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| View of the Praya Grande, attributed to Lamqua |
This is a city of broken promises. I know it.
I was born here.
It may be that you will try to keep
your promise. If it still
pleases you to keep me here, I am sure
you will. But this
you must know. Though I might dearly love to, I would be a
fool
if I believed you. In Macao we know this, that when the time
comes it is always otherwise. Whatever words may have been
said, whatever promises made, when an
Englishman goes, it is
alone.[1]
A few months back, I had the good
fortune to meet Patricia Lemos, a journalist based in Hong Kong. Patti was in Salem, Massachusetts doing
research on Harriet Low, a young women from the town who voyaged to Macau in
1829 and resided there for the next four year, whose nine-volume journals
provide a marvelous glimpse into expatriate life in China in the early
nineteenth century. Patti had read my
chapter on Harriett in True Yankees,
wanted to learn more, and so arranged for us to meet at the Peabody Essex
Museum’s Phillips Library, a trove of materials from the East Indies trade. Our chat was delightful, and I learned much
about Low’s life after she left Macau and settled in Great Britain. Patti’s research will give us a dramatically
different idea of the woman that Harriett Low became.
A month or so after our meeting, an
unexpected package arrived in the mail, bearing Hong Kong postage. Patti had kindly sent a thank you gift—a
fascinating piece of fiction entitled City
of Broken Promises, a depiction of the Old China Trade from British and
Portuguese perspectives. First published
in 1967 (and repeatedly reissued), the book was penned by Austin Coates (1922-1997),
an erstwhile British diplomat who spent over a decade in East Asia. With most of my time committed to research
and teaching, I do not have a great deal of time left for fiction; however, reading
Coates’s work brought some unanticipated surprises.
City of Broken Promises is a complicated
book. On one level, it is a love story
between a British East India Company (BEIC) supercargo and an orphaned
Portuguese-Chinese girl/woman. It is
certainly a fascinating literary work, and scholars interested in this aspect
of the book will find Rogério Miguel Puga’s review a penetrating analysis.[2]
On another level, the book recalls the
career of Thomas Kuyck Van Mierop, whose tenure in China covered the years 1780
through 1797. Van Mierop’s journal served both as Coats’s primary source of
evidence, as little else has survived that would help to recover the tale, and
as a literary device that Coats used to provide the fabric for the multiple
themes that the book develops.
City
of Broken Promises is especially the story of Marta da Silva, the Luso-
Chinese woman who lives at the bottom of Macau’s complicated social structure.
Confined between the interstices of race, gender, and class, Martha struggles
to find a place in which she can locate her identity and protect her integrity.
We first find her as an orphan who must
navigate the close customs of both cultures, as well as that of the English who
are beginning to dominate Macanese society and economy. Van Mierop promises to marry Martha, and to
extricate her from the confining web that is his Macau. But, will he? More interesting still, as Martha begins to
use her own wits to establish a life of independence, did she need him to do
so?
In my first pass at the book, it was
the wonderfully complicated constellation of plots, the intricate nuances of
expatriate life that I found especially intriguing. Through Martha and Thomas, Coates explores the
dizzying array of customs, laws, mores, and expectations that expatriates were
required to navigate in order to survive Macau’s colonial society. This is an especially fruitful vein for Americanists
like myself. Through Coates’s writing,
we are introduced to a different view of the East Indies trade, one that transcends
conventional categories such as ‘Americans in the China Trade,’ ‘the British
colonial world,’ or ‘the Portuguese in Macau.’
City of Broken Promises carries
us into a world that is not just oriental, but, indeed, one that had to be as disorienting
for its participants as it can be for historians who attempt to make sense of
it. The novelist Coates reminds historians
that our efforts to reveal the past, to recover the voices of the forgotten, requires
imagination as well as research.
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