China underwent an eight-year war of resistance against Japan during World War II, and Hong Kong fell for three years and eight months. Due to the neutrality of Portugal, Macao was free from bombing attack. However, Macao people still suffered from the war – starvation and death threatened people every day owing to the influx of numerous refugees, the embargo imposed by Japan, and the escalation of food prices.
Lam Fat Iam, Executive Director of Sino-Western Cultural Studies of Macao Polytechnic Institute, spent a year interviewing 50 Macao residents who experienced this period in order to publish a new book titled Voice of the Commons: Oral History of Macao and the Sino-Japanese War.
The interviewees, now aged over 80, remembered that the poor had to pick corns from faeces, while the rich smoked opium in casino smoking rooms in those days. The beach off the library at the old campus of the University of Macau in Taipa was a mass grave of starved corpses where the government dispatched vehicles to collect dead bodies every day. Most of the interviewed senior citizens have large, happy families and recalled the dismal scene in a composed and serene manner, but ‘the oral historians burst into tears when listening to these stories, and wept another time when sorting out the information in the Centre’, according to Lam Fat Iam.
Lam and his team read tens of thousands of old newspapers for further evidence of the oral stories for his book. They attempted to reconstruct the details of society in those days in the hope of reinforcing commonplace political slogans with a number of truthful stories.
Lam Fat Iam interviewed 50 Macao people who had experienced the war.
