From Mozambique to Brazil: The ‘Good Portuguese’ of the Chinese Athletic Club

Abstract

During his famous journey to the ‘Portuguese lands’ of Asia and Africa at the invitation of the overseas minister Sarmento Rodrigues, Gilberto Freyre stayed in the Mozambican city of Beira. On this occasion, in 1952, at the premises of the so-called Clube Chinês (Chee Kung Tong), the directors of that growing and active Chinese community listened with admiration to what the Brazilian writer had to say. This was a time when Freyre was increasingly moving away from the innovative provocations of the Casa Grande & Senzala (1933), to definitively embrace the Luso-Tropicalist creed.² Obviously, he could never have imagined that his listeners that day, these ‘Luso-Chinese’, and their descendants would settle in Brazil nearly twenty years after that meeting.

Sometimes, on Sundays, Ching and I would ride by donkey (that’s what we called our bicycles) along the banks of the Chiveve, to see the mussopo fishermen off and the marora sellers. The little Chinese man looked westward across the muddy waters and his narrow eyes seemed to see the landscape beyond the ocean. One day, he invited me to watch a basketball match. His favorite club was playing, the Atlético Chinês [Chinese Athletic Club]. ‘My father would not let me utter the name of the Club in Portuguese,’ he confided. ‘And what other name does the Club have?’ ‘It’s the Tung Hua Athletic Club.’

Mia Couto, ‘A China dentro de nós’ Pensageiro frequente, 2010, p. 40.

I would like to thank António Sopa, former director of the Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique (Historical Archive of Mozambique) for his immense help in July 2009 when I consulted — still in the old building of the Arquivo Histórico in Maputo — the journals cited in this work. I also thank the ‘Chinese from Beira’ of Curitiba, Lisbon, New York, and Beira who, over the years, kindly agreed to talk to me.