send him to study in China. His mother “kidnapped” the boy and took him to the area round Inhaminga. The kid grew up there, in that remote shadow, far from his austere father. His body had grown bigger, as had his anxiety to know his origins. He had now come to the city in order to catch a secret glimpse of his progenitor. We took him to the market and Ching pointed ahead through the crowd.

“There, that’s your father!”

The lad stood impassively, and a vague look lingered on his face, as if that vision had no place to dwell within him. I tried to scrutinize the visitor’s state of mind: there was a great wall hiding his intimate thoughts.

As we returned, we sensed a deep sadness in him. Ching’s enthusiastic invitation took me by surprise:

“How about going to watch the basketball? Sui Mei’s playing today, come on, lets go!”

As we sat on the stone bench in the sports pavilion, and listened to the rhythm of the ball as if it were the beating of a heart, the cousin’s sad expression lightened, and he even smiled.

It might have been a forced smile, but it was still a smile.

The Olympic Games, Magical Games

Forty years later, in the sitting room of my house, the family clusters round the television, as if it were some luminous oracle.

“Look: they’re showing images of Peking!”

“It’s not Peking, it’s Beijing,” someone corrects.

Whether it’s Peking or Beijing, it’s an almost religious moment. The opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games brings with it a moment of rapture that transports us back to childhood. How long ago it seems since China was a small nation and the Chinese fit into a small area of a small city! China had, after all, always been enormous, a power throughout its history. However, this celebration seems to have been made for me to travel into my own memories. In the spectacle, China travels beyond History, beyond itself. And it’s no longer the ceremony I’m watching. It’s memories that come alive within me.

Suddenly, I recall little Ching’s sad figure, walking along the paths of Maquinino with a missionary’s step. The little boy comes from far away, from that time when the Sino-Africans were treated as second-class citizens and learned to be ashamed of their religious and cultural origin.

And now, when the Mozambican flag can be seen in the Olympic Stadium, I recall the boy who came from Inhaminga to heal his feeling of orphanhood. No one is now separated from their family: the message conveyed by the Olympic celebration is a handkerchief waving away the sadness in the faces of all small boys far removed from their childhoods.

Finally, the image of Lurdes Mutola lights up the screen as if her face were already a confirmation of victory. And we noisily rejoice as we watch, as if there were other Olympics within that great festivity.

Gradually, the ever-smiling Sui Mei is born again within me, the girl who healed the wounds of our vanquished lives. And once again, we are all natives of that land where gunpowder was invented to make fireworks sparkle.

Article published in İndico, October 2008.