Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California

Antonio M. Jorge da Silva: An Oral History

Interviews conducted by Don Warrin

in 2014

Copyright © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California

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Since 1954 the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, formerly the Regional Oral History Office, has been interviewing leading participants in or well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account, offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable.

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All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The Regents of the University of California and Antonio M. Jorge da Silva dated January 21, 2014. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. Excerpts up to 1000 words from this interview may be quoted for publication without seeking permission as long as the use is non-commercial and properly cited.

Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to The Bancroft Library, Head of Public Services, Mail Code 6000, University of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should follow instructions available online at http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/ROHO/collections/cite.html

It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:

Antonio M. Jorge da Silva “Antonio M. Jorge da Silva: An Oral History” conducted by Don Warrin in 2014, Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 2015.

Antonio M

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M. Jorge da

Silva

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Antonio M. Jorge da Silva was born in Macau, then an overseas province of Portugal, prior to WWII. He talks about the history of the Portuguese in the Far East, and Macau and Hong Kong in particular, where he spent his early years. We learn as well of his interesting family history. His father was at one time treasurer of the Portuguese government in Macau. World War II was a harrowing experience for the family. Later Tony attended British schools in Hong Kong and then went off to England to study architecture. There he met his future wife, Penny. We hear other interesting stories of passing through the US, of visiting Red China and riots in Hong Kong and Macau. The da Silva family eventually moved to California where Tony engaged in his architectural career and founded da Silva Associates. We learn finally of the various Macaense clubs here in California, as well as Tony’s various publications related to Macau and its people and diaspora.

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Table of Contents— Antonio M. Jorge da Silva

Interview 1: September 10, 2014

[Audiofile 1] 1

We talk about his birthplace in Macau—Brief history of Portuguese expansion and commerce, especially related to China and Japan—British and Dutch presence in Asia—History and contemporary economies of Hong Kong and Macau—His books on Macau and family

[Audiofile 2] 16

He speaks of his parents—Father as treasurer of Portuguese government in Macau and his political problems—Growing up in Hong Kong and Macau—Fleeing Hong Kong at start of WWII—Returning to Hong Kong after the war—Attending British schools—Sports—Brief work at China Light and Power and then off to college in England—Studying architecture

Interview 2: November 18, 2014

[Audiofile 3] 37

Architecture study at Portsmouth University—Travel to Portugal on a Vespa—Meeting his wife while at the university—Proposing—Marriage—Passing through the US on the way to Hong Kong—Employment in Hong Kong—Travel through Red China

[Audiofile 4] 55

Riots in Hong Kong and Macau—Fleeing from Macau to Hong Kong—Emigration to California—Work in San Francisco—Settling in Mill Valley—Work on retail structures in Bay Area—Founding of da Silva Associates and later da Silva International—Move to Hong Kong—Wife and daughters remain in California—Return to California—Lusitano hockey team that became the Lusitano Club—Other Macaense clubs: Casa de Macau, UMA

[Audiofile 5] 74

Macense emigration to California, also Canada, Australia, Brazil and Portugal—His publications: Portuguese Community in Hong Kong, Diaspora of Macaense to California, —Rivalry between Macaense clubs—Forthcoming book: Macaenses, the Portuguese in China—History of Portuguese/Asian intermarriage—Contemporary Macau

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Interview #1 September 10, 2014 [Audiofile 1]

01-00:00:17

Warrin: We’re in the home of Tony da Silva in Livermore, and ready to talk about Macau and his various life experiences. So Tony, could you give me your full name, and when and where you were born?

01-00:00:38

da Silva: Okay, my full name is Antonio Manuel Maria Pacheco Jorge da Silva. That’s my baptized full name. And I was born on July 4, 1938, in Macau, in my grandfather’s house in Macau itself. It’s a large house. It sits at midlevel of the hill, towards the church of Penha. And it used to be a very well-known house, because it had a huge collection of Chinese antiques and artifacts. My grandfather was a collector, as well as being a sinologist, and he spent time in Beijing and so on. But he said many famous people went to his house to look at his Chinese art collection.

01-00:01:27

Warrin: And so you were born a Portuguese citizen.

01-00:01:34

da Silva: Yes, I was born a Portuguese citizen. Both my parents, of course, are Portuguese, and my grandparents are Portuguese.

01-00:01:45

Warrin: To fill us in a little bit, could you talk about the history of the Portuguese in Macau, in this tiny piece of Portugal in China?

01-00:02:02

da Silva: Okay, the history of Macau basically starts when the Portuguese first landed there in 1513. Jorge Álvares landed there after seeing the Chinese at the Battle of Malacca; he reported back to Portugal that he had probably seen the fabled Chins, hence the name China. And before Portugal could really get back and tell him what to do, he was on his way in, I guess, a rented fishing junk with some Chinese that guided him to Macau, or actually to Lintin Island, which is just off Macau. Macau was not known in those days. Lintin Island is at the mouth of the Pearl River, and leads up to the port of Canton.

So after his landing there, he tried to do some trading. The Chinese would not trade with him, would hardly let him get off the boat, but he was allowed to sort of stretch his legs. But he remained a little bit longer, befriended the people, so he was able to walk around. I believe Lintin Island he was able to walk around. He was not allowed to go to the mainland part of China. And so he returned to Malacca and reported, I guess, his find, his interest in the Chinese people, that these are probably people that they want to trade with. And so he returns a year or so later, and begins to try and trade with the Chinese, and the Chinese were then not very keen. But eventually, just to cut a

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long story short, the Portuguese got some way of trading with the people on the coast of China, very near Lintin Island, and that took time.

Eventually the Portuguese sent out ambassadors to China, to Canton, to try and procure trade with the Chinese. The Chinese in the beginning were suspect. They don’t like foreigners. First of all, they thought of us as barbarians, and were not very keen on the Portuguese, or anybody, actually, trading in China without special permits, and so on. However, the Portuguese ventured on and brashly insulted the Chinese several times, just by trying to build a fort in one part of China just to protect themselves, and maybe to establish their being there, their arrival.

01-00:04:31

Warrin: Where was that activity?

01-00:04:32

da Silva: This was actually on the coast, near Macau, at the time. I don’t remember the exact location. But ships would come in, and they would salute, and the salvos, or gunfire, frightened the Chinese public, and the Chinese said, oh my God, the foreigners have come to invade. So they got very angry at the Portuguese and chewed them out, and told them, all right, you’ve got to get out of China or we’ll force you out. And so eventually the Portuguese left, and they were forbidden to trade anywhere along the southern part of the Chinese coast. So the Portuguese having had the first taste of trading with the Chinese, and doing pretty well, started to travel up the coast of China, all the way to beyond Shanghai, to the Yellow River, up in that area. And they started to trade. Again, they wanted to establish a base there. And they were not very successful, because after a while, again, they created some problems with the Chinese, and the Chinese chewed them out again, by getting their armed junks, they demolished the entire city of Liampo and wiped out all the people that were there. So the Portuguese, instead of leaving and going away, they started to trade again and backtrack towards Macau.

Meanwhile, three Portuguese sailors discovered Japan, and that’s 1542, if I’m not mistaken. I don’t normally give dates when I talk, but—

01-00:06:09

Warrin: That sounds right.

01-00:06:10

da Silva: Yeah. And so they discover Japan accidentally, and all of a sudden the Portuguese then trade with the Japanese, open the beginnings of trade. The Japanese were fascinated by the Portuguese, and eventually—again, to cut a long story short—the forbidden trade between Japan and China that happened early on, over a century before, was actually brokered by the Portuguese. The Portuguese were able to take Chinese goods and trade with the Japanese.

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So they were working off islands, again, before Macau was actually used. They were in first Sanchaun, which is very much southwest of Macau, and then Lampacao, and then from Lampacao they started to move towards Macau. I guess they must have taken shelter in a typhoon or something, and they found that they had a pretty sheltered spot there. And so they started to move into Macau. And in doing so, the Chinese—again, the government, meaning the emperor, et cetera—were really not really informed, but the local Mandarins were beginning to become interested, because it was money to be made, and the local traders were sort of not objecting to that. And besides, this area was infested with pirates between Japan and China. There were many, many pirates in those days, and the Portuguese, with their gunships, were able to overwhelm the pirates and actually protect. And so the Chinese, seeing the advantage of not only trading with Japan and making some money, but they saw that these pirates are also being kept at bay by the Portuguese navy.

And so in 1557 an agreement was made between the local Mandarins, probably with some knowledge back to the emperor, but I am not certain of that, historically. They were able to use Macau as a permanent trading port. And so the establishment of Macau is officially 1557, and they were allowed to build buildings and fixed structures. Before they were in mat-sheds, and unable to put up any fixed structures; the Chinese would burn them down. And so now they were able to do that, and so Macau very quickly established. And the trade with Japan was booming, and Portugal was happy. The Chinese, I’m sure, were happy, as well. And everything was fine until the Dutch came along, then the British, and they wanted a piece of the pie. And so the British and the Dutch start to try and use Macau as a base. The Dutch actually tried to take it, and failed, because the Portuguese, local small militia, and some black slaves, and a couple of priests were able to knock out an invasion by the Dutch.

01-00:09:21

Warrin: What year would that have been?

01-00:09:22

da Silva: I think that’s 1620 or something like that. I’m not sure of the exact date, off the top of my head, but about then.

01-00:09:30

Warrin: That, again, sounds right.

01-00:09:32

da Silva: Yeah, and then the Portuguese were able to rid the, at first, Dutch invasion, and the British then started to come first, one ship, and they wanted to go immediately to China. And the Chinese were very angry with the Portuguese, because they really thought of the Portuguese as a buffer, if you like, between China and anybody else that tried to come in. So they counted on the Portuguese to keep any other foreigners out, and they had to get special permission to do anything, the Portuguese included. But the British wouldn’t

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hear no for an answer. The British actually started to send their ships up the river, and the Chinese, of course, retaliated and fought back. But instead of doing just that, they punished the Portuguese, and then started the Chinese construction of the Barrier Gate. And so Macau became actually a sectioned-off area of China with the Barrier Gate, which the Chinese could close at any time. And Macau being so small, they couldn’t have their own food production, anything like that, so the Chinese would shut off the barrier, and they’d say, all right—

01-00:10:40

Warrin: Excuse me. What was it like before the Barrier Gate?

01-00:10:45

da Silva: Before the Barrier Gate, the Portuguese were enabled a limited flow into China, in fact go across the harbor to Lapa Island, and have a little farm or something like that there. And the priests were actually the people that were doing that, not the Portuguese. The Portuguese were much more interested in making money, in trading. So the priests did little farms, but eventually the Chinese shut that off. And so it actually constricted Macau anytime they wanted to from food and any other necessities that the Chinese would provide, because Macau is just a few square miles, and that’s about it. So if they shut it off, there was no food, putting them in danger of starvation. So that’s how they kept control, or tried to keep control, of the Portuguese and their dealings with other people.

Anyway, the British never gave up. The Dutch tried again, but not to invade. But the British sent several ships, and in 1699—and I’m pretty sure that’s a correct date, just before the 1700s—the Macclesfield, as a British ship, was actually able to convince the Mandarins of Canton, the superiors that governed the area, that the British should be allowed. And that started the beginning of the Cohongs and the trade between the British East India Company. And that’s a long story, longer than I want to dwell upon at this point.

01-00:12:19

Warrin: Of course, of course. But this is the beginning of Hong Kong.

01-00:12:22

da Silva: Well, Hong Kong was later. I suppose you could say it’s the beginning of Hong Kong, because eventually the British crept in more and more and more. And Hong Kong actually began as a result of the opium trade, which the British were trying to force on the Chinese, because it was very lucrative, and they were making money out of something that was medicinal, at first in China, but forbidden to be used in any other way. But it eventually became a drug, and the Chinese were addicted to it. And there was huge money, and they just got supply and demand, more and more expensive, and so it expands. So the Chinese retaliated by saying, you can’t do that. And I’m jumping ahead from the occupation, the Cohongs, and so on, which are the traders, and the

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dealing of the trades, and the French, and the Americans eventually came there. But it culminated in the Chinese getting frustrated with the opium trade, and demanding that the British—and others, of course—cease and desist in doing any more opium trade. And they sent out a special prosecutor. His name was Lin Tsiu. And Lin Tsiu actually demanded the handover of all the opium, et cetera, and that the British leave.

So he—again, cutting a story short—burnt many, many chests, I mean thousands of them, and just set them all on fire, and threw the British out of Canton. The British evacuated, of course, to Macau. Where else could they go? There was nowhere else. And the Chinese said, no, we don’t want the British in Macau; we want them out of here. They had nowhere else to go. And by then they were almost at the point of war. So they took off, and took most of their citizens—not all, I’m sure—to what was Hong Kong, but a place where they landed occasionally. It was not established as a trading port or anything like that, but the British had already knowledge of Hong Kong. But being confined to the ship, the Chinese not wanting them to land, and so on, and there being problems, they eventually went back to Macau, and created even more problems for the Portuguese.

So the British, already sensing that they had to do something about it—and I’m sure this was planned, that they were actually going to attack the Chinese; they were going to get rid of them and actually force their way in. And so in 1839 started the First Opium War, and in 1841 the British defeated the Chinese fleets that were in that area, and took over Hong Kong, and declared Hong Kong a British territory. And Hong Kong was at the Treaty of Nanjing, ceded to the British. And, of course, there were still more problems, which caused the Second Opium War, but, not being very important, I’m not going into the Second Opium War. But the Opium War itself, the first one, started Hong Kong as a British colony, which, of course, then debased Macau to some extent, because having Hong Kong, with a deeper harbor, and the British already had the Cohongs, et cetera, under their control, I suppose would be the right word.

Following the British taking Hong Kong, Macau became a backwater. And those British residents that lived there during the times that they were able to go to Canton and use their factories, if you want to call it that, their warehouses, the British eventually decided that they were going to move to Hong Kong. At first they were wary; many wouldn’t go there for the first year or so. A few Portuguese followed the British. There were translators. So started the first group of Portuguese moving to assist the British in the beginnings of Hong Kong. So eventually—it didn’t take long—the other residents of Britain that were residing in Macau, they decided that they should follow suit, because Hong Kong all of a sudden was taking off, and the diseases and malaria, et cetera, were not as feared as it was in the beginning, they thought that everybody would die.

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Anyway, so they moved, of course, to Hong Kong, and they took with them—a few of the Portuguese were already working with them as translators. And that started the beginning, what I would call, of the diaspora of the Portuguese. Unfair to call it the diaspora, because they didn’t move there lock, stock, and barrel, everybody. But enough families moved to Hong Kong, and afterwards the treaty ports and Shanghai. The Portuguese, instead of being isolated in Macau, all of a sudden were moving into other ports to make a living. And that started, in my opinion, the beginning of the Portuguese leaving Macau. They were there before that, for two hundred and something years.

So they started to move out. And Hong Kong, of course, being a deep harbor port, was able to take on the new steamships. And Macau, being silted by the down-flow from the Pearl River, was only able to take shallow-hulled ships. And after the event of the sailing ships, and the coming of the steamships, Macau became more and more a backwater. Of course, the Portuguese in Macau didn’t give up. They were thinking of other ways just to maintain their place in China, because they were doing trades with the people in the Philippines. They were doing trade with the people of Timor, and so on. And so there was trading, but nothing like the event of the Japan trade. And in telling the beginning of Hong Kong, I omitted a very important thing: that the Portuguese that were trading in Japan actually were invited in the beginning by the Japanese to trade. They were very keen on having the Portuguese there, and the Japanese allowed them to form a little community, or enclave, in Nagasaki; and Nagasaki the Portuguese sort of used as their trading base in Japan. So the trading ships from Macau would travel to Nagasaki, back to Macau, and then to Goa, and from Goa to Portugal. And that was a trade that the Dutch and the British—got them interested and got them to go to oust the Portuguese, because I don’t think the British wanted to share. And the traders went on with the Japanese.

Meanwhile, of course, one of Portugal’s reasons for their voyages of discovery was not just to go out as discoverers and adventurers; they were out actually to spread the Christian religion. The Catholic faith was one of the most important things that the Portuguese thought that they would do. And at the same time, they wanted to cut the Arab trade and take over the trade that was flowing from the East to the West, through Malacca, and so on. But then, that’s another story. But important is the fact that the priests started to enter Japan, and in the beginning they were treated as wise men, but then more and more of them started to go. And eventually the Japanese feared that the priests were going to poison the mind of the people, because more and more Japanese were being Christianized. And so in time the shoguns decided to stop the entry of the priests into Japan. And the Portuguese, instead of just saying ‘business is more important’—they were fervent Catholics, and so they smuggled them in, in disguise. And the Japanese got more and more angry at that, and eventually told the Portuguese they had to leave. And the Portuguese, of course, had been there for decades, fifty, sixty years by the time the trouble

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started there. And so some of them were married in Japan. Some of them had concubines. But they certainly had children, had families. And the Japanese ousted the families, and the families of the Japanese then went to Macau, and eventually they mixed in with the population. But again, that’s another aspect of Macau being the base of Portuguese mixed marriages and Portuguese interbreeding, if I can use that word. But more important is that the Japanese eventually kicked them all out, just threw all the Portuguese—burned the ships, beheaded a lot of the Portuguese, and sent them out of there. And by 1640, the trade with Japan was over. It was—

01-00:22:45

Warrin: Ended because they didn’t want any Western contact at all, right?

01-00:22:50

da Silva: See, the shoguns and the daimyos were afraid that the Japanese were being heavily influenced by the Westerners. Well, they didn’t want the Westerners. In the beginning they welcomed them. They introduced firearms to Japan, which fascinated them. But they wanted Japan to remain Japanese, and they were afraid that they were going to Christianize all of Japan, and they would have trouble there. So they decided, okay, everybody out. And so that was the end of the Japan trade.

01-00:23:20

Warrin: And so they isolated themselves. What’s interesting, also, in that respect is the few everyday Portuguese words which made their way into Japan, like koppu, which means a glass in Portuguese (copo). It also means a glass in Japanese. And there are a couple of dozen words that made their way into everyday Japanese.

01-00:23:51

da Silva: Yeah, easily more than twenty. I think my book illustrates some of the more common words that they use, bread [‘pan’] and so on, in Portuguese, pão, to Japanese. But from the point of view of introduction, I think more important than just introducing Portuguese words there is introduction of Japanese people, I think, to Macau, and the intermarrying with the already mixed Portuguese families there that were mixed with Indian, from Goa, they were mixed with wives or concubines from Malacca, and so on, black slaves, remembering always that in the beginning the Portuguese women could not travel that far. They just couldn’t live the months and months in the ships. They got as far as Goa, and a lot of them died onboard the ship. And so up until the late 1600s, there were almost no white women in Macau. I think there was one that Peter Mundy talks about in his book, and that’s about the only white woman that was there. The rest of them were concubines, those that were Christianized in Malacca they were able to marry. And so Macau started off their mixed race population very, very early on.

So from 1557, they brought their women and children from Goa, from Malacca, from other parts of India and Africa, wherever the Portuguese traded

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and had a base. Of course, they had womenfolk and they had children, and they brought them to Macau, and that was the beginning of it. And then the Japanese came in, and quite a lot of the Japanese went there. Remember that in Macau in those days the population wasn’t huge. It was a few hundred, mixed Portuguese, and then the Japanese went there. And so the Japanese influence in the bloodline of the Macaense, if you like, that’s the locals of Macau, they probably became about maybe 20 percent, maybe even more, of the mixture of the races, until the Chinese came in. But that’s, again, later, because the Chinese were not allowed to intermarry, nor were they interested in the Portuguese in any way whatsoever. We were barbarians, remember, and treated as such. And they sort of kept away from the Portuguese, not that there was no intermingling between some of the sailors and some of the Tanka, which are the boat people. But that was very, very rare in the beginning.

01-00:26:35

Warrin: It’s very interesting because, simplistically, I think you would assume that the Portuguese entered China and intermarried with the Chinese, and that’s the result, but it’s anything but that.

01-00:26:53

da Silva: Correct, anything but that. That sort of came afterwards, when the Chinese began to be willing to be Christianized. Again, the Portuguese trying to penetrate China by introducing Christianity. And I say penetrate because the Chinese were very guarded, and they didn’t want any of that at all. And even when I was very, very young—and I’m now switching to the twentieth century—the Chinese kept away from us, and they sort of looked at us as strange, in the beginning of my youth. Of course, they worked with us, and eventually the communities—and I’m almost coming back to today—they started to intermarry. But in the beginning, the Chinese were not very keen on the Portuguese, always looked down upon us and not look up to us, as the British like to think that the Europeans are looked up to by the Orientals, but not the case. It’s that they looked down on us just as much as the British and others looked down on them. The Portuguese never looked down on them as such, but certainly noticed and knew the difference between one race and the other. They were more willing to sort of live together and work together with these people, but the British took a different attitude. So that’s the beginning of discrimination, which you can talk about later.

01-00:28:27

Warrin: Sure, sure. And, of course, Macau was Portuguese up until the end of the twentieth century.

01-00:28:42

da Silva: Right, right. The Portuguese ruled, controlled Macau—governed Macau is probably the best way to put it—until 1999. Okay, Hong Kong was given back to the Chinese in 1997, and to give face to the Portuguese—and giving face is a very important aspect of the dealings between the Chinese and the Portuguese. Actually, anybody else. Face is very important to the Chinese. So

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to give face to the Portuguese, they let the Portuguese stay a few more years, and the British had to give it up in 1997. So they said, “All right, Portuguese, you can have until 1999.” And that’s the way of the Chinese sort of payback, if you like, to the Brits. So in 1999, of course, everything changed.

01-00:29:34

Warrin: And the Chinese moved in at that point.

01-00:29:37

da Silva: Well, the Chinese were always there, but they moved in, in terms of they ousted the foreign government control of China, of any part of China, now Hong Kong, the British— in Macau, the Portuguese. But they were not invaded by introducing a Chinese government. They actually have an interim government in Macau and Hong Kong called RAEM [Região Administrativa Especial de Macau], which is a Portuguese way of saying it. So the government of Hong Kong and Macau—the interim government—for fifty years will be the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong and Macau, the RAEM in Portuguese, and the HKSAR [Hongkong Special Administrative Region] in Hong Kong. And those, of course, fostered by the Chinese, are the interim governments of the area. The Chinese have allowed a lot of leniency in Hong Kong. People are allowed to speak their minds, and so on. Doesn’t make the Chinese very happy, but the Chinese did not bring their military in and clamp down. So in that respect, I have great respect and admiration for the Chinese. They are smart and patient people, and they understand that waiting will serve them best. And in the meantime, they are developing trade and making Hong Kong and Macau very useful to them.

01-00:31:33

Warrin: Are they treating Macau and Hong Kong any differently, one or the other?

01-00:31:40

da Silva: I can’t say they’re treating them differently. The people are reacting differently. The Hong Kong people want more independence. They’re more used to the British system, and they feel that they want their say. In Macau, the people don’t play as heavily on that. A lot of the people that come to Macau come in and are very proud of being Chinese, and now they take great pride of being Chinese of Macau. But Chinese is the first and foremost thing in their minds. But they’re not thinking of alienating, having protest marches and so on, alienating the government there. The government’s working with them, and I think they are working with the government.

Hong Kong is a little bit different. It’s not that the government’s not working with the people, but there are certain rules that the Chinese or the interim government want to maintain. And in Hong Kong they’re so used to being able to do their own thing that they are now objecting and wanting more and more control, and more and more a part in the government of Hong Kong itself. So that’s the difference between the two.

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01-00:32:51

Warrin: But that must be a little difficult in relating with the central government of China.

01-00:33:01

da Silva: Yeah, in Hong Kong, again, it is a bit more difficult. The Chinese have to play it very calmly and very clever, and they are doing so, and they are allowing the people to speak their mind. But sometimes it’s getting too far. But this is not happening in Macau. There are a few protests once in a while—don’t misunderstand me—but it’s very, very small. It’s about matters that are not enormous, that they’re trying to demand this and demand that, because they seem to be working very well with the local government today.

01-00:33:38

Warrin: Could you just briefly describe the contemporary economies of Hong Kong and Macau?

01-00:33:48

da Silva: Well, again, Hong Kong is a huge international trading port, and a huge business. And the Chinese respect that, and as they’re building up Shanghai and other business ports in China, which are building very, very quickly, Hong Kong is used not only as a place of transition, but as a receiving port, where they are starting, and now it’s spreading out to China. China is very, very quickly developing their own ports, trading ports with the rest of them. Macau is different. Macau, again, the lack of deep water, and not having any major businesses in Macau, like the big trading companies. Macau has concentrated on the casinos. And the casinos is something that started over a hundred years ago anyway, because the Chinese like to gamble. And the Chinese have always tried to have lotteries. And the Portuguese in the beginning tried to stop it—and this is Amaral’s time, so I don’t want to go there.

But then afterwards the Portuguese sort of allowed the Chinese to have a little casino in one of the hotels. And one of the families had the monopoly of that. And then came in the STDM, Stanley Ho and that group, and it grew bigger, into a more—how can I put it? A bigger casino, a more defined business. And the people of not only locals, now the people are coming in from Indonesia, and so on. And recently, after the Portuguese sort of started to negotiate with China, to give up Macau as a Portuguese-controlled area, the casinos started to grow, because it became more and more flexible, and they started to get some money—I’m talking about the Portuguese government of Macau—started to get more money from the STDM to develop and to preserve some of the historical sites in Macau. And then when the Chinese, finally, were handed Macau, by then the casinos have already so much clientele coming in that the casino era has exploded, and now the Americans are there. And the casinos in Macau now make, I heard, three times more money than Las Vegas. And it’s incredible now, and it’s just building and spreading all over. You know, the central city of Macau is full, full, full of gamblers. And you think of gamblers

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not as wild people; they’re just normal people that like to go there and gamble, like going to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is famous for that, and Macau is famous for it in its own way, except there are lots and lots of Orientals, people from in China, ignorant of the Western way of living. And so with their newly found money they’re buying items from Gucci, et cetera, because it shows the people back home that, my God, I’ve got money, and here I am, I got a Gucci bag, and so on. So that mania, or that way of thinking, is actually now flooding the streets of Macau.

01-00:37:43

Warrin: So Macau became a center of gambling as sort of what you might call offshore gambling. I mean, it wasn’t allowed in mainland China, in some way. They could control this better, rather than simply having casinos in Shanghai or some other place, right?

01-00:38:06

da Silva: Right, well, first of all, the Chinese are not encouraging that. They’ve got Macau, and they’re not encouraging any casinos. They don’t want gambling in China, per se, at all. And gambling was always forbidden in Hong Kong. And so Macau had its unique position, and its unique capability, of being the gambling mecca of the Orient.

01-00:38:27

Warrin: Very interesting, yeah. And it, essentially, has allowed Macau to prosper and continue as a somewhat independent little place, right?

01-00:38:43

da Silva: True. Macau is now prospering again, just as it was in the times of the Japan trade. This is now the renaissance of trade and money in Macau, so the people in Macau are able to earn a lot of money. But then, of course, with the Portuguese gone, we’re talking about the Chinese able to earn more money over there. Those Portuguese, the centers of the Portuguese that are left there, they’re very few. It’s less than five percent of the total population in Macau that are foreigners; I’m not just saying the local Portuguese. But who’s benefitting now are the Chinese of the area.

01-00:39:26

Warrin: Well, that’s an interesting story, and a brief history of many centuries of the Portuguese in Macau, and its development and change. I’d like to go back and talk about your own family. And you mentioned in your soon-to-be published book, East to West, the two families in particular, the Silva family, and the Pacheco-Jorge family. Could you talk a little bit about that family background?

01-00:40:11

da Silva: Well, my family, if you like, in Macau—they’ve been there for many generations, the Pacheco-Jorge family separate from the Silva family. And the Pacheco-Jorge family are people that have actually started off as traders, that came via Singapore or the Malay Peninsula, Siam in the old days, today

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Thailand. And they came into Macau as traders. And they eventually married some of the local people, and that’s the Jorge family itself. The Pacheco family comes via Portuguese military from Goa, and their people, some of them are knighted, and so on. So they’re very senior Portuguese officers, and they are really mainly of Portuguese ancestry, Portuguese blood. Those in the Jorge family, in the beginning, some of them were—how can I put it—intermixed with the local Portuguese, some of whom have Chinese blood, and some of whom probably have the earlier mixed-race blood of Malacca. So a percentage of my family, historically, has that mixture. But the Silva family, different. The Silva family are mainly Portuguese, from Portugal, that have come there, and—

01-00:41:40

Warrin: And about when? It’s interesting to put a general date on both of these, or all these families that you’re mentioning.

01-00:41:52

da Silva: Right. Well, the Jorge family actually came out there about the 1700s, in the 1700s, and remained in Macau as traders, and later on they became ship owners, and got involved that way. Now, the Pacheco family married into the Jorge family, and that’s relatively recent. That’s probably a couple of generations back. Now, the Silva family actually basically started in 1800, 1810, and so on. First of all, they came out as the Arriaga family, who are actually people from the Azores. He was a very well-known Portuguese crown judge, Miguel de Arriaga, and he was the first of my ancestors that came from Portugal, and married—

01-00:42:45

Warrin: And excuse me, from what island?

01-00:42:48

da Silva: From the Azores, Faial. And so he, and his ancestors before him, a lot of them were from the Azores. As I trace back in my family tree, I’m finding that for over a hundred years or more they’ve been coming from the Azores. Originally, of course, they were all from the mainland, but I’m surprised at the amount of Açorianos that are actually part of that side of the family, and Horta, and so on.

So anyway, Miguel de Arriaga goes out there as a crown judge for Portugal, and very quickly gets into negotiating for the British to stop menacing Macau, and trying to take it over, and trying to protect it, and have their ships remain in Macau. So that’s the first group that came in. Very close after that, another great-grandfather of mine—he would be my great-great-grandfather Arriaga—my great-great-grandfather on the other side, the Silva side, also would be actually Anacleto José da Silva, who was actually a captain of one of the ships that actually fought against the pirate fleet. And that’s about maybe seven to ten years after Arriaga arrives. He arrives, and Arriaga sends these ships out to fight the pirates, and not knowing that eventually the son of

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the captain is going to have relations with his granddaughter, and produce the Silva side of the family. And so that’s the Silva side, and that brings us to about the 1800s. Later, mid-1800s, and so on, one becomes a priest, and my family are descendants on one side of priests, but of Portuguese priests from Portugal. So I don’t know if I’ve brought you enough up to date, but then it goes on.

01-00:44:55

Warrin: Pretty much. No, pretty much. And so your parents? Could you talk a little bit about your own family?

01-00:45:12

da Silva: Well, my father married my mother when my mother was only nineteen years old, and my father was about ten years older than my mother at the time. And the marriage was forbidden, because the Jorge family and the Silva family were not socially very close to each other, the Jorge family being the family that were sinologists, and so on, and a part of the external government, if you like. They would go to Beijing and deal with the Chinese government over there, assisting them in translations. My father was an independently wealthy man. All his brothers were very, very wealthy, and if you like I can tell you almost how and why. But his first wife died, and that was another taboo from the Jorge side. So he had three children by the first wife. And so my mother being nineteen years old, and this other man having three children already seven years old and down, my grandfather on my mother’s side thought that was too much. Besides, he knew that the Silva family had some illegitimacy involved in it that involved priests. And so it was definitely a no, as far as a marriage is concerned. So my mother, being strong-headed and being in love, decided that she was going to marry my father anyway, disinherited or otherwise, so she married my father. And from that marriage there were nine children. There were nine children. Two died at birth, and the other seven of us—and my mother took on the other three children from my father’s first marriage, as well. So it was a very large family that I came from. Eventually, the Jorges and the Silvas sort of mended their fences. The daughter was already married off, and my father was going into my grandfather’s house. I can see in some pictures, having dinner together. So it wasn’t sort of enemies. They didn’t sort of forbid my father to ever come in, which was something they didn’t want in the beginning, but when it happened, there it happened, except my grandmother didn’t like it, and my grandmother cut my mother out of her heritage completely in her will. She left nothing to my mother, and left everything to the other children, all the jewelry and everything left, because she said in her will that my mother married a rich man; she has everything anyway, so what are a few pieces of jewelry that I can leave her going to do for her?

01-00:48:02

Warrin: But that wasn’t, probably, the real reason.

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01-00:48:05

da Silva: No, it wasn’t. It was the anger that my mother sort of did what she wanted to do. And my grandfather on my mother’s side, and his wife, my grandmother, who objected to the marriage, they weren’t poor people by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, they had this palace of a house with antiques all over the house. So they had money, but my father just had a lot more money, that’s all. And so that’s what she said. I think it was more her expression of anger and disapproval than anything else. And besides, when my grandfather eventually passed away, his entire collection was split among all his children, and my mother didn’t get anything. So I don’t know whether he held a grudge or he forgot, but he certainly didn’t leave my mother even one piece of the antiques. But my mother, I think before my grandfather went back to Portugal, I think there’s one piece of antique that I have over there on the wall that is in his antique album, the album of all his well-known collection pieces. And so that was the beginning of the Jorge-Silva family marriage.

01-00:49:25

Warrin: So it seems like, as we say, old money versus new money.

01-00:49:31

da Silva: That’s correct. That’s correct, old money versus new money. And the Portuguese, socially they are very, very protective of what other people think of them. And remember that Macau has social strata levels. You have the Portuguese government people from Portugal; they are a tier apart. And then you have the elite of the Portuguese that were born locally. Those that were rich, and those that were well educated, et cetera, became the elite social tier, of which both my mother’s side and my father’s side belong. And then there was the average working man, and then came the ones that the people looked down upon, which were the ones that were really marrying into the Chinese, et cetera, in those days. I don’t mean to insult the Chinese, or anybody to take offense, because many of my friends are Chinese. And I’m very proud of having lived in China. But that was the attitude in those days. So there was the three-tier society, and there’s a fourth involved, which means those that intermarry.

01-00:50:49

Warrin: And the three tiers were?

01-00:50:51

da Silva: The three tiers were the Portuguese, the Macaense, and the Chinese. Those are the three tiers. But in between tiers are the Chinese and the lower-class Portuguese, the soldiers below the rank of officer that married with the Chinese, and they were actually sort of a second and a half down to the third tier. They were looked down upon by the Macaense people, and the Chinese also looked down upon them, because they weren’t very happy with that situation, either. So those were the tiers of society in Macau, and they existed in those tiers. They lived like that. And they had social clubs in Macau where

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only certain families would attend these functions, and the other ones wouldn’t until, of course, more recently.

01-00:51:37

Warrin: Could you briefly describe how these two sides of the family gained their wealth?

01-00:51:48

da Silva: Gained their wealth?

01-00:51:49

Warrin: Yes, how—

01-00:51:49

da Silva: Oh, okay. My father, some of the money was inherited from his—how can I put it—his illegitimate grandfather, okay. That’s not a very good way of explaining it. I think I’ve got to start from the beginning there. I think I’ve got to tell you that Arriaga’s granddaughter, okay, Carolina, actually had relations with a priest, and having relations with a priest, my grandmother was born. And when this priest eventually died, he left her all his belongings. Now, when you say all his belongings, you think a priest doesn’t have a lot of money; well, this one did, because he was a treasurer of the bishop of Macau, and he was very, very wealthy in that respect. And so that money was left, but it wasn’t a great fortune. I think my father’s other brothers and my father invested some of his money in the stock exchange, and so he became even more wealthy. And also in Macau there’s the trading with the Chinese, again. This is, again, very important. If the Chinese want to do something in Macau—they want to establish a business, they want to do something, buy a building, or whatever—they have to go through the Portuguese government, and the Macaense were the intermediaries, were the people that helped them to negotiate with the government and helped them get things approved. And for that, of course, there was either a fee, or a gift, which is a Chinese way of doing things. Not always did they give you a fee, but they gave you a gift, which is the give face situation, or part thereof. And so you can call them perquisites, if you like, and I think that added to the wealth. That’s the Silva side of the family. And so they had a lot, lot, lot of money. I mean, my father is reputed to have had an opera company come and sing for his birthday, from Italy.

01-00:54:06

Warrin: Really?

01-00:54:06

da Silva: So it’s that much money that he had. Yeah, those are tales that my mother told me. And my grandfather on my mother’s side, on the other hand, his is old money, and his money comes from generations of traders in Macau. But a lot of it comes from his grandfather, who was a negotiator for the Portuguese during the days of the Opium War. But before that, and after that, there was the Coolie trade. And this gentleman, my great-grandfather, owned a ship, or

16

maybe ships, and the Sofia was one of the first Portuguese Macau ships that took the Coolies to Cuba. And that was owned by José Vicente Caetano Jorge, my great-grandfather. And he left, obviously, his wealth to his son, and his son left his wealth to my grandfather. And my grandfather, besides, collected and bought the stuff, but going to Beijing as the Portuguese envoy sinologist that spoke and translated, he picked up a lot of things over there that eventually were worth money. He didn’t sell it; he was a collector. But he already had money behind him, able to buy all that stuff. And he had his castle on the hill, so to speak, and the Silvas had their mansions on the other side of another hill. And that’s the two families.

01-00:55:33

Warrin: All in Macau.

01-00:55:33

da Silva: All in Macau. Yeah, all in Macau. So that’s the two families.

01-00:55:39

Warrin: Very interesting. Let’s take a break here.

01-00:55:41

da Silva: Okay.

[Audiofile 2]

02-00:00:00

Warrin: Okay, so we’re back, and we had begun to talk about your own family, if you could sort of fill us in on your immediate family.

02-00:00:21

da Silva: Yeah, my immediate family, meaning my wife and children, or my mother and father still?

02-00:00:29

Warrin: Let’s finish up with your mother and father.

02-00:00:32

da Silva: Okay. Well, with my mother and father, after they got married and had their children, my father got into a problem with the Portuguese government in Macau, through the government working on opium factories. My father was, as well as being a rich man, he was the treasurer of the Portuguese government in Macau. And he was given the opportunity, because other people were seeking to do that, when he was offered to do it. And he didn’t necessarily have to do it, but he did it anyway. What I’m getting at is the Portuguese always, since the days of the opium trade, they’ve always maintained an opium factory of some kind, opium house in Macau. And it came that the new governor of Macau wanted to build a factory to actually

17

process opium. And my father, because he speaks several languages, he was asked to help the governor personally to do it. Well—

02-00:01:49

Warrin: About what year would this have been?

02-00:01:51

da Silva: This is in the 1930s now. I’m going down to the League of Nations, and the League of Nations made—and now I’m jumping a little bit, but this is important—the League of Nations made a treaty to Portugal that the opium would be controlled, and that certain things had to be approved by the League of Nations before it could be done, or not done at all. But involved with this governor was another gentleman, a Mr. Lobo, L-o-b-o. He was actually working with my father in the government, and he also became a very important, and a very, very wealthy man. And he and my father had some kind of a rivalry, I guess, because he wanted to do that. And according to my uncle, who told me this whole story, is that because of his jealousy of my father he actually started to push the wrong buttons and create problems for the governor himself, and eventually my father got involved, and got in trouble.

Now, you may say if Macau always had the opium factory, and always had an opium house, if you prefer, then what’s the problem? Well, the problem was they were processing opium, and creating heroin out of that. And my father didn’t know. At least, I was told my father didn’t know. And they were just building the building, building the factory. And before they even started the process, anything, this other gentleman, Mr. Lobo, leaked to the League of Nations—this is what I’m told, again, by my uncle—the fact that there was something going on that is either illegal or that should be looked at. And so the League of Nations got involved with the Portuguese government, in Portugal, who immediately wanted the Portuguese government of Macau to respond and to come clean, so to speak.

02-00:04:01

Warrin: And let me ask you: What was your father’s role in this? What was his responsibility?

02-00:04:08

da Silva: His responsibility, as far as I know—it’s better written in my notes, his exact title. I don’t remember the exact title in Portuguese, but his role was to take instructions, written instructions or verbal instructions, from the governor himself personally to the Chinese that were actually bringing in the construction materials to build the factory, and some Chinese that were involved in the process of opium, which had been happening for decades before, centuries before. So he was the one. He was the messenger, the translator, the official go-between the government and the Chinese that were doing that.

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Well, the other gentleman, Mr. Lobo, felt that he was being stepped upon, because that he felt was what he wanted to do, and it was his position to deal with it. But the governor personally preferred my father’s personality, I guess, and befriended my father, and there was this intimate friendship between them, and they went back and forth until this League of Nations problem came to seed. Then, of course, the governor, being confronted with this, backed right off and said, “Who me? I don’t know anything.” And so my father was held by the Senate to go and explain himself. What are you doing sort of dealing with these people that are actually probably making narcotics or something like that? So my father said, “Who me? No. I wasn’t doing it. All I was doing was working with the governor, and I’m independently wealthy,” he would say. “I don’t have to do this, but I need to do something.” And before, he, my father, was a member of the Senate. And he says, “I’m just a member, working with the government in order to translate and to go between.” And so they brought him to a hearing, and so at the hearing my father would produce the papers that were signed and written by the governor. And, again, my uncle tells me—and my uncle’s a lawyer, also, and he said that the people there during the hearing—and my uncle was present—snatched the papers from my father, tore it, and threw it on the ground, said “this is worthless, this is absolute nonsense, you are the one that’s involved,” and so on. And my father, being very loyal, a patriot, et cetera, didn’t want to embarrass the governor, and didn’t want to embarrass particularly Portugal. He sort of hoped that after the people had talked among themselves and gone through a little bit more that they will find out that he was really an innocent party there, just working at the directions of the governor. Of course, the governor said nothing, and so the hearing—not a trial—went from bad to worse. And so it ended up my father being exiled, told to leave for a period of five years Macau.

Now, what happened immediately thereafter is the governor was found out, and the Portuguese government, from Portugal, recalled the governor, and took him out, and sent in a new governor for Macau. So the governor was recalled. And there’s a book—and I don’t remember the name of the book—a French author wrote a book that explained a little bit more about it, and it actually said that my father was actually the person that was the go-between the governor and the other. So my father then ended up going to Hong Kong, and living in Hong Kong. And he took, I guess, the money that he didn’t lose—now, again, there’s another untold story—in the stock exchange, the crash of 1929, the market crash, what he didn’t lose and didn’t give to save his brother’s wealth and fortune he took with him. So he took it with him to Hong Kong.

02-00:08:02

Warrin: So as he began an expatriate, this was around 1929.

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02-00:08:10

da Silva: Nineteen thirty-four. No, no, 1934. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, this whole incident happened in the 1930s, early 1930s, 1933, ’34. So he became exiled, if you like, living in Hong Kong. Now, the Chinese helped in Hong Kong, Mr. Ko Ho-Ning being a very well-known person, and a multimillionaire Chinese. My father helped him, so he helped my father. He said, “Look, I am building a huge, double-block apartment. You and your children live here. Don’t pay me any rent ever. You can stay as long as you want.” So that was the building in Takshing Street where I grew up as a young man, as a child after the war. So he was given that place to live, and he stayed there. And he stayed there until the Japanese occupied Hong Kong. And then they get into another phase of my father and my mother’s life. But that’s what happened to my father, and that’s how we first went to Hong Kong. Of course, I wasn’t yet born when my father went. I was born in 1938, which is many years later. So when the Japanese came, I was just a young child.

02-00:09:28

Warrin: And so you were born in Macau somehow. At least, your mother went back to Macau for your birth.

02-00:09:35

da Silva: Yes. Yes, because, again, my mother’s family were very concerned that she was going to either have a C-section, which was very serious in those days—and a personal friend, in fact my godmother’s husband, was a famous doctor in Macau, well-known doctor. He told her, “No, you come and have a child by natural childbirth here.” And my grandfather said, come back home. And so my mother had me in his house in Penha, Rua de Penha, in the big house. And so I was born there. And about a month later, as soon as I could travel, my mother left and went back, of course, to her husband and home in Hong Kong, and I was baptized in Hong Kong.

02-00:10:21

Warrin: Okay. And you, of course, were brought up essentially in Hong Kong, right?

02-00:10:28

da Silva: Later on in life I was brought to Hong Kong, because when the war happened, during the Japanese occupation, we were sent out by the Japanese to Macau. Most people went as refugees, left as refugees, but we did not. We were sent by Japanese, if you want, a Japanese gunboat, a Japanese launch that belonged to a marine colonel, and that was under his control. And we were escorted out of Hong Kong to Macau. Why that happened, I don’t know. There are rumors that the Japanese actually had befriended my father before, because the Japanese consul in Macau actually bought my father’s house after my father left. But that’s…

02-00:11:20

Warrin: In Hong Kong.

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02-00:11:21

da Silva: In Macau. You know, the house he had over there.

02-00:11:23

Warrin: Oh, in Macau.

02-00:11:24

da Silva: —the big palace that I told you that he had over there, big palace, huge house, and the Japanese consul, I was told, bought it, and that’s why the Japanese, when they found out who my father was, sort of escorted him out of Macau. Again, that’s an interesting story in itself.

02-00:11:45

Warrin: Escorted him out of Macau or Hong Kong?

02-00:11:48

da Silva: Pardon? Sorry?

02-00:11:50

Warrin: You said escorted him out of Macau.

02-00:11:51

da Silva: Hong Kong. Out of Hong Kong.

02-00:11:52

Warrin: Out of Hong Kong.

02-00:11:52

da Silva: To Macau, yeah.

02-00:11:52

Warrin: To Macau.

02-00:11:54

da Silva: Why that? Okay, let me get into the war. Okay, after the Japanese bombed Hong Kong, and fought the British, and took Hong Kong in early 1942. Well, they took Hong Kong at Christmas 1941. Hong Kong capitulated Christmas Day. And after that, the looters were running all over the place, ripping things out. The Chinese were stealing, and so on, before the Japanese had full control of the place. And the Portuguese that were there, the local Portuguese, the Macaenses of Hong Kong, if you like, they took refuge by the boatloads to Macau, and Macau accepted them open-armed. In our case, it didn’t happen that way. In our case, the Japanese came and barged into our house, and started to want to take all our bedding. In winter, it was late December, early January when they did that, and my mother being my mother, strong-willed, et cetera, grabbed the Japanese by the arm, showed him the painted Portuguese flag on the entry door that my brother had painted there, just to tell the Japanese we were neutral. And so she pointed and said, “Portugal, neutral, neutral.” And the Japanese fellow didn’t understand, so he got angry and shrugged her off and went back in. So she insisted on Portugal being neutral. So eventually they got frustrated, broke a few things, and took off and left.

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And a day or so later, he appears again, the fellow that was insulted by my mother, because it shamed him. So the colonel who returned with the soldier, a colonel called Colonel Iguchi, of the Japanese Marines, came and asked my mother to open the door, and to allow him to go and save face, to go in and be able to take something and break it. So he with his sword, or the butt of his rifle—I don’t know which—he broke a couple of vases, much like that one [points], but not porcelain. I mean, they were porcelain vases instead of metal, big ones. And he smashed that, smashed one of our radios, and then his shame was satisfied, and they left. And a week or so later the Japanese colonel shows up again, and he shows up with rice, because he noticed that there were children in the house, and Japanese, loving children and babies and so on, were very nice—sympathetic is the word I was looking for—to my mother, and brought her a little bit of rice, et cetera, to eat, because people were starving in Hong Kong. There was no food, all the shops were closed. And he then told my mother that soon we will have to leave. And within about a month or so he was back again with more food and rice. He told my mother, “You must leave, and I will take you to Macau.” And whether he had talked with the people in Macau to find out who we were or whatever, I don’t know.

It’s also a rumor that my house, in Tak Shing Street, was used as a headquarters for the local Portuguese in Hong Kong to negotiate how they would be evacuated from Hong Kong, those that remained behind. The Japanese treated us as third-country neutrals, all right. And so the rumor is they also used the house for that. So I guess they wanted everybody out of that house so that this was not going to take place and take root. And so anyway, so he came and marched my mother and my brothers and my sister to his launch, had the servants carrying whatever they could, and sent them to Macau on his personal launch. And my mother carried with her, unbeknownst to her at the time, a fortune in jewels and things that the neighbor across the street asked my mother to take. He said, “Oh, these are family belongings. They are things that are important to our family. Don’t want the Japanese to destroy it.” My mother didn’t know that it was jewelry and money. So it was in a chest, and my servants took this chest over there, and somehow during the trip my mother either opened the thing to see what was in there or whatever, and she found that there were jewels. So she sat on the chest, according to her, all the way to Macau. It’s a four-hour journey. How she discovered it, I don’t know, but I can’t believe she sat on that for four hours in a launch, because I know the sea is pretty rough. So anyway, so she saved the fortune for Mr. Fu, who was the owner of the Macau casino in the old days. So that’s another story.

02-00:16:43

Warrin: And where was your father during this time?

02-00:16:45

da Silva: My father was at home, and he couldn’t do anything, so he went with my mother, and they went to Macau. And his time in exile had already expired.

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He could go back to Macau. He didn’t want to, as he was so offended by this whole thing he didn’t want to go back to Macau. But he had to, because the Japanese said he had to go. And he was escorted out, so to speak. So he went back to Macau, and we arrived at my grandfather’s house immediately after the launch, and we had dinner there. And my grandfather thereafter arranged for us to have an apartment very close by, down the steps, just on the lower part of the hill. And we rented an apartment there for maybe a year or more, and then we rented like a farmhouse at the outskirts of Macau, where we had chickens and pigs and goats, and I lived the war there. Of course, I only spoke Portuguese at the time, a little bit of Chinese to my servants, but I spoke no English, of course, until I went back to Hong Kong.

02-00:17:46

Warrin: Did Mr. Fu, I think you said—

02-00:17:50

da Silva: Mr. Fu, yeah.

02-00:17:50

Warrin: —get his possessions back?

02-00:17:57

da Silva: Oh, yeah, yeah. My mother immediately delivered it to the family there, because Mr. Fu had family in Macau, just that he couldn’t get whatever was in that chest out of the Japanese-occupied territory. And so he got my mother to do it. And he didn’t really thank my mother after the war. But his daughter and my sister were good friends, and that’s probably how he discovered that my mother was being sent out by the Japanese just before, and he arranged this transfer of material. But he never thanked us, never gave us anything, never did what Mr. Ko did for us by allowing us to stay in his place, or even give us gifts at Chinese New Year. Mr. Ko used to come over and give a “lai see,” which is the red packet during Chinese New Year [a gift of money], and gave it to the children, but Mr. Fu never did that.

02-00:18:55

Warrin: Well, there are different personalities in this world. It seems like your mother was a very strong personality.

02-00:19:04

da Silva: Very. Very, very strong personality. She also, on going back to Hong Kong, instead of waiting for the boats to go back she actually hired a Chinese fishing junk, a big one, and she went back on that to go back to see if her house was okay in Hong Kong before we actually were able to take the boat with the others to go back. So my mother went alone to Hong Kong. Not my father, my mother. And I remember standing by the exterior port and saying goodbye to her as she got into the fishing junk. I remember that distinctly in my mind.

02-00:19:36

Warrin: That’s amazing. And you were very young.

23

02-00:19:38

da Silva: I was very young then. I was about six years old, six, going on seven, when my mother left. Yeah, seven.

02-00:19:45

Warrin: What year was that?

02-00:19:46

da Silva: Nineteen forty-six, the beginning of 1946, or she could’ve left the end of ’45, after the war was over. So either the end of ’45—but it was wintertime. I remember her wearing a black coat, and it was either end of ’45, beginning of ’46, because by ’46 we already were back in Hong Kong, because my father died in May of 1946 in Hong Kong, in that house that I’m talking about.

02-00:20:11

Warrin: So your father died quite young.

02-00:20:13

da Silva: Yes, yes. My father died when he was sixty. Anyway—

02-00:20:22

Warrin: And what was life like during the war in Macau?

02-00:20:26

da Silva: Well, I remember very little. I could not remember, because I was very young, it’s just stories that my mother would tell me, like the first day that we arrived at my grandfather’s house after getting off the Japanese launch. We were all invited to dinner. And in my grandfather’s house, a table would seat about twenty-something people. It’s a big table. So the entire family was there, uncles and aunts and grandfather, not grandmother, and all. As dinner was being served, and my mother said to me that I stunned everybody by running into the room, hugging a loaf of bread, and saying to my mother in Portuguese, “Mamá, mamá! Pão! Pão!” Which means, “Mama, mama! Bread! Bread!” And everybody looked at me and started to cry, because I was so pleased to have this loaf of bread in my arm. We hadn’t seen it for months and months and months, and everybody was surprised. So that’s one of the stories that I was told, not that I remember.

I remember the bombing of Macau, remembering hearing the planes over. I was at maybe kindergarten at the time. I remember lying down on the ground, told to lie down or something like that. But I remember the silver planes up on top shimming, and then I remember hearing boom, boom, and they bombed the gasoline, I think, reserves that they had near the Melco station in Macau. Melco is Macau Electric Company. Anyway, so it was bombed. That was very near our little house that we lived, like little farmhouse, but I was at school then.

02-00:22:15

Warrin: And who was doing the bombing?

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02-00:22:19

da Silva: The American fleet from the Philippines. I have the actual name of the fleet, but I don’t remember right off the top of my head.

02-00:22:33

Warrin: This hugging the bread would indicate—and I was going to ask this question—how did you feed yourselves during this period? You must not have had the same connections with mainland China. And how did you get—

02-00:22:54

da Silva: Are you talking about Macau now, or Hong Kong?

02-00:22:56

Warrin: Macau.

02-00:22:56

da Silva: Well, in Macau, there was some food getting through from China. The borders were not closed. Macau, remember, was neutral. Portugal was neutral. But the Japanese patrol boats would patrol to prevent any people escaping to Macau, and so on, from Hong Kong. And they pretty much controlled what came in and out, but allowing the people to be fed, because the Japanese, in no way they wanted to feed the Portuguese on the other side, all those in Macau. That’s why they let them escape in the first place. So there was food in the black market, the better stuff. There was a little bit of food. We were in rations. And the Portuguese from Hong Kong, a few thousand of them, they were also given rations, and some of them that had connections with the British were given a few dollars of compensation, so that they could buy whatever, but very little money, a subsidy. And there were refugee camps for them. And so I was lucky that I had my grandfather, and we were a Macau family, so he took care of me.

So there was no starvation, no hunger that I remember. I had my own chickens, after all. We had our own eggs. And I had goat’s milk as a child from my own personal goat. I used to take the goat out and gather firewood at the age of about eight or nine—no, excuse me—six or seven now. I’d gather firewood in the hills just behind our house and bring back so that the servants could feed the fire with the firewood. So that was my job, looking after the goats and—

02-00:24:28

Warrin: So you would cut down some firewood?

02-00:24:30

da Silva: I would break the firewood, because there was like a pine forest, Montanha Russa, which they call it the Russian mountain, just behind us. And there were pine needles and little sticks, so I would gather all that and put it in a sack, and drag it with my goat, leading my goat back. So that was my job. Of course, I’m sure there was firewood that was being purchased for the major fire, but mine, it was like a fire starter.

25

02-00:24:58

Warrin: Twigs?

02-00:24:58

da Silva: Yeah, twigs. It was something for me to do to get me out of their hair probably.

02-00:25:03

Warrin: Right, right. So then soon after the war ended your family went back to Hong Kong.

02-00:25:13

da Silva: Yes, immediately after the war ended, soon as my mother came back saying everything was safe. The ferryboat started to run again to Hong Kong, and I don’t remember whether we went over by ferryboat. I’m 99 percent sure we did, because the Japanese weren’t there to escort us anymore, so we probably went back on the ferryboat, and went back, and I stayed on Tak Shing Street. And a few months afterwards my father died of a heart attack, and that was the most horrible day of my life, and I’ll never forget it. And it still today affects my mind. I can’t see funerals. I can’t go to a movie and see people being interred or something like that. I have to leave. Like when Robin Williams—we were talking about him dying—I had to switch off the TV and leave the room. I cannot face that anymore. I had to kiss my father’s dead body. I was forced to, and I cried and screamed for days, and I just went nuts. And that was the most horrible thing in my life, because I loved him dearly, and he loved me dearly. I still remember his voice, but that was a horrible thing to make a young man—I was seven, going on eight, and it was done out of respect. That’s the way we showed respect, I guess. And to me, it was a most horrible, horrible thing to do.

02-00:26:32

Warrin: I can imagine.

02-00:26:32

da Silva: Yeah, it affected me all my life, and to this day.

02-00:26:35

Warrin: Really? So when you went back to Hong Kong, in what way might it have been different from, let’s say, physically than before the war?

02-00:26:54

da Silva: Oh, when we went back, the house opposite me, where the Fu’s used to live, was now occupied by RAF. It became the RAF headquarters. There were military vehicles, and all sorts of people. There was a chaos in the beginning, sort of regrouping, getting the Japanese out of town, and the British trying to regroup and take over. So I remember little of that. Again, because I was young, I remember the jeeps. I remember the military personnel coming and talking to my brothers. But we lived in a terrace above the street, see. All these houses were on a terrace. We had to walk up through a private gate, up about twelve to fifteen steps, in order to get to our terrace where our three

26

buildings were, on the other side were offices where they had their headquarters was the same. So the street was down below. So I didn’t see a lot of, or contact, a lot of people in the streets. Unless they came up our terrace, I personally would have no contact with them. But must’ve had some contact, because my first words I learned in English was ‘thank you,’ ‘chewing gum,’ and ‘chocolate.’

02-00:27:58

Warrin: It sounds like you had some contact there.

02-00:28:00

da Silva: Yeah, so some contact. Somebody offered me some candy or something.

02-00:28:05

Warrin: Yes. And so I guess soon after returning to Hong Kong you must’ve started school.

02-00:28:14

da Silva: I started school. The schools started to open again, and there was an influx of people coming in. And, of course, Catholics go to Catholic schools. And English-speaking schools were run by priests and nuns. The nuns would take the girls and have the girls school, and the priests would take the boys, or the young men. Now, what happened to children, they weren’t prepared for, so we ended up going to a girls school, to the Canossian sisters girls school, which was not far from the house.

02-00:28:45

Warrin: Because you were young.

02-00:28:46

da Silva: Yes, and I was nine, ten, just beginning to learn how to speak English. So the Canossian sisters had us for about a year or so, and then thereafter—and I got to about eleven—it was time for me to move out of the Canossian girls school and go to a boys school. But the boys schools were full where all the others went, so there was an Anglo-Chinese school where there were French-Canadian sisters, and they would teach Chinese English, and would bring in some of the local boys, the Portuguese, a few, maybe a couple of Pakistanis. Mainly the Portuguese boys, because I have photographs of that. And the Hong Kong Portuguese would go there with me. And we started to learn how to speak English. And I was there until I was about maybe thirteen or so. And then we had to get out, because, again, that school was not capable to take us. And so we would go to, then, the school where the big boys went, so to speak, La Salle College, run by the La Salle brothers. But that was full. And my father being from Macau originally didn’t have the contacts to pull strings to get me in school, so a few friends of mine that were with me that also didn’t have strings pulled, we were given a chance to go to the British school.

Now, Central British School, which was later named King George V School after the war, was only for British. But right after the war they accepted two or

27

three Portuguese, a couple of Parsees, and so on, if you could pass an English reading test. So I remember reading some poetry or something like that in English, maybe a bit of Shakespeare, as well. And I was able to pass the minimal requirement, and I was accepted at KGV. And, of course, I was already older; I’d missed a couple of years of school. And so I went into form two, which I don’t know what the American grade would be, but there were people there much younger than me, a year or more younger than me, and I was already fourteen years old. And I went, and very quickly I was befriended by the British. The only thing is the girls giggled at me, but other than that we became friends—it was a coed school. There were girls and boys in that school. And the British treated me fantastically, and I had a great, great time at school.

02-00:31:12

Warrin: So this was rather unique, your experience moving into a British school, rather—

02-00:31:19

da Silva: Very much so, very much so. I was one of a few Portuguese, and there were probably a handful of us, ten, twelve, at my time that ever got into that school.

02-00:31:29

Warrin: And where did most of them go?

02-00:31:32

da Silva: They went to La Salle College. They went to La Salle College, where the majority of the Hong Kong Portuguese went.

02-00:31:39

Warrin: And how would your experience, then, have been different from then on, than the people in La Salle?

02-00:31:46

da Silva: Well, first of all, the La Salle people sort of didn’t like us, because we went to KGV [King George V School], to the British school, and there was a little bit of rivalry with La Salle, other than sports, which came later. But outside of school, we weren’t treated any differently by the Hong Kong Portuguese. They accepted us, no problem. But the boys, as usual, and the girls said “Ah, you think you’re big time with the British,” and so on and so forth. So that was a unique experience. The other unique experience there was that it was a school where it was run exactly like a school would be in England. You’d go to morning prayers, and sing hymns in the morning. And so we became very Anglicized, and very British in the way we all had uniforms and a tie, and everything was run by the British, and all the teachers were British. And the majority of students there in the beginning were British. Eventually—and very quickly eventually—the Americans came, and so the American boys and girls, and so on. So it was a big happy family of Americans mixed with the British, and that was the majority of the school. And then the few Portuguese, and eventually a couple of Chinese were even allowed into the school.

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02-00:33:03

Warrin: How do you think that would’ve affected you later in life, compared with those who were in the typical education system there in Hong Kong?

02-00:33:14

da Silva: Well, I think it gave me a terrific advantage, because a lot of the people that had the ordinary education in La Salle—the normal education, if you like—some of them went to Australia, as boarders, and a few of them went to England, and so on. But a majority ended up working in the banks locally, or working in commercial institutes locally. With me, I had different aspirations. I had a different involvement with the British. And being taught in the British system, I thought I’m special, and that I have to go further in education. They all talked about going to university in England. At that time, I didn’t even dream of it, because our family had no money after the war. The Japanese yen my father was forced to put his money into was all worthless, and he died, anyway. And so we had no money. And by the time I finished school I was more of an athlete than I was a student, and I was a very poor student. I was told that I’d never make it. And that, again, you don’t say to me, because it makes me very determined. If you tell me I can’t do something, I’m going to want it more than anything else in the world.

But, so I took my exams, and before I knew it the exams were over. You had to wait for results, because it was corrected in England, and then they were sent back from England. The results were sent back about September, October, end of the year. Meanwhile, what to do? I went to work in the China Light and Power Company, in the accounts section, with the Portuguese that went to La Salle. So we became friends again, and so on. So I got more involved with them, whereas before I was more involved with the British boys and girls, and the Americans, in KGV. So I started to make friends again with the Portuguese. And the British teachers that said I’d never make it, et cetera, well, they were very surprised, because I passed seven out of eight subjects, failing English, strangely enough. I did not make English, but I made math, I made all sorts of things that they never thought I would pass in. And so I then looked at this, bewildered and surprised myself. And I thought, my, I think I can go to university after all, and all the things that I was taught and I dreamt of at school, being with the British and having a good life. So I asked my mother if I could go to university, and that started another phase of my life. So I would say that KGV was an inspiration for me, although they didn’t think I was a good student. I wasn’t. They weren’t very kind from that other perspective. But the teachers were very nice, except for one or two that gave me the cane [laughs]. And I was very much accepted. There was never even—I never felt for a moment that I was different, that I was Portuguese and they were British, et cetera. Not for a single moment.

02-00:36:15

Warrin: Well, that was good, that you were accepted.

29

02-00:36:15

da Silva: That was a huge difference between the La Salle boys that had this feeling of the tier system. I never felt the tier.

02-00:36:22

Warrin: That was good. And obviously, if you passed your tests well, you had learned more than the school gave you credit for.

02-00:36:34

da Silva: That’s true. See, first of all, I’m not really a dumb kid. It’s just that I was more interested in sports than anything else, and I spent most of my time playing sports. And I goofed off when it came to study. But when they said I couldn’t make it—I knew the exams were coming up—I closed myself, locked myself up in a spare room at the back. I brought my books in. And I developed a system of studying, and I wouldn’t talk to anybody. I would go into the room, lock myself, and I would study the subjects that I had a hard time in. And by reading something and writing it down in my own handwriting, and then shortening it more, and shortening it more, I was able to memorize a word. A word reminded me of a sentence. A sentence reminded me of a paragraph. And a paragraph reminded me of a chapter. And that’s how I learned: memorization. And some understanding, because I wasn’t dumb, but I was being an athlete and playing sports and all that stuff. I just locked myself away, because they said I was going to fail, and there’s no way I was going to let my mother down, or let me down and fail.

02-00:37:37

Warrin: So that was a big challenge in your life.

02-00:37:39

da Silva: It was a huge challenge, and I had several challenges in my life. That’s the one I remember most, because that was a barrier that I had to get over.

02-00:37:47

Warrin: You mentioned sports. Presumably you played British sports.

02-00:37:55

da Silva: Yes. I played British sports. Before I talk about me playing sports, I’ll tell you about why I got caned once. I got caned once because I was introducing softball—I pitched the softball with the Portuguese—sorry—because I’m left-handed, and I was a pitcher. And so when I went to British school, after the second year I decided that I was going to teach some of the British to play softball. And I was hauled out of the school, first of all, for playing in the drizzle. It was raining a little bit. We’re not allowed to play in the rain. The second reason was I was playing a hooligan’s game. You don’t play a hooligan’s game that the Americans have brought in here. So I got four strokes of the cane for that. My behind really hurt for softball! [laughs] And that was the end of my softball in KGV. Thereafter I got into track and field, mainly track and field, and I played field hockey, I played soccer, all sorts of things, rugby for a little while, cricket, of course, the British game. But my

30

strong point was track and field, a hundred, 200 meters, high jump, long jump, which hurt my back, but all that stuff. And I did very well, and I became very well-known, and I represented the school in track and field, won many trophies in my day. And I think my juvenile head was so filled with pride that I just neglected my studies as a result.

02-00:39:22

Warrin: But it helped your self-confidence.

02-00:39:24

da Silva: It did. It gave me self-confidence. And I had also a terrible temper that I had to get rid of, and playing sports brought out the ugly side of me, the temper. When somebody would do something to hurt me in the game, I wasn’t a big, strong guy— [rather a] skinny fellow wearing glasses, but I certainly knew how to take care of myself. And I had a fiery temper, according to my coach. And he said, “If you can cut your temper, you’d be a much better soccer and a much better field hockey player, if you just controlled your temper.” But I got this temper out of being left alone, I guess, after the war, going back a little bit. My mother fell down and hurt her head, and she had to go and have her brain operated upon, in the early days of neurosurgery. She went to Macau, so I was left alone, and I had a nanny, if you like, look after me. And this nanny was British—she was Irish, actually—and she was married to a Portuguese who was beheaded by a Japanese during the war. And she wanted me to do various things, like sit down when I’m told. And she loved dogs, and I’m a little bit allergic to dog hair. And the dogs would sit in the chair, but I couldn’t, on the couch, so I was very angry about that. And she would beat me in the back occasionally, just slap me, not beat me, beat me, but just slap me in the back, and so on. That would get me very, very volatile and angry. Then she would lock me up with no food and say, “Go to bed without dinner,” just lock me up in the room. The servants would pass the food through the window, because in Hong Kong we had these bars, sort of wrought iron bars, and they would pass me a little bit of food through the bars of the window. But if I was caught, I’d be whacked again. And so that developed some kind of an anger and hatred, so much so that one day I was so angry with her, for whatever reason, that I punched the window to the bathroom door and cut my arm, and there’s a scar right there to prove it [points], and flesh was hanging out, bleeding like hell. I’d punched the whole thing, just thinking it was her face I was punching. And that anger transmitted into my field hockey days, and so on. So I had to get rid of that anger. And then, of course, she left, and another lady came, and she didn’t like me, either. And so I had a bad time for about three or four years until my mother came back.

02-00:41:47

Warrin: And how long was your mother gone?

02-00:41:48

da Silva: About three or four years.

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02-00:41:49

Warrin: That’s a long time.

02-00:41:50

da Silva: That’s a long time. She was operated, and then she was recuperating. So she was in Macau with my younger brother in the beginning, rather than me, and I was left alone for a long time. And so I didn’t feel good. And when I came back, of course, there was some anger towards my mother, also, that was inside of me.

02-00:42:11

Warrin: For abandonment.

02-00:42:13

da Silva: Yeah. There was anger. And so this anger came out. And the anger’s gone, thank God. I don’t have anger anymore.

02-00:42:19

Warrin: And sports probably helped you to relieve yourself a bit.

02-00:42:25

da Silva: It did, except field hockey never relieved myself. The anger came out. Track and field, I was never angry. I was never afraid of being beaten, or anything like that, and I was never, never told for anything in track and field. But field hockey and soccer, yeah, because I was in physical contact with an opponent, and that was different. But eventually, knowing that, I think I grew out of it. And then in England, when an English student called me a bloody foreigner, and I decked him, [laughter] but he embarrassed me so much that I think maybe that cleared my anger. But that’s another story for later.

02-00:43:03

Warrin: At that point.

02-00:43:04

da Silva: Yeah.

02-00:43:04

Warrin: So you finished school, and you worked for a short time, in—

02-00:43:11

da Silva: Yes, China Light and Power—

02-00:43:13

Warrin: —Hong Kong.

02-00:43:13

da Silva: —in their accounts department. Bored stiff. I hated accounting. I didn’t like correcting meter reading slips. I went out as a meter reader—I enjoyed that—with the Chinese, et cetera, and meter readers, and I went out to read meters. And that was fun. It was going around—

32

02-00:43:29

Warrin: At least you were out around.

02-00:43:30

da Silva: I was out and around, yeah, and not stuck behind doors, or just scribbling on a piece of paper. I was sent to accounting classes, and hated that. It was just boring to me, and so I told my mother, I’ve got to— And that’s when I started to apply to American schools, at first. I was hoping for an American sports scholarship. And then I made the dreadful mistake of talking to the American consulate people, because I had opportunities to come to America. I had a brother living here. Anyway, and what knocked me out of coming to America is they asked me, all right, you want to go to school in America, et cetera, et cetera, and what would you like to do after you finish school in America? Would you like to live in America, with the Americans? And so on. Being a very polite Portuguese, you would say, of course, I love your people. Of course, I would love to live in America, and remain behind, and live with the American people. They’ve been so good to me. Boom, I was not a bona fide student. I wanted to be an immigrant, not a bona fide student. So I was refused to come to America as a student, so my student visa was denied. And so the Irish priest that would come over often was very sympathetic, and he said, “All right, so the Americans won’t have you. Maybe the British will.” And so he wrote to the principal of St. John’s College in Portsmouth, England, and St. John’s College said, “Oh, all right, sure. He’s one year older, again, than his classmates would be,” because, remember, I fell behind a year, very much in the beginning of my school years. And he said, “But he’s got his O levels. He’s going to go for his A levels.” “What does he want to do?” And so I said, “Well, I want to do research, medicine.” He said, “Well, he needs physics and chemistry.” And I didn’t have physics and chemistry because I was thrown out of the physics and chemistry class for being a very curious boy, and overloading the experiments, and blowing it up a couple of times.

02-00:45:23

Warrin: Oh boy.

02-00:45:24

da Silva: And it splattered the wall with stuff. I was just curious. If you heat this mixture a little bit longer, what happens? Well, it cracks the test tube, and explodes it, and sends it onto the wall is what happens. And I was thrown out of—this was in KGV—chemistry. And that was one of the reasons that knocked me out of continuing and going to boarding school. But then if you want to talk about boarding school versus why I went into architecture, it’s a related story, but interesting, why I switched. So anyway, I went to British school, and went to St. John’s, and got in the airplane with my two cousins, who went to another part of England to school, young girl cousins. And I went to St. John’s College, as a boarder, all by myself, and I didn’t know anybody. And again, they treated me very well, but boarding school, being a boarding school, it has rules, again. And I’d already been working, earning money outside. And it has rules, and the rules are you cannot go out of these walls of

33

the school unless it’s a special reason, like going for a sporting event or something like that, or you are escorted out. But there is no mixing with anybody outside of these walls. And every Saturday afternoon, you have to sit down. You have to write a letter home to your parents, so you’re forced to sit there and write. And then you’re fed this horrible food. I thought it was terrible food, anyway. And the priests were reading the Bible, and preaching to us while we were eating, and we were eating things like rhubarb and custard, and terrible, terrible things that I still hate today.

02-00:47:05

Warrin: This sounds like prison life, almost.

02-00:47:08

da Silva: Well, British schools are very, very strict. You have lukewarm water for a bath, for a shower, and you have only that much time, at so-and-so hour. You have fifteen, twenty more minutes to get settled in bed, and then it’s lights out. And then the priests walk the corridor, make sure that there’s no conversation going on, et cetera. And then you first would get up in the morning, you go to the chapel, and then the school day starts. That’s boarding school for you. And as soon as I could leave, I left.

02-00:47:37

Warrin: How long were you there?

02-00:47:38

da Silva: I was there for a few months. And the college, which is now Portsmouth University, had openings for students that didn’t show up for their courses. So there were engineering and this and that and that, and there was nothing I was qualified for to escape for a one-day out of the boarding school, until I saw architecture. I said, ooh, my cousin’s an architect. Maybe I’ll go and tell him architecture. Because I already passed art. I have math, and so on. So I went, and said, okay, I’m going to talk to the architectural department. Lo and behold, there he was, an Englishman, the dean of the architectural school, and he fought in the Spanish Civil War. And he saw the name Jorge da Silva, which he pronounced incorrectly Jorge [pronounced “George”] da Silva. He thought I was a Spaniard. And he came and embraced me, and started speaking to me in Spanish, and so on. Knowing Portuguese, of course, my godmother being Spanish, I speak a little Spanish. Well, he was very excited, and so he wanted me in the school. So he said, “Yeah, you qualify. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. You can come in any time. Just go in and buy the tools, and tell your mother, and you’re accepted in the school.” Well, I was thrilled. I’m out of jail. I’m going to architectural school. Medicine, yeah, I can leave that behind. And so I almost immediately wired my mother. I cabled her. And she said, “All right, it’s an honorable profession. So you’re not doing medicine, but architecture’s fine.”

02-00:49:18

Warrin: It was quite a change.

34

02-00:49:19

da Silva: “So you can go.” It’s completely different. I hated art. I don’t like drawing. I like solving problems, hence research, and so on. So it was something that I didn’t understand. So anyway, I got out of boarding school, and I started to go to— But, of course, I was two or three months late, and it was near Christmas time, the time I joined school. They start September, October, November, and so on. I had missed, and so I had to go into engineering lectures. And all this put into my head was difficult. And we started with a class of about sixty people in the beginning, so it was a lot of people. And they weed you out in the third year, by the way. They cut it at least half by third year. So anyway, that’s further on down the line.

So I started in architecture, and I found it very difficult. I had to work very hard, read, almost like when I was at KGV, sort of pat myself on the back and read as much as I can, make notes and learn so I could pass the weekly tests that I used to have. And the thing I hated most was drawing, funny enough. It was an outdoor situation, and one of the requirements was that once a week you will go out and sketch. So they send you to an old church, to an old schoolhouse, and so you had to sketch this building. I hated it. For some reason, I just didn’t like that kind of art. But I thoroughly enjoyed solving problems. I liked the idea of how do you do this, and how do you do that. The jigsaw puzzle of architecture was ticking over in my head very, very slowly.

02-00:50:53

Warrin: The structural part interested you.

02-00:50:56

da Silva: The planning. It was not planning in the beginning; it was understanding how does this fit into there, and how do you make it utilitarian so that people can use it. How does it function? And the first thing I ever designed was a garbage can. That was my first project, design of a garbage can. How do people open it? How do they use the garbage can? But just the fact that it was a question on how—which should be obvious—I had to solve. That interested me, and that kept me in, because I was ready to forget it, go back to boarding school, go and do something else, take another course. But I managed to do it.

02-00:51:36

Warrin: I would imagine that your approach to architecture was very different initially from most people, who would be the sort of people who would want to design a fancy building, and draw, sketch things.

02-00:51:53

da Silva: Very correct. I never liked that aspect, even when I did architecture. I was more interested in the flow plan, in how the people flow in a building, and how the building would make a person comfortable, or make it a better place for them to work in, live in, and so on. And I was more interested in that than throwing a façade first, and drawing a picture, and then fitting the architecture inside. I worked the other way around. The façade and the architecture came

35

as a three-dimensional part of what I’m trying to do to make it better for people. And, of course, aesthetics then later on come to it, because I was taught that certain things are good, certain things are no good, in the architectural design classes. But I didn’t always follow that, because very often the professor would say, “If you want to design this kind of building, you go back to Europe.” Because very early on I was doing curves, curved entries into buildings, rather than going straight in. And he said, “This is England. It’s this way or that way, but no curves. You want to draw curves into a supermarket because the people flow that way and be romantic about it, go home.” [laughter]

02-00:53:07

Warrin: So you were more interested in the inside than the outside, in a way.

02-00:53:10

da Silva: Yes, yes, very much so, and always have been. Always have been. And so when I did architecture, that’s a lot of the time I got frustrated, because people were not interested in that. They were interested in what would sell. The first job I got in the States was with a developer-contractor, and he wanted me to design the front of the building, make it look pretty, fiddle around with the floor plan, so it’s okay. Forget about the back, except for the back door to the thing, and the sides are supposed to be as plain as possible. And after two weeks of working on that, I told him, “Forget it, I can’t do this.” And so I went to San Francisco and worked, and that’s another part. But still school wasn’t over yet. I had to learn all that, and all that had to evolve in my mind, and I had to learn how to be creative in solving puzzles, and just creating a better environment for man. I think that’s my philosophy in architecture is to create an environment for man.

02-00:54:05

Warrin: That’s very interesting, because it’s obviously a very practical approach to architecture, or design. What happens when you walk inside this place? What’s my life going to be like?

02-00:54:20

da Silva: Exactly, which a lot of architects believe in that, but when you first start practicing architecture, especially if you work for a developer, he doesn’t care. He cares about what sells. And then if you start as a junior architect—I went to London after graduating. I was designing construction drawings for windows, for how do you fit the window together, working how the window fits with the building. I wasn’t interested in that, although I was able to, because that’s a technical thing. I was able to figure out how things fit and do that. So “working drawings,” I was pretty good at that, but I never got a chance to express myself. So I went from there on to I started to work with houses. And there I was able to start to express myself. And then came the frustration. Nobody wanted to buy what I wanted to do, because they wanted something that they had in their mind, out of a magazine, or out of something

36

they had seen. They were not interested in my creation of their environment for them.

02-00:55:20

Warrin: Yeah, right. That’s very interesting. Well, I think we better stop here.

02-00:55:26

da Silva: Okay. Okay, Don.

[End of Interview]

37

Interview #2 November 18, 2014 [Audiofile 3]

03-00:00:08

Warrin: Today is November 18, 2014 and we’re again in the home of Tony and Penny da Silva in Livermore and we’re going to continue our talk about your life. We had stopped about the time that you had started architecture school and you had talked a bit about your choice of architecture. At the time it was convenient but maybe it wasn’t the most exciting thing you could have moved into, is that right?

03-00:00:51

da Silva: True enough. At the time I went to university I had no idea that I was going to do architecture. I actually wanted to do research medicine but because I didn’t have, as I said earlier, chemistry and physics I had to go to boarding school and do it. In the interim, after having worked for a year between high school and the boarding school—it felt awkward to be at boarding school and being told when to go to bed, when to eat, and so on. I was sort of a young lad, interested in living a young man’s, and having earned money for about a year in between it was difficult to sort of put on the uniform and say, “Yes, Sir,” “No, Sir,” and so on. So when I had an opportunity to go out, I just wanted to go out for the day, it was just an opportunity to go out and see what the university had to offer as far as late students were concerned, whether there was a place for other students to get in, taking the place of the students that had not shown up. I just took that as an excuse to go out and have coffee, if you like, and get out. So not knowing anything about what they were offering they asked me, “Well, what would you go out for?” And I had a cousin who was an architect and so the first thing that came to my mind was architecture. Could have been engineering, it could have been anything, but architecture was what I said. So when I went there architecture is what they sent me, to see if there were any places in architecture. And, of course, there was. And as fate would have it, the principal, the dean of the architectural school—I think I said that last interview.

03-00:02:32

Warrin: You did.

03-00:02:33

da Silva: Yeah.

03-00:02:35

Warrin: You said he was Spanish.

03-00:02:33

da Silva: He was an Englishman who fought in the Spanish Civil War and so on and he took a liking to my Portuguese name, which he thought was Spanish, and before I knew it I was convinced. With his arms around me he sort of said, “All right, you’re in. You’re into architectural school.” And that’s how I did it, and I went to architectural school. Of course I was already a few months

38

late. I had to catch up. Very, very hard. Which I didn’t mind. I set out to do sections of buildings, standing in the roads and stuff. I didn’t mind standing in the road but I hated sketching buildings. Although I passed art at college, high school, and passed it, I didn’t mind doing art, but it was not my kind of art. I didn’t like to do buildings and draw buildings. Thought that was boring. And as the course went on and I got into planning, into analysis, into even the engineering part of it, I began to enjoy it. And the professor I had was a marvelous man who made me think. He taught me how to think and I think that was a wonderful, wonderful thing. And his critique, instead of me being offended by it or not pleased, I was challenged by it. I was challenged by his critique, of him telling me to use my head and follow the process while I plan rather than doing a pretty picture and then try to fit the plan into it. And that stuck in my mind for the rest of my career and, in fact, was some of my disappointments when I found that that’s what, in fact, the world wants to pay you for is for something pretty and not for—

03-00:04:16

Warrin: For the pretty picture on the outside.

03-00:04:17

da Silva: Pretty picture and then never mind the inside. The inside of it got okay and that was a bad experience when I started working here in the United States. Again I’m jumping the gun. Well, during university anyway I met a lot of nice English people. There was one Indian boy in the class with me and we were the only two so-called foreigners in the architectural class. And it was a big class. It was a class of about, oh, sixty, seventy people in the beginning. They cut you down, cut you down. And by third year they cut you in half. And they’re very, very careful as to how they send you off. They tend to see whether you’re suitable for a career, not just whether you get good grades or not. Whether you’re actually a person that would make it in that career. I think that was a good thing that the school did. They didn’t cut me off but that’s another story.

So after that, the fourth and fifth year, I got to write my testimonies of studies and I got to do my thesis and in doing that, because I chose the House of God as my thesis, I went and traveled all over France and Spain, et cetera, looking at different churches and how the churches evolved and so on in order to get my thesis in place.

03-00:05:34

Warrin: How did you get the money to do this?

03-00:05:37

da Silva: There wasn’t much money involved. It was me with a motorcycle and a friend of mine with me who shared the gas and he was writing about monasteries or something like that. So the two of us together we paid for the gas and I already had a small scooter to travel around in England. And with that we actually climbed the Pyrenees on a scooter, which was really quite something

39

because we had heavy backpacks and the scooter did break down in Spain and it had to be jigged by one of the Spaniards that were there using a piece of—instead of a fuse or something he used some silver paper from the cigarette wrapping and he stuck that in and somehow he made it work like a fuse. Who knows what he did but that got me to Portugal.

03-00:06:19

Warrin: Just connected it to—right.

03-00:06:20

da Silva: Yeah, it got me to Portugal and to my family. I wanted to see my family anyway. So the trip went all over. But it was very, very interesting. We saw a lot of the major cathedrals and the wonderful ecclesiastical architecture which was the background to my book, to my thesis. And when I wrote my thesis and designed my building it had nothing to do with the old buildings or anything like that. It was as modern as modern can be, using new forms of design and very simplistic forms as to that because, again, I was working for the—what the plan would do and how the interior should be and I fit the building very simply around it and over it. And, again, that became what I would do later on in my career. But I started that way. And that got me through my thesis and I got very highly graded and it got me my degree.

03-00:07:19

Warrin: What was the title of your thesis?

03-00:07:23

da Silva: Domus Dei, the House of God.

03-00:07:25

Warrin: The House of God.

03-00:07:26

da Silva: Yeah.

03-00:07:28

Warrin: It was the design of a cathedral?

03-00:07:34

da Silva: It was actually a church.

03-00:07:34

Warrin: A church.

03-00:07:35

da Silva: It was a church and it was at the time of I think Pope John the twenty-first or the thirty-third, I’m not sure which Pope now. Anyway, it was all about mass facing the people. That was a new concept. And so the church in the half-round, if you like, where the celebrant faced with the people as opposed to the celebrant with the back to the people. And so I incorporated that into my design. But instead of using curves because, again, I was criticized for being

40

too European and being too romantic and using curves, I did that by using rectangular shapes. For some reason the British didn’t like me using curves in those days. I had been criticized several times for using it even though that would have made a lot more sense.

03-00:08:15

Warrin: Yeah. You had mentioned that. You talk about going around on a motorcycle. You mentioned a scooter. Was it a scooter like a Vespa that you—

03-00:08:28

da Silva: It was a Vespa, yeah. It was a “Grande Sport,” one which had a little bit of power, otherwise I would never have been able to go up the steep slopes of the Pyrenees. And we ended up in Spain that had no roads, there were dirt roads there and nobody had ever seen a scooter before. And so the only thing that I could see there was actually a cantina. So we had to take a break and have a glass of wine and have a little snack. And the crowds from the inside, they were surrounding the scooter because they’d never seen one before and asking all sorts of questions.

03-00:08:59

Warrin: They were fairly new at that time, wasn’t it, scooters?

03-00:09:01

da Silva: Well, the scooters were new but these people were so much into the interior part of Spain that I don’t know if they’d ever seen a motorcycle before from the questions they asked. However, I also realized when they’re talking to me, I said, “Where do you live? Where’s your town?” They said, “Right in front of you.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you see those chimneys? That’s the chimney to the house.” I said, “There’s no house.” He said, “Well, the house is underground.” So they were actually living in like dugout caves. And I was absolutely astounded. And you could actually walk up to some of the chimneys and almost look down into their living rooms or their dining room inside. It was fascinating. All you could see was a mound of dirt, a door, and then a chimney. There were many of them around and that was the town.

03-00:09:45

Warrin: And as an architect, that would have been very interesting.

03-00:09:48

da Silva: It was very interesting. I was absolutely flabbergasted. Never had the time, unfortunately, or had the camera to go inside one of these. I’m sure I could have convinced them. But I had an agenda and a time constraint and so I moved on. Pity. Pity.

03-00:10:00

Warrin: Right. But traveling around Europe on your scooter you would have noticed all sorts of architecture, different styles, and so forth—

41

03-00:10:08

da Silva: Yes.

03-00:10:09

Warrin: —that might have influenced you in some way.

03-00:10:11

da Silva: Actually I use them almost as background. Again I say my influence was in the analysis of the floor plan and in the analysis of full spatial floor and so on and so forth. I was very much influenced at school by some of the Finnish architects and some of the very ultra, ultra-modern architects where shape was as simple as you can make it but it was the inside that made the difference at all. So my concept was just putting a roof and walls around the function rather than making a pretty architectural shape in which the function could live. Does that make sense to you?

03-00:10:48

Warrin: Yeah. And that style, does that segue into contemporary architecture?

03-00:10:57

da Silva: Into my kind of contemporary architecture, yes, because that style, the roof over the walls is what I did for my own personal house. I designed several houses like that and have designed buildings in Korea and other places that are very, very simple but they work very well. Very functional and so on. Nothing I did, on purpose anyway, was architecture that had any filigree or any of these cute shapes that people like. When I put an archway there, there had to be a reason for the archway. I didn’t put an archway there because my client liked archways. I actually had several projects where after studying I told the client, “Thank you but that’s not my way of doing architecture.” It was my own business, of course, by then, and I had the capability of saying no to a client, although it hurt me in the pocket. But it was not my kind of architecture. Soon I found out that residential architecture particularly, that’s what they wanted. That’s where the developers want. That’s what a lot of the clientele wanted. And I tried to stay away from those projects and I ended up doing very few buildings in my style, if you like. And I did one tongue-in-cheek one that I really enjoyed in Tiburon that was really what I would call a fantasia of English architecture and it was somebody’s home. But because the doctor who commissioned me to do the thing was so eccentric anyway that I took that and I played a game with him and designed a house with archways, with English pointed roofs, and a strange window and so on and rooms that led nowhere because he loved that and I enjoyed his company. And he had the money and it was just a game to us. And eventually when the house got built he changed a lot of the things with his contractor friend and the building eventually did get built in Tiburon and probably still there.

03-00:12:51

Warrin: That would be interesting to see that.

42

03-00:12:53

da Silva: It would. It would. I saw some of it in the beginning process. He made so many changes I got offended with him and I never wanted to see it again and our relationship sort of parted. But I remembered with fun in mind that it was one of these buildings I’d probably be ashamed to show my colleagues. But it was something that I really enjoyed designing with him.

03-00:13:14

Warrin: You had a sense of practicality on the exterior. Did that extend to the interior also or were you a little more artistic when you’re inside the building?

03-00:13:28

da Silva: Artistic. It depends on what you mean by artistic. Artistic can be if you make interesting shapes or take from old architecture and interpret it into modern architecture. That could be artistic. For me artistic is form and flow and light. So I introduce a lot of light from either skylights or actually the separation of a roof and putting a series of clerestory lighting and so on, which brought light into the interior which gave accent, if you like, to some of the rectangular shapes. And later on the curve shapes in the buildings that I did. Architecture was really all about light and shadow and so on, which eventually led me to be interested in lighting stuff but that’s a later story.

03-00:14:16

Warrin: Right. Let’s jump back now. You’re still a student in Portsmouth. Where about is Portsmouth in England?

03-00:14:24

da Silva: Portsmouth is in the south of England, is in the county of Hampshire and it’s north of Southampton or very near north of Southampton. It’s sort of next to Southampton. It’s south of London. It’s about an hour’s train ride from London and it’s a seaside place. It’s very famous because of D-Day, the bombing and so on and that’s where the “cockleshell heroes,” their training during World War II. So it was much bombed by the Germans.

03-00:15:00

Warrin: So that’s where you met your future wife?

03-00:15:01

da Silva: Yes. Yes.

03-00:15:02

Warrin: And this was while you were fairly early in your studies, as I recall.

03-00:15:08

da Silva: Fairly early in my studies. I met her when she was about thirteen. I actually stayed in her mother’s house and it was like a boarding house. There were about five or six students there, different students from different countries. I had just moved out of the boarding school and went into another what we call lodgings or digs, as we call it in England, and the mother, I think, of the landlord had died and so we had to leave the place. We were sort of thrown

43

out, and I was very lucky to have found that place and it just happened to be Penny’s mother’s lodgings. And so I stayed with her. She was just a little girl. And I moved in with my Iraqi friend and we shared the same room, he and I. So we shared the top room there and I stayed there my entire five years at university.

03-00:16:06

Warrin: So you were living in the same house with Penny over those five years?

03-00:16:12

da Silva: Yes, over five years, yeah. And I was sharing a room with this Iraqi fellow and I would see—and I saw her grow up and I was interested. She just used to be the little girl around and eventually I got engaged to another girl who I had met in Hong Kong, an English girl, the daughter of a colonel. And after my twenty-first birthday she and I got engaged. We sort of drifted apart, perhaps because I was drifting more into Penny’s cute world—she was a little girl. By then she was about fifteen or sixteen. I didn’t really believe that I was feeling that way. In fact, my mother told me when I went on the one and only vacation back in Hong Kong my mother said, “What’s the matter with you? You’re different. You all right?” And I said, “Of course I am.” She said, “But you seem to be a bit sullen and a bit dull. You’re not like that. You’re always bright and jumping around so what’s the matter?” So she said, “You have a girl in England, don’t you? You got engaged to Leila. What about Leila?” I said, “Oh, we broke that off.” She said, “There’s another girl?” I said, “No.” She says, “I’ll bet you there is.” And my mother sort of knew that there was something different.

03-00:17:24

Warrin: Very intuitive.

03-00:17:25

da Silva: Yeah, very intuitive. She knew there was something wrong. And I stayed there for about a month and a half on vacation. I went back to England, of course, carried on studying. I was very, very serious about getting through my course. And when I graduated I went to London to work. I got my degree. So my Arab friend and I took off and rented an apartment in London. And when I was working in London, living in the apartment, I felt awful. It wasn’t right. I didn’t enjoy working, I didn’t enjoy living in London and so on. And suddenly I realized what was missing was Penny and that actually I had fallen in love with this girl and just never admitted it because she was so young and it was wrong and so on. So I rushed back. I told my Arab friend that I had to go back and see Penny. And I didn’t realize until I got on the train and when I got off the train almost that I actually had to ask her to marry me.

03-00:18:21

Warrin: Just like that, huh?

44

03-00:18:23

da Silva: Just like that. And I was by then overflowing with emotion. I was nervous. I was excited. I was just crazy, if you like. I went through the door. Rang the bell, went through the door, and marched up the stairs and Penny was having a bath in the bathroom. And so I bang on the door, heavy. And she said, “Who’s this, who’s this?” So I told her. “Oh, my God,” she said, “are you back? I didn’t think I’d ever hear your voice again.” And I said, “I’m back but I want to marry you.” She said, “What? I don’t want to marry you.” She said, “No, I’m having a bath.” I said, “Come out.” She said, “I can’t.” So anyway she put her robe around her and came out the door. I hugged her and I said, “Would you marry me?” She almost cried. She said, “What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I thought you left, I’d never see you again.” I said, “Would you marry me?” And she was almost speechless and when she said yes I almost fell down. I just didn’t know. So it was a great, great, great moment. I then became speechless and waited when she got changed and sort of stared at each other and sort of blushed and were embarrassed to even talk for a little while.

03-00:19:37

Warrin: Well, it was such an abrupt thing for her and for you. It seems more like an evolution from a younger sister to a future wife. You had to make that adjustment yourself.

03-00:19:59

da Silva: Exactly. It was something that never really entered my mind but it was in my mind. On Sundays, and that was the only day we were allowed to go to the movies after church. So my Arab friend and I—we were very close buddies, he and I and a couple of the other roommates in the house would go out to the movies. And we’d say, “Hey, Penny, you want to come along?” And so occasionally she would join us in the movies. And that was the only time we sort of ever went out together. She was too young to go to the pub and so on. So it was just a big surprise. It was something that was in my head that I never admitted to myself and it was an incredible feeling. Incredible.

03-00:20:34

Warrin: Yeah. And obviously in her head, too, to some degree.

03-00:20:38

da Silva: Oh, yeah. Well, she thought she would never see me again. She thought when I left that would have been the end of that because I took everything with me. I didn’t have much anyway.

03-00:20:48

Warrin: So what was your work in England?

03-00:20:51

da Silva: Well, I worked in an architectural company, a big one called Halpern and Partners in London and it was near Saint Paul’s. And I worked there for about a month and something and I was just a cog in a huge, huge machine and I wasn’t even part of the wheel. I was just the last cog that they stuck in there to

45

see if it would fit and I detested it because it was nothing to do with design, nothing to do with anything. I was just doing details of a window or something, how to put a window on a brick sill or something like that. I don’t blame them because they were trying to find out if I really understood how to do construction drawings. Everybody gets out of architectural school thinking they’re great designers and will go straight into design but they quickly made me see reality and it brought me to tears. Anyway, so I left.

03-00:21:47

Warrin: I can imagine. Yeah. And so you rather quickly got married then, right?

03-00:21:56

da Silva: No, no.

03-00:21:56

Warrin: No?

03-00:21:56

da Silva: There’s a bit more to it than that. Then I went to Portsmouth, asked her to marry me, then I asked her mother, her mother said no, that she can’t marry a foreigner. So I got quite upset about it and there was nothing I could do about it. So in between being upset I got myself a job. My professor liked me a lot and he hired me, much to my surprise, because when a professor hires you and you think he’s great and he thinks you’re good enough, that’s quite an honor. And so I decided to work in Portsmouth and eventually had to go to court to get the court’s permission to marry Penny. Her mother said, “I have nothing against you personally. We have foreigners living in the house. But it’s just in our house. I do not like the idea of my daughter marrying somebody from a different cultural background,” and so on. “And anybody that’s not British to us are foreigners. No offense.” And so I went and challenged it. I went to court and the court told me that if I can work and prove myself, that I still love her a year after I work, and earn enough money to support her and to make her comfortable, then they will consider giving me permission. And we agreed to that. And I worked for a year for my professor and after a year went back to court. And, wonderful, they gave me permission to marry. Now came the marriage.

Now, my mother lived in Hong Kong and weddings in my family are usually hundreds of people. Not one hundred, not two hundred, but hundreds. It was like you invite the entire community. It’s usually done at a cathedral. It’s a big ceremony. So she wanted me to marry in Hong Kong, Macau actually, where I was born, where I still had some family. I decided I didn’t want to do that because I wanted to marry Penny in her home town and not bring her immediately out to some foreign place and just throw her into a new environment. So we made friends with the pastor of a cathedral in Portsmouth, Portsmouth Cathedral. He actually was the one that baptized Penny. Penny was an English, what do you call it, a Protestant. A Church of England, excuse me. Was from the Church of England and this young priest baptized her and

46

made her into a Catholic and so we were able to marry in a Catholic church. But this happened before I got permission to marry and so on and so forth.

So we eventually got permission to marry and we decided to marry in England. And I had a cousin, my first cousin was living in England going to engineering school, so he was to be my best man. And, of course, my Arab friend was there, as well, as my second best man, if there is such a thing. It was just a group of maybe ten, twelve students and friends of her family. But her mother would not attend the wedding at all.

03-00:25:05

Warrin: Really?

03-00:25:05

da Silva: Her father had left, taken off, and gone to Scotland or something. So she’d refused to go to the wedding and so we had the wedding without her mother, which is a shame. But her mother accepted us afterwards and everything went fine. There was no eviction, no discrimination, no calling me a foreigner or anything. She got along with me very, very well even when I was staying in her house. We got on beautifully. It was just that particular thing, that she had made a promise that she stubbornly would not give up.

So after getting married we decided to go back and start a career where I could make some money. So I wasn’t going to stay in England anymore working with my professor. I was making very little money, although I liked and learned a lot from him. I decided to go to Hong Kong where there was big architecture to be done and good architectural firms to work for and work with.

03-00:26:04

Warrin: If I could just interrupt you for one moment.

03-00:26:06

da Silva: Go ahead. Please, please.

03-00:26:08

Warrin: Nineteen sixty-four is the year you were married.

03-00:26:12

da Silva: Yes.

03-00:26:13

Warrin: August 15th is—

03-00:26:14

da Silva: August 4th.

03-00:26:15

Warrin: August 4th of 1964, which means that you’ve just celebrated your golden wedding anniversary.

47

03-00:26:24

da Silva: That’s right, that’s right. This year.

03-00:26:25

Warrin: That’s right. Congratulations.

03-00:26:28

da Silva: This year. Thank you. Thank you.

03-00:26:29

Warrin: So how was Penny about the idea of moving to Macau?

03-00:26:35

da Silva: Penny would go anywhere that I would go and we were just inseparable after that.

03-00:26:42

Warrin: And she had a sense of adventure like that, too?

03-00:26:44

da Silva: She had a sense of adventure. She had a sense of purpose, I think. She was young but she was an intelligent young person rather than scatterbrained as most young people are. She was not like that at all. She actually used to work for the city council and worked for the accounting department with the auditors. She was very much a logical thinker and she accepted that Hong Kong would be interesting but it would better my career and better our future and so she went with me. And I can tell you about that when we get to that point.

03-00:27:20

Warrin: Right. So you headed actually west to go to Macau and passed through California.

03-00:27:29

da Silva: Yes, I did. I have a brother that lived in California who went to Gonzaga University in Washington State, and he lived in Castro Valley of all places, just around the corner from me now. And he said, “Why don’t you have your honeymoon in the United States and come and see what America’s like. Maybe you’ll want to come to America.” I came and spent about five weeks actually in the United States and, oh, I’d never seen anything like it. This is a huge country. The supermarkets were bigger than I ever imagined. I fell in love with chocolate sundaes and milkshakes, which I love to this day. And America was just paradise. Driving cars. I was frightened a little bit by the freeways but I was amazed. When I looked at American architecture I thought, “How odd. They build everything out of wood over here.” And I said, “In England, when I learned to do architecture, only the shacks on the beach are built of wood. Normally we use brick.” I said, “That will never do us.” So adoption to the British way of thinking in a construction aspect. I said, “I don’t think this will fit in.” And I said, “Let me go to Hong Kong.” So I

48

went to Hong Kong and then the story evolves from there. But I loved America. I really did.

03-00:28:48

Warrin: It was a way ultimately to bring you back I would imagine.

03-00:28:51

da Silva: Well, passing through, a chance for me to see somewhere that has opportunity, as well. My brother was smart enough to see that. He thought as an architect I would do well over here. I didn’t think so. So I went on to Hong Kong. But enjoyed America and enjoyed the opportunity of seeing America. If you remember the early part of my story, I got a scholarship to come to America for sports and I was denied by the passport people, the immigration people, because I was challenged with America and being very polite when she asked me whether I wanted to stay in America after I graduated. I naturally, being very polite, said, “I would love your country. I would love to stay.”

03-00:29:33

Warrin: And that was the wrong statement.

03-00:29:35

da Silva: And then she said, “You’re not a bona fide student then,” and that was denied. America.

03-00:29:40

Warrin: So you went to Hong Kong and you were part of a big project for the first casino hotel.

03-00:29:48

da Silva: Yes, correct. I was quickly hired by Eric Cumine and Associates, probably the biggest company in Hong Kong at the time. There were others but I think he was probably the biggest. He came from Shanghai and he was a Eurasian, half-Chinese and half-British. Wonderful charming man and he hired me I guess because I speak Cantonese, speak Portuguese, had a British degree. I can get possibly a permit to work in Macau and he thought it would be a good idea for me to work on the casino project, which was in Macau, which needs some interpretation, some meetings with the government and so on. And so he hired me and put me straight onto the casino project and said that he wanted me to design—lovely word, I loved it—some restaurants and some of the interior spaces for him and give it a Portuguese flair. I was so excited. I was almost falling down to thank him. And it was an incredible, incredible adventure. The office had over 150 people there but I was on a very small and tight-knit team that did the casino and I got the chance to meet the owner of the casino, Mr. Stanley Ho, who is world-famous today and go to meetings as the architecture representative with my boss Eric Cumine and he would let me do the presentation and do the speaking, which was a tremendous opportunity and an eye-opener and really taught me how to make presentations. He never criticized me publicly even when I said something wrong. He would later on

49

just say, “Look, I would approach it a little bit differently and so on.” That man is probably one of the most charming people I’ve ever met and ever worked for. I’m grateful to him to this day.

03-00:31:45

Warrin: You were fortunate to have a very considerate person to start off your career and to slowly teach you and also to be given the interior, which is what you preferred anyway, right?

03-00:31:59

da Silva: Yeah, I wanted to do the analysis and so on. And there I got to do it because he wanted me to. Then I got to do artistic things, like put little bits of the castle of Portugal. He said, “Open your mind.” He said, “I want a castle. I want this to be an open air restaurant. You are inside a building but it should feel as if you are in open air,” and it’s a transition from the casino to the hotel side. So from the casino gambling rooms to the hotel side there was this huge walkway. It was just absolutely covered in an interior and there he wanted me to put the whole of Lisbon and a few castles into that space. And so he said, “I want to see castles and churches and this and that.” I said, “No, no, I want—“ He said, “That’s what I want. Open your mind.” And I had a lot of fun doing it.

03-00:32:47

Warrin: That was quite a challenge. Is that still in existence?

03-00:32:50

da Silva: Well, the funny thing about it is I got the whole thing finished. I got that restaurant approved as well as the underwater seafood restaurant, which I’ll talk about if you want. But that one, the Portuguese government objected to the design of that restaurant because I did not know that you couldn’t have the—what do you call that—the shields of the cities on the ground for people to walk on. And so what I did is on the walking part of the passage, between the casinos, off the side of the restaurants, I had the shields of Lisbon, the shield of Guimarães, the shield of all the different cities, as many as I can put in there to walk on. So the government objected to that. Eric didn’t want to change my design. He liked it. So the long and the short of it is it never got built that way.

03-00:33:37

Warrin: Oh, that’s too bad.

03-00:33:38

da Silva: So at the end of it it got changed and it wasn’t my design anymore, which is too bad.

03-00:33:43

Warrin: Yeah, it sounds like it. So also about this time your first child, Antoinette, was born.

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03-00:33:54

da Silva: Yeah, Antoinette was born shortly thereafter in 1965. By then I was in charge of the casino project, all of it, which was astounding to me.

03-00:34:10

Warrin: Quite a responsibility.

03-00:34:11

da Silva: He put me in charge of all of the project itself, all the construction documents which I was learning very quickly how to supervise. I didn’t draw them. We had Chinese draftsmen draw them but I had to make sure that they worked. So there was a lot of thinking involved. And also he promised me, and he kept his promise, that I would be in charge of construction once the project started and later on I was.

03-00:34:43

Warrin: You actually watched the construction and supervised the whole thing.

03-00:34:46

da Silva: Yes. Yeah. When they broke ground I was there and they broke ground and I was the architect that would go there every week and sometimes stay for three or four days with the chief engineer. I did the architectural side. The chief engineer did the engineering side. And we were there. Eric Cumine would go there once in a while but he was more interested in talking to the clients. He trusted me a hundred percent. And the engineer was looking after, watching my back because in the beginning there was very little architecture anyway. It was me making sure that the contractor would follow the plan and how it suited but it was all about reinforcement and so on. So the engineer was really more the person working on the project than me. I just had to keep an eye that the plan was followed until the next phase. And when it got to the next phase he sent me to China. He trusted me so much that he sent me to Canton, that’s the “Red Guard” story, to go and look at buying and purchasing artwork and different things for the casino project.

03-00:35:47

Warrin: Is this typical that an architect stays to monitor the actual construction over the period of building?

03-00:35:59

da Silva: Well, an architect usually goes at least once a week. On a bigger project he goes two or three times a week. But being in Macau it’s a jet foil across, or in those days, hydrofoil, across there. Macau was forty miles away, remember, and so it was convenient for me to take the hydrofoil over, go to the jobsite, and then come back and go back the next day and so on. Eventually what he and his wife did is they actually bought an apartment in Macau where the staff could stay. Had three or four bedrooms. I had mine and the other staff had theirs. They couldn’t stay in a hotel. We could stay in the company lodgings which was an apartment right near the jobsite. We could walk to the jobsite.

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03-00:36:40

Warrin: Okay. You also then worked on the Church of Our Lady of Fatima?

03-00:36:48

da Silva: That was a little bit later. The construction of the Casino had already started. By then I got my architectural license, my British architectural license because it took two years of practical training. One I did in England, the other one I satisfied by working for Eric, a British registered architect in Hong Kong. And so I was able to then qualify to get my British license. So I got my British license. At the same time the Portuguese government recognized my British license and gave me the license to practice in Portuguese Macau. So I got a so-called Macau Portuguese license, as well. Having done that, I think the bishop of Macau found out through the newspapers that there was a new architect in Macau and as he didn’t agree with the design that his already hired architect, if you like, did for his church building, the Church of Our Lady of Fatima. So he asked me if I was interested. My uncle actually knew the bishop pretty well and he talked to me and said could I do it? And I said, “Oh, I’d love to do it. I’d be honored. However, I’m still working for Eric and I’ll have to bring it into Eric’s office. So working for Eric. I talked to Eric and Eric said, “Tony, this is an opportunity for you to get started in a career.” He said, “My God, you should do it yourself. Don’t bring them to the office.” I said, “I respect that.” I said, “I’m working for you.” He says, “Okay.” He says, “You’re working for me, you can still open your own office and I’ll pay you just to be the architect [of the casino]. You can be the architect in charge of construction, in charge of the project on a fee basis.” So he helped me start my own company, which is incredible.

03-00:38:29

Warrin: It certainly is.

03-00:38:29

da Silva: So he says, “Take it on yourself.” I said, “Well, first of all, let me design the building and see whether it’s a reality or whether the bishop will like it or not.” He gave me the opportunity to do that without doing it behind his back, which was wonderful. So I went and did the design for the bishop and he loved it. It was simple, it was straightforward, it met all his criteria and I got the job. And so Eric said, “Okay, now start your company.” And I then became Eric’s architect under my own business.

03-00:39:08

Warrin: Right. So at some point, I believe it was after this, that you had this most interesting trip into Red China.

03-00:39:20

da Silva: Right. Let me go back and say why. The Portuguese government and the Chinese government sort of said, “Look, we want artifacts bought from our country. It’s good for the economy.” And they want to sell something, both countries. And so the project owner, Stanley Ho, had to agree with both the Portuguese and Chinese governments because just the location of Macau

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within sight of China. And so it was still a Portuguese territory but there was some agreement between the two to go to China and look for the Chinese. It could be boilers, it could be artwork, it could be anything that I could bring back to the project. And that would be 50 percent of it. And then another architect would go to Portugal and pick out the Portuguese weavers, tile work and so on and bring that back. So I was sent to China but I was terrified because at the time the Red Guard movement was already started. And so Eric said to me, “Don’t worry, Stanley will guarantee you have two bodyguards with you and he will insure you for a million dollars.” In those days a million dollars was a lot of money. “And if anything happens to you you’ll get a million dollars and your wife and your child will be taken care of.” And so off I went. Off I went.

But I said, “One thing I want in return. I don’t want to go by train through Hong Kong. I want to go by car. I want to go and pass the villages where my father used to go hunting with my uncle and so on through the Barrier Gate. And so they said, “But it’s not done. No European since the end of World War II has ever crossed the barrier with a permit.” And so Stanley Ho, being very influential, got the Chinese government to agree to get me a petition. They told me it was signed by Lin Biao [Vice Premier of the People’s Republic of China, 1964-1971] that must be in Chinese. So whether it was signed by Lin Biao or not I don’t know. But anyway, I got to go and I went by car with the two bodyguards in a big black limousine and got into China and faced them [Chinese soldiers or guards] dressed in white with machine guns pointed at me asking me to take off my ring, take off my gold chain, and take off my watch, and put out any money that I had in my pocket and give it to them and they would hold it for me until my return. Upon which I refused to take off my ring and I refused to take off the cross that my mother gave me, crucifix that I always wear around my neck. I refused to do it and that created a bit of a scene right at the border. And the bodyguards had to negotiate with them to get it done. So I gave them my first headache, if you like, and I was able to keep my wedding ring, my wedding band, and able to keep my crucifix. And I went into China. They could have all the money, watch. I didn’t care about it. And I couldn’t take a camera in. So that was the beginning. And then the journey after that, I’ve written about that. It’s a long story.

03-00:42:13

Warrin: Right. Could you sum it up in a few—

03-00:42:18

da Silva: Yeah, I can sum it up. I went through it, I went through the Barrier Gate. I was amazed to see the other side of the gate, which I never dreamt that I would see. I was met by these people in their white uniforms, white, white clothes, pointing their guns at me. I guess that they were just there. But that was just their duty to do. Then I went from there to the Chinese villages. And being driven from the actual barrier gate where the guards were to the villages, I was very disappointed. I didn’t see a lot of the things that I thought I would see. I

53

thought I would see architecture or I would see buildings and so on. Oh, I saw a bunch of dirt roads and once in a while a donkey cart being pulled by a farmer or something like that, until I got to the first village. When I got to the first village I got out of the car and immediately a bunch of Chinese kids ran up to me and pointed at me laughing. And I turn around and they said in Cantonese, which I understood, that I had a big nose. “Kou Pei Lou” they called me. “Big nosed man. Big nosed man. Ha, ha, ha.” But when I turned around, they’d run away. And so I tolerated that until I got from the car to the main gate of the lodging where I was going to stay. I turned around to them in Cantonese and said, “What are you laughing at?” I said, “I have a big nose but you have no nose.” I said all that in Chinese and they freaked out. Jaws dropped and they just went, “Ah, oh my God,” and they all ran away. I never saw them again. [laughter] That was the first part of the journey.

From there I was brought across the small tributaries of the Pearl River where the barge had to take the car. Had to load it onto the barge. And sometimes it was pulled across by horses. The barge was pulled across by horses. But in one of the slower ones, one of the longer ones, I got on board with a bunch of Red Guards, young students. I didn’t know. And I sat down next to them and they were there reading. And my two fellows were next to me. I didn’t pay attention but they started to sing. And they were not singing in Cantonese and passed me a book. So I took the book and they nudged me and asked me to sing. Of course, I can’t read Chinese, I can speak it. But they heard me speak so they thought I could read. And they didn’t care whether I had a big nose or a small nose or looked a bit foreign. They just wanted me to sing with them that the “East is Red” and “Mao is great” and all that stuff. And I couldn’t sing. Again to my rescue came the bodyguards. They had to explain to them that I can’t read but can speak. Of course, they wouldn’t have any of it. So they were getting quite annoyed at me and insisted that I do it. But before we knew that, the barge had arrived and they were too anxious to get out of the barge and forgot all about me and that was the end of that incident with the Red Guards.

03-00:45:09

Warrin: And you were fortunate there.

03-00:45:09

da Silva: Yeah, yeah, until I got to the hotel. We’ll go into another story which I really want to tell, quite often the hotel, boring it was and so on. It got to me having to go to a ceremony which is actually in a theater where they had all of Mao’s songs and everybody was dressed in the same gray garb. Everyone that was there. The audience and then there were literally people there dressed as military, et cetera, and they were talking in their very high pitched voice in Mandarin and they were talking about Mao and then came Mao’s songs and so on. And then at the end of it all everybody would stand up and clap. So I stood up and clapped. Sat down, beautiful. Until they had a couple of plays. And one of the plays was about the downing of an American plane and a

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fellow parachuting down. And this is all acted out, right. And the farmers go with a pitchfork arresting, if you like, the pilot from the parachute. And that brought me to tears. And at the end of that everybody stood up and clapped. They sang Mao’s songs. I refused to stand up and clap. Now they [the audience near me] were asking me to stand up and my bodyguards were urging me to stand up. I refused to stand up. And he said, “What’s the matter with you?” he asked me. And I told him. I said, “My friend, an American pilot, was shot down a few weeks ago in Vietnam and this could have been him.” And I said, “That’s very sad.” I said, “I can’t stand up and cheer my friend being caught.” I don’t know whether he was caught or not but he might have been killed, which of course I later found that he was. They got me out of that, as well.

03-00:46:55

Warrin: You were maybe fortunate to—

03-00:46:58

da Silva: Yeah.

03-00:46:59

Warrin: This is a very principled action.

03-00:47:01

da Silva: Very much so, very much so.

03-00:47:02

Warrin: Given the audience and you being so outnumbered here.

03-00:47:08

da Silva: Yeah. It was all just my anger and my sadness at that point. But the following day I had to go visit another site. These were all part of the agreement, that before I went to choose the material. I had to go now and visit a museum. In the museum there were American pilot helmets and jackets. I was in tears again. I had to leave. I just walked out of it and I refused to go the next week to the atom bomb show that they put out. And so after that they made excuses and then I went on to the fair to select the products and the material and so on and then from there I went back to Macau after that, also by car, and it was less eventful on the way back. It could have been dangerous. They asked me to go to Beijing, by the way. Lucky I didn’t because about a week or so after I went back there were riots in Macau against the Portuguese.

03-00:48:04

Warrin: Right. But what year was this exactly when—

03-00:48:09

da Silva: Yeah, ’66, ’67. Just before the ’66 December riots. Sixty-six.

03-00:48:13

Warrin: Okay, good. So it was ’66.

55

03-00:48:16

da Silva: October I got back, yeah. October. End of October. I got back about November. The riots started in December. There were already some problems in Macau but the real riots started later.

03-00:48:29

Warrin: So this was definitely a difficult time.

03-00:48:32

da Silva: Yes.

03-00:48:32

Warrin: Well, I think we should stop here.

03-00:48:37

da Silva: Okay.

[Audiofile 4]

04-00:00:09

Warrin: So you returned after this very stressful trip into Red China and found that Hong Kong itself was in trouble.

04-00:00:20

da Silva: That’s right. Well, the riots from Macau flowed over to Hong Kong. The Macau part was before Christmas and the Hong Kong bit sort of happened afterwards. In between I was still doing site visits because we didn’t expect the Hong Kong riots.

04-00:00:38

Warrin: What was the trouble in Macau?

04-00:00:41

da Silva: Well, in Macau what happened is the communists wanted to build a school basically and the Portuguese government asked them to wait until the owner of the property came back. And they said, “Why?” Because you can build your own buildings, the Portuguese can build whatever you like and you have either attorneys speaking for them or whatever. That wasn’t exactly what transpired. I don’t know the exact details. But the whole thing is the Chinese objected to the Portuguese insisting that they had to wait for a special permit to build a school and that permit kept on being delayed and delayed and delayed. Weeks after my return from Canton they protested it and marched up to the government building and through the guards into the governor’s palace and walked up the stairs. And I happened to be there at the time being debriefed on the other side of the stairs and I was told to hold and wait, there was some trouble. And sure enough they were marching and chanting Mao’s thoughts and they were shooed out and pushed almost down the stairs and sort of tumbled down. They went back. They marched back into the center of the city, pulled down the statue of Coronel Mesquita, who’s a Macau hero. And then they went into the library and started to throw the Senado library, which

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is the senate library, started to throw down the books and so on and so forth. And eventually that created a problem. There was martial law. People were shot and killed. And that riot eventually spilled over to Hong Kong. So we were there at one of our site visits. As the riots split up we were told, we the members of staff, were told to go back to Hong Kong immediately, otherwise we won’t be able to get back. There was a last ferry. So I gathered Penny. Penny was with me, and my daughter Antoinette was also there staying with my brother. We had a brother there. And I got them and we got into the last jetfoil to Hong Kong. A hydrofoil to Hong Kong. And then when we arrived we found out that it was also the last ferry from Hong Kong side to Kowloon side where we lived and we were lucky to get onto that last ferry. And after having taken the last hydrofoil from Macau and the last ferry from Hong Kong to Kowloon we went to the taxi stand and there were no buses, there were almost no taxis and the taxis that were there were either going away and we had to wait our turn and it was like deserted. So a taxi eventually appeared and we were able to get in the taxi and he [the taxi driver] said, “Quai pó,” which in Cantonese means ‘devil woman.’ No foreigner, in other words, in the car. So they didn’t want Penny in the car. After offering him much more money than the taxi fare he agreed to let Penny in the car with the baby if Penny would lie down or get down below the seat.

04-00:03:44

Warrin: It must have been very stressful.

04-00:03:44

da Silva: It was very stressful but we had to get home because we couldn’t hang around the ferry. There was nothing there for us. So when we drove back I was sitting up and I would see there was nothing in the streets. Hong Kong was, for the first time ever to my memory, deserted. It was like a ghost town. And we got almost to the corner of where he would turn onto the building where I had my home, then we could hear the rioters screaming and shouting and charging and the taxi driver saw a horde turning from one of the roads in front of Jordan Road onto Nathan Road and he screeched his taxi to a halt and told us to get out. And he said, immediately, “Get out.” So I gave him his money, dragged my wife and child across. Went across the main road which is two or three lanes of traffic. Well, it’s two lanes on each side of traffic across the street. And there were these people shouting and rioting just a few hundred yards away from me. Hundred and something yards. And we were able to get into a confectionery store owned by a Russian called Cherikoff and Mr. Cherikoff told us to come immediately into his store and he hid us for a while.

04-00:05:07

Warrin: Did you know him already?

04-00:05:08

da Silva: Oh, yeah. I knew Mr. Cherikoff. We used to go there and get the little cakes and so on all the time. He was a white Russian. And so we went into the store and he hid us there for a while until things quieted down and then he said

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we’d better go. And so through his back door across Austin Road, which is just on the side of this. We had to get across there and go one more block to my house. By the time we got across the block we had to hide again. So we went down the little very, very narrow passageway where there were a few little Chinese stores. And when I say narrow passageway, that passageway was probably about four feet of walking space and ended with small little stalls there and there were two walls, the building wall and a wall to a school on one side. We were allowed to stay in one of the stores who knew us because we went shopping there. And he said, “Come. Come and hide.” So he hid us in the back for another half an hour. Time didn’t mean anything. It seemed forever. We were hidden in the back and then when it was safe for us to leave he told us to leave and to go quickly and so we went out of that lane and turned right onto Tak Shing Street, which is where we lived. Up there and waiting for me were my Indian guard because our house was guarded by a guard always. So we had an Indian guard. The Indian guard opened the gates for us to go up the stairs. And my mother was all frantic there waiting for us.

04-00:06:27

Warrin: So your lives were essentially in danger during this time?

04-00:06:30

da Silva: Oh, yes, very much so.

04-00:06:32

Warrin: Yes.

04-00:06:32

da Silva: Very much so. Because the riot previous to this riot, the riot in the fifties, they burned the Swiss consul’s wife alive in her car.

04-00:06:41

Warrin: My.

04-00:06:42

da Silva: Because she was a foreigner. So Penny being blond, that wasn’t safe. And we had Antoinette in our arms, and Penny was already pregnant with Julia. Anyway, so we went home and as soon as we could I said to Penny, “You’ve got to get out.” I put her on the first plane, available plane back to England and I stayed because I had my own business in Hong Kong then and I had clients that owed me a lot of money. A lot of money. Debts unpaid. Fees unpaid, and so I tried to hang on and see if I could get the money back. And three or four months later, by the middle of summer, I decided that forget the money, my wife and my children are more important. And so I just left all the money behind and forgot about it. My mother was upset. My mother stayed but I had to go back to Penny so I went back and flew to England and reunited with Penny and stayed in her mother’s house for a few days, then rented an apartment and I went to work in England for the City of Portsmouth as one of the architects.

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And so we lived there for another, oh, maybe six to eight months before I decided that wasn’t for me. The architecture was too slow. I was bored to tears again and I wanted to emigrate, this time to the United States. And in trying to emigrate it took time to get a visa and so I gave myself a deadline. If I don’t get a visa by so-and-so date I would emigrate to Canada, which I could get a visa almost immediately. And within a week of my deciding to go to Canada I got my American visa because my brother called me and was able to make things easier working with the senator or whoever he worked with over here. And we were on our way to America, to a new life.

04-00:08:36

Warrin: And so this was a big change after Macau and England—

04-00:08:43

da Silva: And England and Hong Kong.

04-00:08:46

Warrin: —to settle down in California.

04-00:08:50

da Silva: Right. Well, England, again, it was too slow and working in the office you had to go to tea breaks. Once I get designing I don’t want to go to tea breaks sometimes. I just want to get on with my work and I was criticized for not joining the staff to the tea break. And I was told that I can’t work faster and get the project finished before the schedule wants me to finish it. And I thought, “This is a lot of nonsense. I just want to get on with the project and do the best I can and get onto another project.” So things were just too slow for me I guess.

04-00:09:21

Warrin: You were a better fit for the American way of life.

04-00:09:26

da Silva: It quite seemed so. And so I emigrated to America. My brother got me a job and that was one of the ways I could come more quickly. He got me a job with a contractor/developer and so I entered already with a job waiting for me.

04-00:09:41

Warrin: And you guys settled in Corte Madera, I understand?

04-00:09:46

da Silva: No, I moved to my brother, who was still living in Castro Valley and working for the developer who was also in Castro Valley and I worked with him for about two to three weeks and I realized again that I wasn’t satisfied. I just couldn’t do that kind of work. Because he wanted me to design the front of the house, forget the sides completely, just get the kitchen and front to look okay. It doesn’t matter if it’s not good stuff. And the only interesting thing that I could put my hands on and do something with was the master bath. So it was kitchen, master bath, front of house. That was called “curbside appeal” or something like that and it was completely against my theory or my way of

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doing architecture. I wanted, as I told you earlier, to design the building and make it flow and so on. He wasn’t interested in any of that. He was interested in how many square feet and how cheap he could make everything and have all the cheap material on the side where nobody could see because it was on the side yard anyway. And then put a little bit on the back and that was it. So I told him after three weeks that, that was it, I couldn’t do that.

So I went to San Francisco and looked for work and I got a job offer in San Francisco. Two job offers in San Francisco. I got a job offer in Palo Alto, one doing schools, and another one with a very big firm in San Francisco doing high-rise buildings, I guess. But I was willing to do anything but work for this guy. And on one of my trips for interview I was told that there was an engineering office that was looking for an architect that was willing to travel and so I went and interviewed with them, as well. He was very, very charming and so I eventually declined the job in San Francisco, declined the job in Palo Alto and worked for Rogers Engineering, who had me doing PG&E’s, what do you call it, “The Geysers,” the warehouses, but the buildings that house the machinery and the pipelines. So “Geysers five and six, seven and eight” were done by me. Okay, I was the architect doing that. And of course I lined up all the pipes, which is very strange to PG&E but I still did it. Organized it all and after that they sent me on a project to Korea. So I went to Seoul and worked with the Anyang pharmaceutical plant, which I again mentioned earlier, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing because it was all about flow and function and allowed me to build a building that made sense in terms of the cost and flow and I really enjoyed doing that.

04-00:12:28

Warrin: How long were you in Seoul?

04-00:12:30

da Silva: On and off I was there for about two or three weeks. The project was in Anyang and then I had a chance to fly to Hong Kong and show my boss, who went with me, another architect, showed him Hong Kong for a day or so. Fly back to Seoul and then continue the project and then come back to the States. In the meanwhile, of course, we moved to Corte Madera for a little while and then my wife fell in love with Mill Valley because it reminded us of England, reminded her of England because of the trees and the style of housing. And eventually we moved to Mill Valley. So that’s that part of that.

04-00:13:09

Warrin: And along this way, as you’re working, you had three more daughters.

04-00:13:16

da Silva: Well, the daughters were later. Julia was born in England. I forgot to mention that. She was born whilst I was in England and Kimberly and Lisa only came about later, much later. Yes, 1976 was Kimberly. But I was working with Rogers Engineering. I worked there for about a year or so and then they weren’t doing too well and my boss told me things are going to happen, they

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might restructure, we might be doing more engineering work and they might be cutting architectural projects. Since he and I became friends he said, “Look, there’s an architect down the road in Taubman Company, whose name was Naggar, Avner Naggar, an Israeli architect, who is looking for somebody to join in his design team to work on retail and you seem to be the perfect match for this person.” So I went and interviewed with him and he hired me immediately and so I just went from one job to another. And I worked with Naggar for over three years. So I worked on the San Jose Eastridge Shopping Center in San Jose. Then I worked in Stoneridge over here and I remember a lot of it because I did a lot of the drawings in—

04-00:14:26

Warrin: In the City?

04-00:14:27

da Silva: —at the Stoneridge Shopping Center here in Pleasanton.

04-00:14:29

Warrin: Oh, in Pleasanton.

04-00:14:30

da Silva: Yeah. And then I worked on the other one in Richmond and so on. So I did a lot of retail. And in doing that he put me in charge of all the smaller retailers. And so all the retail shops, rather, in the interior that were done by other architects had to go through me. And if I had any questions I would go through him, and once in a while he’d look over my back to see whether I was doing it to his specifications. So now it was a big project and I was lucky enough. Just before I got into doing the smaller retail work, I got to design Liberty House, which was in Stoneridge. And, of course, Liberty House no longer exists. It was sold to another big outfit. I think it’s not Macy’s but Nordstrom.

04-00:15:23

Warrin: Nordstrom.

04-00:15:24

da Silva: Yeah, I think Nordstrom bought it. Anyway, so I worked and designed most of that building. So anyway, back in Naggar’s office he put me in charge of these small projects. So the clients would bring in these projects and I’d have to criticize them. And he told me to really criticize. So I was talking to some of the big interior design architectural firms in the city and, embarrassingly, in some of the meetings he would be present and he would tell them to the face, the boss of these big companies, “You’re an idiot! How dare you give us such horrible design drawings?” And so on. “You’re making Tony work on something that he could do so much better than you.” And I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do to hide my face. But he had this explosive temperament and he was the only game in town so they all had to swallow their pride and accept this man being like that. But he was like that even to his boss, the owner of Taubman and Company, Al Taubman himself.

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He would call Al Taubman an idiot on occasion at different meetings. And that’s just his personality. And he’d yell at me sometimes but I didn’t like that at all because I’m not used to it. So anyway, he taught me all about contracts and writing contracts. He taught me how to review plans, how to look for details, how to make things look really nice to balance things out and to draw plans and so on. So he taught me a tremendous amount about retail architecture, which to me was just doing interior design. It really was, in a way, below my dignity because I was after what my professor always taught me, is to do buildings and grand entrances to museums and big markets and big buildings and so on. Or a residence. But to me to do a little interior shop or just be checking shop drawing was something I wasn’t interested in. So I worked for him for about three years. He taught me a lot. And he had this bad temper so one day he called me in and for whatever reason he chewed me out. He chewed me out and I was so angry. I have a temper myself, unfortunately. And I said to him, I said, “Mr. Naggar,” I said, “not even my father would yell at me the way you’re yelling at me.” I said, “I can’t tolerate this.” I said, “I’m leaving immediately.” I said, “I resign as of right now.”

04-00:17:43

Warrin: And you left?

04-00:17:45

da Silva: So he was still mad at me. He said, “If you walk across this threshold and leave me, never cross this threshold again. I never want to see you again and out you go if you want to leave. But you have no gratitude for all I’ve taught you,” and so on and so forth. “Go if you must go.” So I took off and started my own company. And what did I have? Nothing. So I told my wife, I said, “Penny, my temper has got the better of me again. I have one remodeling of somebody’s kitchen that I was asked to do and that’s the only job I have.” And she was very upset. “How are we going to live?” I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “But we’ll be fine.” I said, “What we’ll do is grow stuff at the back of our house. We’re going to grow vegetables.” I said, “If we have to eat only the vegetables that I grow and rice and be able to just pay our rent, which we barely have enough money for,” I said, “that’s how we are going to live and I’m going to make it, I promise you.” And Penny being Penny, she followed me and I was able to make the business grow a little bit. From the remodeling of one kitchen I got to remodel somebody’s exterior of his house and so on and so forth. So eventually I started to get projects. And within three or four months I already had projects. A house to do and some other remodel to do.

The reason I’ve dragged the story on is Mr. Naggar called me on the phone, saying, “Tony, I need your help. I’m eating crow by calling you.” He says, “I would never do this otherwise,” he says, “but I really need your help.” I said, “What do you need help with?” He said, “I’m having problems with this shopping center in Richmond and the contractor doesn’t know what he’s doing and it’s falling behind schedule and I know you can put it right. Will you come back?” My answer to him was no. “What? No? I will pay you more

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and you have to come back. I’m telling you to come back.” I said, “Mr. Naggar, I’m very sorry. I’ve started my own business. I have projects now. I am not coming back.” “Ungrateful!” Bang, he slams the phone down. And a week or so later his assistant calls me, and his assistant was a good friend of mine and he says, “Come on, you know Avner’s got his temper,” blah, blah, blah, “come back and help him out.” I said, “I can’t. I’m committed to the others.” He said, “Oh, you can do those projects around but come back to the firm. We’ll make you senior in the division and so on and so forth, give you a better salary.” I said, “No.” So he said, “All right. I will talk to Avner. I’ve got an idea.” So he calls me back two or three days later and he says, “Avner’s very upset but he’ll accept it. He will give you the project under your name and you come in as a consultant and you will run his project. Yes?” I said, “Yes.”

So I ran the project. So I went there and fixed the—there was a pizza, brick pizza thing that was being built that was out of sync as far as timing was concerned and out of cost budget. So I got it right—and from then on he would give me projects. So I started to work as a consultant to Naggar’s people. So anytime he had a project that didn’t have the right architect on it he would say, “Tony’s going to do it.” He used to give me projects.

04-00:20:56

Warrin: Like you were an external consultant at that point?

04-00:21:00

da Silva: Yeah, I was “da Silva Associates” and he would give it to da Silva Associates as the architect for the project. So any project he wanted, “Tony will do it.” He just gives it to me just like that.

04-00:21:10

Warrin: So the name of your firm was?

04-00:21:12

da Silva: da Silva Associates. Because after working for a while sooner or later we have to cross faces. So I went to his door, knocked on the door, he says, “Come in.” I didn’t move. He says, “Well, come in, Tony.” I said, “Avner, you told me not to cross this threshold.” “You silly boy. Come in here. Forget that.” [laughter] So that was just a bit of fun but I never forget that. Never forget that. But he taught me a lot. Anyway, so I’ll get on to your other questions now.

04-00:21:44

Warrin: You had this firm all the way up to 1994, I believe.

04-00:21:52

da Silva: That’s right.

04-00:21:52

Warrin: So it’s over twenty years that you were—

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04-00:21:53

da Silva: Over twenty years. I still kept the firm. I never closed the firm. I just had the firm but it wasn’t doing much. It was sort of hanging in limbo because I went out to work for Duty Free Shoppers as their general architect for the whole of the Asia Pacific region.

04-00:22:10

Warrin: So in 1994 you made a temporary move to Hong Kong. What was the motivation for that?

04-00:22:18

da Silva: First of all, that was during another recession that we had over here so my projects were slow in coming. I had staff working for me and I had to pay their salaries. And I’d pay their salary, not pay myself, and sooner or later I was going to get in trouble in not bringing enough money home. All right. So there was that to think about when my friend, who’s the president of—he’s my childhood friend—the president of Duty Free Shoppers in Hong Kong came and said, “Look, Tony, we have a big project in Hong Kong. In fact, we have two and we need somebody hands-on that can speak Chinese and is good at what he does and knows retail and come and work for me. Would you come and work for me?” So I said, “What are the circumstances? How long is the project and so on?” He said, “As long as you want.” He said, “But I need you now. I need you next month.” So anyway, to cut a long story short, I went out there and I had to pay my staff and the two staff that was working for me, that were left, pay them a little bit to apologize. And I went out to work in Hong Kong and started to work on this huge project in Kowloon and ended up with no major project in Hong Kong, Hong Kong side. But to my horror, these people were doing drawings, they had a little design shop in Duty Free, their own little department if you like, Department of Store Planning it was called, but they were designing out of matchboxes on the floor almost. They had wires all over the place. Place was a mess. There was no design. And so I said to John, I said, “I can’t work like this.”

04-00:23:56

Warrin: They were amateurs.

04-00:23:59

da Silva: They were amateurs that were doing drawings, just grabbing straws out of the air. He said, “That’s why you’re here.” I said, “Look, I’ve got to reorganize the entire staff. I’ve got to hire new people. You’ve got to buy computers. You’ve got to do this, do this, do this.” And he gave me carte blanche and he let me do it. I was honored and flabbergasted. So I said, “This is now not going to be the Store Planning Department. This is going to be Architectural Department of DFS Hong Kong Limited.” And I did. I got them started. We did the whole thing and we started to do real working drawings and design on computer and so on. I quickly built up this division, which worked very well. So very soon I was working on projects in Korea, in Vietnam, in Bali and so on. Nice buildings. I would stay at Bali for a month just to look around and

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get the environment and set ideas to do the thing. So they gave me a lot of leeway. So I became the regional architect then. I did Bali, I did Singapore. So I would fly from place to place and place to place and that’s how I worked for the next three or four years.

04-00:25:15

Warrin: And, of course, being settled in Hong Kong your family was still here.

04-00:25:22

da Silva: Here. Yeah, Penny was here. Penny was willing to go over to Hong Kong and live. I said, “No, my girls are at school and it’s important for their schooling they stay here. You stay with the girls.” So Penny would come out to see me once and I would come back here twice. So she’d fly out sometime in the spring or autumn as she wanted to. I would fly back for my birthday on July 4th and I’d fly back for Christmas and stay for New Year’s Eve, then I’d leave the week after. So I did that for four years.

04-00:25:49

Warrin: So you would see each other three or four weeks out of the year?

04-00:25:53

da Silva: That’s right. That’s right.

04-00:25:58

Warrin: That must have been a little difficult.

04-00:25:59

da Silva: It was very difficult. I was very upset. Very sad. I was enjoying my work, but I was like being imprisoned in a place because all I did was work and go back to my apartment and work and go back to my apartment. Of course I traveled to all these places but to me that was part of work. I never went to Bali and enjoyed the swimming and so on and so forth. As I told you earlier, I’m a very conscientious person and I would go from the workplace to the hotel, on the jobsite again, meet the client, back to the hotel. I’d have dinner and maybe go to the bar for a drink, then go to bed and start again. I had a swimming pool in the Bali hotel. Beautiful. Never swam there once in the whole month that I was there. Never once. Or the sea.

04-00:26:43

Warrin: You were just working?

04-00:26:44

da Silva: Just working and just doing things. So I was there for—it was like four years but I got to travel all over Asia and in charge of big projects.

04-00:26:53

Warrin: What does the name da Silva International, what exactly was that?

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04-00:26:56

da Silva: Well, da Silva International happened very soon thereafter. All right. So the decline of the [Japanese] yen had a big impact on Duty Free. Duty Free Shoppers took it very hard because the majority of the clientele of Duty Free Shoppers were Japanese. It was huge. There were very few, though. So they tried to woo the Chinese, so they opened the Hankow Center and they made that the retail center for the Chinese. Didn’t work well because the Chinese at the time, some of them had money but a lot of them are just really people that have no knowledge of what they were buying. They were just buying for the sake of buying. But it didn’t take off. The Gucci’s sold very quickly but the other departments didn’t because they all knew Gucci was expensive and you bring home a Gucci and show your friends you’re a big shot. And that was the Chinese attitude. So the Chinese market didn’t work too well. Japanese market was all but dead and so Duty Free decided that they were going to change the structure again. The restructuring came around and they started to cut staff and they offered us senior guys a chance of getting paid, what do you call this, this lump sum something? I forgot what you call this. They pay you a big amount of money if you will retire, sort of thing.

04-00:28:16

Warrin: Okay, yeah, I can’t think of it.

04-00:28:19

da Silva: I can’t think of it right now. It’ll come back. So they offered a few of us senior people that and I saw the opportunity in Hong Kong so I took it and I retired. Immediately thereafter started da Silva International. So I hired one of my staff members I brought from the States there to work as my assistant. And Hong Kong’s international airport was in trouble. They couldn’t deliver all the shops on time. All the lower floor, the tenant stores were a mess. They had an English group there that was in charge of it and it was over budget, behind schedule and so on. So I was very surprised, they hired us, I guess because they knew I could do the work, to be the superintendent in charge, the architect in charge of the entire lower floor, of all the tenants that were behind time. And so we got all of them up to schedule and got the airport finally running properly with all the shops going.

04-00:29:19

Warrin: That was a big project, obviously.

04-00:29:20

da Silva: Huge project because it was involving some of the big tenants and there was Chanel involved. Some of the big, big, big ones. And eventually that job was over and they said, “Look, we know you. Why don’t you do a couple of our tenant stores?” So I started to work with Lancôme and some of the French companies there and I started to work with other Asian companies that were doing retail stores in Hong Kong. And a lot of them in Duty Free. Since I knew Duty Free and Duty Free knew me, we left in good relations, I had easy, easy access to Duty Free, to the staff to find out if there’s vacancy for these

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people and whether they could put their stores there. And they liked my design, Duty Free liked my design. So it was a no-brainer. So for about four years I had da Silva International. And why did it only last four years? Because now the opposite was happening. I was flying to the States to my family and trying to start something going here and I was flying to Hong Kong to get the other projects going. So I left Kevin, my friend, in charge and I would fly here for two or three weeks, fly back there for two or three weeks, and for two or three years I was doing that. It got tiring.

04-00:30:39

Warrin: I can imagine, yes.

04-00:30:40

da Silva: So the time had come when I had to make a decision. Am I going to make da Silva International work or what? If I had to make it work I had to move back to Hong Kong because some of the trips I would fly from here to Hong Kong and on arrival my client would like to meet me the following morning in Beijing or something like that. So I’d fly to Hong Kong, barely sleep, get on the next flight, go to Beijing or Singapore or wherever, come back, work for three or four days and then go somewhere else for a week, get a new project. I was all over the place. Da Silva International was the architect for Adidas. So we did all the Adidas stores in Asia Pacific. And then in South America and so on. So I had a big decision to make. All right. So I tried for a few months to go live in Hong Kong. So I went and I was renting an apartment. So my friend stayed in the apartment. I stayed with him in the apartment. Almost it’s his apartment but I sort of stayed as a guest but still the company was paying for the apartment. And it was like being there all over again, like same old, same old. Duty Free again. And I just didn’t have the guts, the courage. I got very lonely. My kids would cry when I’d go home. “Daddy, Daddy, please don’t go. Please don’t go.” My youngest one Lisa, “Daddy, don’t leave me. Don’t leave me.” And it just tore me apart. And I wasn’t getting much going over here because I was over there and I was already forgetting all the codes and rules that were starting over here, so I told Penny, “Look, I’ve wasted a lot of money going back and forth.” I didn’t make a lot of money. “But I’m going to forget about this. I’m going to come back to the States and we can start working here.” So in 2002 I ended da Silva International.

04-00:32:16

Warrin: Now, to step back, while you were there in Hong Kong in 1997 the handover of Macau to China was a big event that you were affected probably in some way.

04-00:32:33

da Silva: Well, Macau was 1999.

04-00:32:34

Warrin: Nineteen ninety-nine.

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04-00:32:34

da Silva: First one 1997 and I was affected in a big way there because it was a sight. When I say a sight, it was just a huge performance. The Chinese built the biggest firework stands and there were floats on the harbor and it was a spectacle. I sent Penny back and I got my two daughters back to see 1997. It was exciting in many, many ways. And Hong Kong was to prosper. Hong Kong was Hong Kong and it was fine because all the arrangements were to the satisfaction of most companies. No company got shut down. Everything was hunky-dory, right? Nineteen ninety-nine was a different story. Nineteen ninety-nine, when they were closing down Macau, now that’s personal. I was born there. That’s my hometown, if you like. And when I went there to see the Portuguese flag lowered and the Chinese flag raised or the new Macau flag raised, just brought tears to my eyes. I couldn’t see it. I was just overwhelmed. I got sentimental and I just couldn’t go. I just went away. I just took off. I didn’t stay for the whole ceremony.

04-00:33:48

Warrin: And how did that affect the business? For instance your architectural business in that time with the handover of Hong Kong and Macau?

04-00:34:01

da Silva: It was fine. It was fine. I was doing great. The handover of Hong Kong gave me—Hong Kong had the national airport, the newer tenants in the lower floor and that really gave me the impetus and my starting spark, if you like. And then the other people were building in Macau and Hong Kong. I was doing projects on both sides. I was doing great. Didn’t affect me at all. It was a little bit of slowdown at Macau after a bit but it didn’t affect me because I had projects in Hong Kong. So I was fine. It was me. I left because I just emotionally feel like—and stupidly couldn’t handle it because if I had been there today I would have big projects, be an architect, probably made a lot of money. My kids would probably know me less and probably some of them might have gotten married out there. Who knows. My future would have been completely different. But guess what? I’m happy I did what I did, all right, and have no regrets at all. I don’t need money. I’m not interested in making money. I got my passion coming after that, and passion started in 1992 in order with the writing of the books about Macau, the history of Macau, of the Portuguese in China. So that gave me something to do. Before that I went into depression for about — I mean depression, for about six or seven months where I got busy and shops and so on. So from the beginning of this thing, in 2002, 2001, when I was giving it up, realizing that I didn’t have a business, I couldn’t go back to Hong Kong, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was getting a job or so here, or the promise of a job or two here, things weren’t gelling properly. So I decided, told my wife again, just like when I went into business for myself, “I’m not going to do it anymore. I’m going to write books and I’m not going to get paid for it.” “What? Here we go.” And again, for the third time in my life, Penny went along with my crazy ideas and she believed in me and still here we live today writing books and not getting any money from it but we’re doing fine. I’m happy.

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04-00:35:55

Warrin: But you’re making a contribution to history as here with your books. When you came back to California you did work for a while for a lighting company.

04-00:36:08

da Silva: Yeah, I tried that for one year because as I was changing from one to the other—now, that was before 2002. Da Silva International was sort of still around. It wasn’t quite closed. And I worked for this particular company. But the problem is that I couldn’t design light fixtures and I should learn how a light fixture was made and the electrical part of it. And also I promised that I would go and lecture at different cities across the United States, lecture other architects on how to use light, implement light in their buildings and how to light their buildings inside and outside. So when the sun isn’t shining then my lighting would be the thing they would look at on the outside of the buildings and on the inside my lighting would express the architecture. But first I had to learn a lot more about lighting to calculate how to implement lighting and so on and I was able to talk to many, many firms. They used me partly for that, to get their company name known; but part of it, it got too much to me making sales. I didn’t like sales. I wanted to learn and I’m already part of their development company. So eventually, after a year, when I saw me falling more and more into sales, I told them “No thanks, I’ll pack up,” and that’s when I really started to write. You’re quite right.

04-00:37:23

Warrin: And that’s when you essentially retired. You refer to the Lusitano Club. Could you describe that, what that is?

04-00:37:32

da Silva: Well, the Lusitano Club was actually one of what they called the Casas de Macau. It started off in the eighties but it started not as a social club, it started off as a hockey team, field hockey team.

04-00:37:45

Warrin: Here?

04-00:37:45

da Silva: Here in the States, yeah. My doctor friend, Sir Albert Rodrigues’s son, who was a player in Hong Kong, and I was a player for Club de Recreio in Hong Kong, as well. So they said, “Look, can you get a group of the old players from Recreio to play hockey against our visiting team? They’re going to visit the US, California, they’re going to visit Canada. So can you get some of the boys together and form a team to play against Recreio.” So I said, “Sure, we’ll do that.” So we got a bunch of Macau, Hong Kong boys, Shanghai boys, and we called the team “Macaense” and we started to play a game with them and ended up playing two or three games as they stayed for a few days. And after the first game, the people that played, the ex-players from Hong Kong that played the game, got so excited that they went back to my house for a barbeque and they said, “Hey, why don’t we play in the league, in the US Men’s League. Why don’t we play over there?” Two or three of us were

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already playing for the clubs, as I was. And two or three of my members were playing. We played for the Marin County Field Hockey Club. So we said okay. So let’s call it this, let’s call it that, and we ended up with the name Lusitano. All right. They didn’t want Macaense because of some envy between the Macau boys and the Hong Kong boys and the rivalry and so it became called Lusitano, which was neutral ground.

04-00:39:07

Warrin: Sure.

04-00:39:09

da Silva: And so Lusitano hockey team was formed. In order to play hockey the men’s league said you have to be a club registered in the state of California. You can’t just be a hockey team, you’ve got to be a club. And so we went back and formed a club. So the club has to have a president, vice president, blah, blah, blah, so we formed a club. I’m the captain of the team and we just played and we formed a team. Everybody got on, interested and so on. And two or three years into it, by 1991, about 1991, before I went to Hong Kong, they wanted me to be president of the club. I said, “No, I don’t want it.” He said, “Well, this other president’s not doing anything. And so we want to make a social club out of it.” I said, “No, I don’t want to do that.” Anyway, I did. I said, “On one condition. That I can bring history and culture back to the community.” There’s another club called UMA (União Macaense Americana). They put out a newsletter. I said, “I want to put out a bulletin, and in the bulletin I want to talk about Macau food, Portuguese culture, the history of the Portuguese starting from the Lusitanians because the club’s called Lusitano anyway. I want to get the children involved, young people to know their country, to know their history. And I want to get the bulletin out with photographs of the children playing sports and so on. So we had sports picnics and so on to get the children in the community together.

Well, UMA, the other club, resented that and said that they were the original club. They were the bigger club, that I was actually being divisive and creating a rift in the community, that I had all the young people and why don’t the young people and the entire hockey team join them and be a chapter of their club. Well, our young people didn’t want to do that. Our young people wanted to be self-governing, self-promoting and play hockey for themselves. So we refused. So that created enmity between the two clubs and that really was the birth of Lusitano. So I wrote the bulletins and got the thing out. And so the membership, out of maybe fifteen, sixteen people, all of a sudden it became seventy—sixty, seventy people. And a few interested. The young people were joining. And then my Hong Kong job came so I resigned as president and asked somebody else to step in. And I got the bulletin to be written by Mike McDougall, a professor at CalPoly. So Mike took over the bulletin. I went over and just became an architect in Hong Kong and contributed every now and then and that’s how Lusitano was born.

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04-00:41:52

Warrin: And does it continue today?

04-00:41:54

da Silva: Lusitano today just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this year and it now has 800 members.

04-00:42:00

Warrin: Is that right?

04-00:42:01

da Silva: Yes.

04-00:42:02

Warrin: And what kind of activities does it promote?

04-00:42:04

da Silva: Again, cultural. It teaches cooking. They have language lessons using the MCC, the Macau Cultural Center, which is another story in itself of how that came about. They write bulletins. The bulletin still exists. They have rafting, rubber rafting. They have all sorts of things. I started with the wine tasting thing. So a group that does wine tasting and so on. So it is of interest to the young people culturally and socially. So it’s a social cultural club and now they are getting into scholarships. So it’s working very well. Very well. It’s a great club now.

04-00:42:46

Warrin: So right now are there still two active Macaenses—

04-00:42:53

da Silva: Three. Three active—

04-00:42:54

Warrin: Three.

04-00:42:53

da Silva: — Macaense clubs here. UMA has maybe a couple hundred, maybe. Maybe more. I don’t know how many hundreds. But they're the older generation. They have a difficult time getting the younger generation to join because their activities I guess are more into playing cards and socializing functions and so on. Lusitano has 800 plus. And the other one, called Casa de Macau, has maybe just over a hundred, if that today, and they’re not very active. But they’re still around. So those are the three clubs. Now, all three clubs have access to what we call the Macau Cultural Center, which is the building that was bought with government money, Macau Portuguese government money. We bought a cultural center, which I insisted on calling it, and it is located in Fremont. So that cultural center now can be used by all three clubs, all right, and is being rented out and so on. I was the first president of the Macau Cultural Center because they asked me to do it, I guess. And I insisted that it be a cultural center rather than another clubhouse. They kept calling it a

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clubhouse and in all my meetings I beat that down, I beat that down, I beat that down, and today it is a cultural center.

04-00:44:06

Warrin: So it’s just not card playing and things like this.

04-00:44:10

da Silva: Yeah, not just card playing. If you want to go play cards, fine. You can have access to it, you can book it. The club can book it to play cards. If you want to rent it out for a wedding then the MCC makes money. But all the money goes back to the MCC for cultural things. We have cultural events. We can have plays sometimes and so on. So it’s really getting more and more to be a cultural center.

04-00:44:33

Warrin: Who are the founding people of the Casa de Macau?

04-00:44:38

da Silva: Casa de Macau?

04-00:44:39

Warrin: Yeah, that was the—

04-00:44:40

da Silva: The third club.

04-00:44:41

Warrin: —the third club that you mentioned.

04-00:44:42

da Silva: The third club, okay. Henrique Manhão and there was a lawyer called Sousa, Anthony de Sousa, and a few other members. And they are mainly Macau boys. Now, if you want to talk about, again, rivalry and people, okay, Uniao, mainly UMA is the Hong Kong people with a few Macau people having started it in the beginning. So UMA is more or less Hong Kong and Shanghai, a community club. But Casa de Macau mainly Macau boys, the Macau boys and girls and their families. And they also accept non-Portuguese blood members that are Chinese. Lusitano accepts them and any other but we make a little bit more of a deal out of worrying about it being taken over by the Chinese after the last guy, Macaense, if you like, with Portuguese blood drops dead one day. That the Chinese might take over because they’ll be here forever. So we worry. But Casa de Macau doesn’t worry about that. They’re more liberal, if you like. But today everything is changing. Lusitano is accepting members of any nationality now. And it started accepting them, but at one time you couldn’t be an officer unless you were of Portuguese blood. UMA, I don’t know what their rules are because I’m a member but I’m not into what their rules are all about. But there is, again, a Hong Kong group, Macau group, and a younger group, with Lusitano.

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04-00:46:11

Warrin: Okay. And say what have been the activities in the past year of the Lusitano Club? What are some things that they have had that—

04-00:46:23

da Silva: Well, one of the first things that they have is the clambake and I cook every year. I started the clambake in the eighties and I’ve been cooking for them every year unless I was in Hong Kong. I’ve been doing the Alentejana clambake and that’s usually Easter time, just before or just after Easter. It’s mainly before Easter. So I do the clambake and a hundred and something people attend. And after that they have the children’s sports day, the picnic day, and they had some softball and they play soccer and they do different things. And they have that. And in between some of them go to the casinos and gamble, some of them have social parties, like picnics and barbeques, so on. They also have in between, of course, what I said. They have the cultural part of it. They have cooking. Cooking lessons at the MCC. And they have Portuguese language lessons and so on and it goes on to rafting in the summer. They do more barbeques, on to Macau dinners with Macau food and that’s what they do throughout the year.

04-00:47:30

Warrin: What are the cultural connections with the clambake?

04-00:47:34

da Silva: Oh, the clambake. It started off with me doing it in my backyard after a hockey game. It’s the hockey team. When Lusitano was first formed, after the games, we’d come back, sit in my hot tub and everybody always said, “Well, what are we going to do for dinner?” “I don’t know,” I said. “I just came back from Portugal and I had this great clambake in Algarve.” I said, “I know how to do it.” So I went and started it. They loved it. And soon more and more people came so it became an annual event from then on and I’ve been cooking ever since at that clambake. And it has grown from the hockey team and a few friends to an auction plus the clambake and now I don’t like any money auctions when I’m doing things. And so now it’s just a pure clambake with a hundred and something people every year and we have clams and we have one additional dish. It could be Macau food and it could be—once in a while I will recommend, “All right, this year we’ll do food of Goa and the clambake. Next year we’ll do food of Mozambique, African chicken, or something, with the clambake. So that we introducing in other food culture from the Portuguese provinces. Oh, I shouldn’t call them provinces anymore. Overseas territories. And Portuguese food. So every year we change the second course, if you like, the main course.

04-00:48:48

Warrin: So you’re moving beyond the provincial to introduce people to different aspects—

04-00:48:53

da Silva: Yes.

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04-00:48:53

Warrin: —of the Portuguese cosmopolitan culture.

04-00:48:58

da Silva: Right, yeah. Every year picking one. Some years we fall on two Macau ones because popular demand. What can you do? But we’ve done Africa, we’ve done Goa, all sorts of things.

04-00:49:15

Warrin: Well, that sounds very interesting. I’ve been a little aware of UMA but I have not known about the Lusitano Club or the Casa de Macau.

04-00:49:28

da Silva: Really?

04-00:49:28

Warrin: Yeah.

04-00:49:28

da Silva: Well, UMA is now the smaller club. Bigger than Casa de Macau, but Lusitano now is really big. And Lusitano and UMA, they are members of each other’s clubs. They are not sort of member of one only or the other. They work together. They party together and so on.

04-00:49:46

Warrin: So there’s quite a large community, Far East Portuguese community here in California.

04-00:49:53

da Silva: Yes. Yes, there certainly is. The exact number we don’t know. People have tried to analyze it and count, if you like, but their numbers have come out wrong. The people have said that this is not correct. We haven’t done a real accurate headcount.

04-00:50:11

Warrin: This would be sort of difficult to do, I would think.

04-00:50:12

da Silva: Over a thousand. Over a thousand. But I mean in Southern California and Northern California. And that’s where the majority of them are, in California. All right. Expect one or two in New York, one or two here and there, but mainly it’s a California community. And then we have the Vancouver community and the Toronto community and they have their own clubs called casas.

04-00:50:33

Warrin: Yeah. Okay, I think we should again take a break here.

04-00:50:36

da Silva: Okay. Let’s go grab a bite. It’s quarter to one. I’m getting hungry.

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[Audiofile 5]

05-00:00:00

Warrin: Okay, Tony, so we were talking about the various organizations of the Far Eastern Portuguese population.

05-00:00:1800

da Silva: Macanese or Macaense?

05-00:00:19

Warrin: Macaense population here in California, UMA and Casa de Macau and Lusitano and how you have a place in Fremont called the Macau—

05-00:00:33

da Silva: Cultural Center.

05-00:00:33

Warrin: —Cultural Center. When did the real group of Macaense start to immigrate to California?

05-00:00:45

da Silva: Oh, they began to immigrate to California basically after the first few years of the Second World War, okay. One or two of them came first. They could find better opportunities. Some came to school. Like my brother came in ’46 and a few others with him. And then the actual diaspora, the group, when they left en masse was actually after the first riot in 1956. The ’56 riots, a lot of them saw the writing on the wall and they began to come. After the Shanghai occupation by the Chinese in ’49 a few of them may have trickled through. A lot of them went to Macau, to a camp, to wait for the Christian association and others to arrange for them to migrate to California, to Brazil, and so on.

05-00:01:32

Warrin: What was a Macau camp?

05-00:01:34

da Silva: It was a camp that was out of the Canidrome where the dog races used to be, all right, and they housed the Shanghai people there. First it was camp one and camp two and camp three. When they were from Shanghai they couldn’t put them up in Hong Kong. There were no jobs, et cetera, and so they went to Macau and the Macau government, once again, similar to World War II when they were in hotels and so on. This time there were less of them and they were housed mainly in the Canidrome and then there were two other camps. And I’ll give you the names and so on if you want later on. They were housed and there they remained until they could find either an exit visa to the United States or to Brazil or to anywhere else. The Catholic society could help them, too. And also the American consulate actually helped them a lot to move to the United States. So that’s the Shanghai group. And some of them could go through before the fifties but most of them it was after. It was afterwards. So actually the main diaspora move was after the Hong Kong riots, and the people of Hong Kong and a few from Macau and some even from Shanghai

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were able to find their way to California, to Australia, to Canada and so on. The relaxation of the immigration laws there helped a lot but I’m not going to get into the legal part of it. But that’s when it all started. That was part one.

And then part two, another great exodus for those that didn’t leave then, when the ’67 riots that I talked about earlier happened. Then phase two of another large group also migrated here and joined those in San Francisco, Australia, and Canada and so on. Then just before the handover there was a trickle, more, that decided, “All right, look, if things aren’t going to be much better for us over here we feel that we want to go to the States,” and they went. And, of course, there were those that believe that China would be just as good if they remained there and those remained in Macau and Hong Kong. And there’s still a small community of Macaenses in Hong Kong but the majority moved out in the fifties, okay, ’56, if you like, the sixties riot, and then a little bit in the eighties.

05-00:03:39

Warrin: I don’t think you want to give the impression that all of them moved to California.

05-00:03:47

da Silva: No.

05-00:03:49

Warrin: Where were the various destinations and what percentage would have gone to different regions?

05-00:03:55

da Silva: Okay. In terms of numbers, I won’t give percentage numbers. What I will say is that there’s a majority that came to California. It was their preference, for one thing, to come to California. Some to south, a lot of them to the San Francisco Bay Area, a large percentage. And then some went to Australia because it was too difficult for them to come here and it was faster, easier. Some of them are the parents of the children that went to school in Australia after the war, after World War II. Some went to school in Australia and to the United States. So they actually went to Australia. And another group that could not go to the United States went to Vancouver, Canada, and some to Toronto. And so there are communities other than Brazil. I’m not talking about Brazil, the Portuguese-speaking group, because it’s also Brazil and Portugal and a minority to other parts, England, to Germany and so on. But just one or two. No, we’re talking about these groups. We’re talking about the majority. Definitely California, okay, and then number two could be Canada and/or Australia. About the same as far as I know. So those are major, major groups. And then Brazil and Portugal aside because a lot of the non-British speaking or non-British educated, they were the Macau boys, in other words, or Macau girls, they went to Brazil and went to Portugal.

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05-00:05:11

Warrin: And what attracted them to Brazil?

05-00:05:15

da Silva: They speak Portuguese. In Portugal there were not enough jobs and work and so on. It was probably easier for them to make a living, if you like, in Brazil because they didn’t specialize in anything in particular that the Portuguese were given jobs for. Some of them worked for the banks and so on and so forth, but not speaking English. A few of them spoke very little English. They worked in Hong Kong. And their English was useless in Portugal, basically in the Portuguese banks. So the Portuguese speaking a little bit of English that they use in Hong Kong was basically useless for them, for the bankers, and people that worked in the international companies. So they probably found it easier. And, again, I’m almost guessing, if you want, went to Brazil.

05-00:05:59

Warrin: But it was one of the major destinations anyway?

05-00:06:03

da Silva: Oh, definitely. Definitely.

05-00:06:03

Warrin: Yeah, okay. Well, that’s very interesting and rather typical about suddenly the outspread of a group like this. And within the area of China, when did people start to move from Macau out to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and so forth?

05-00:06:27

da Silva: Oh, that would come after the Opium War, right. Until the Opium War everything was concentrated in Macau. The trading was between Canton and Macau. I’m now not talking about the Japan trade which happened earlier and the Portuguese stopped doing that in the 1600s, 1640s about. But Hong Kong was, after the Opium War, ceded to the British in 1841, okay, and 1842 according to the Treaty of Nanking. And after that the people that worked with the British and with some of the European firms who lived in Macau, they transported over to Hong Kong with the company owners, like Jardines and so on. Once Hong Kong became a port, a deep water port, a port of entry for the big ships, it became quite obvious that that’s what’s going to happen. And so the Portuguese went there, some to work with the bankers and so on. There were one or two entrepreneurs that started their own companies. So they first went to Hong Kong and shortly thereafter they went to Shanghai and other treaty ports like Canton, Guangdong, Amoy and so on. But the largest group Hong Kong, second largest group Shanghai.

05-00:07:42

Warrin: Okay. More recently, since your retirement, you have written several books on these communities outside of Macau. In 2007, I believe, you published the Portuguese Community in Hong Kong. What was that about?

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05-00:08:06

da Silva: Oh, the Portuguese Community in Hong Kong had two volumes to it. The first one, I didn’t know there was going to be a volume two so I didn’t call it volume one. And subsequently I got more information and then I had to put out a volume two. What was it about? Really it was about a disappearing people, a disappearing community of Portuguese that lived for centuries in China, Macau and the treaty ports in Hong Kong and so on. And there seemed a necessity, seemed to me a great necessity to get the photographs of these people and their names identified. To give names to faces and give faces names. Many, many times, and often in history books or in museums and libraries you see faces of communities but there are no names. Or you read in a history book a whole bunch of names but there are no faces to attach them to. And I thought it was an opportunity for me to put them together to the extent possible because already much of the photographs had been destroyed by the war, had been thrown away when they moved to different countries and so on.

So in the nineties when I was in Macau at one of the meetings of the communities, I realized that there were many, many books written about people of Macau, people from Portugal and so on. Nothing about Hong Kong and nothing about Shanghai. There were only a few books written by Braga, J.P. Braga and his son Jack Braga, J.M. Braga, that were about the people of Hong Kong. But no book that I know of written about the people of Shanghai. But certainly there were no photographs with the names of any of these people. So I decided that it had to be done. In fact, I worked against time to get it done and collect as many pictures as possible. And the reason behind no volume one and volume two name is because when I put out volume one I didn’t think the people had enough confidence in me. They were wondering what I was doing with their names. You must remember old folks are kind of suspicious and they want to keep secret their family heirlooms, if you want to call it, pictures. They didn’t want to lend to anybody their photographs. So what I did is I went to the sports clubs and I collected the pictures from the wall of the hockey players, of the softball players. I’ve got a few families, my family and a few others, that were in there. Mine not so much because I’m a Macau fellow. But my Hong Kong friends and their friends. So I got a few contributors, so to speak, and I got this wonderful lady, Teresa de Luz, who helped me put the names in. And once they saw that book out they were surprised. A lot of the families said, “How come my name is in there? How come my family isn’t in there?” I said, “Very simple. I asked you for it and you never gave it to me.” They were in the bulletins and the newsletters of the clubs and you didn’t trust me enough to give it to me.” And all of a sudden I had a barrage of photographs and volunteer names and so on that came to me and I had to write volume two.

Then came Shanghai, which really shouldn’t have been written by me. I asked a group of Shanghai people to write the book and none of them seemed to be willing to either take the time to or they said they didn’t have the knowledge

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to do it. And I thought, “Oh, my God, that’s going to be missing because the Shanghai people left a long time ago, ’49 they evacuated Shanghai.” There’s a big detachment of that community from the Hong Kong Macau community. Other than, kind of apart from, rather, the rivalry that they had between them. Friendly rivalries. Some of it was sort of just rivalry. And so I asked the Shanghai people if they would cooperate with me and they did. I’m sorry to say that one or two people that I run into in the Hong Kong community ask me, “Why are you writing about the people of Shanghai? They mean nothing.” I said, “What do you mean they mean nothing?” I said, “They’re people of Shanghai. I have to write about them. They’re as important as you.” “Ah, you’re wasting your time.” That was a dismissal of those from Shanghai. And I talk about this—

05-00:12:00

Warrin: Rivalry, yes.

05-00:12:00

da Silva: —very honestly because in my book that’s coming out now I talk about the rivalry between the three or four communities. They exist. Some of it friendly, some of it not so friendly. Okay. Anyway, the Shanghai book came out and the Shanghai people really enjoyed the book and it sort of got their community and their photographs identified. I feel happy with that.

05-00:12:22

Warrin: That’s great. You also had an early book about Macaense to California.

05-00:12:28

da Silva: Yes. In between I wrote the Diaspora of Macaense to California. This was actually put on me. I didn’t intend to do that until later, until I collected the information of Hong Kong, Macau and Shanghai. Somewhere in between a group in Macau, one of the Macau associations, asked me to write that. I suspect that the reason behind it is that they wanted me to uncover it because I was involved in quite a lot of this. Uncover the differences between the clubs UMA and Casa de Macau and Lusitano. There’s been anger, if you want, disappointment or whatever in me personally for having started Lusitano as a hockey team and then formed into a club. And they didn’t want that to go forward so there was a lot of enmity or anger, if you like, between these clubs and functions. They would have them at the same time and the community, some would go to one, some to the other. They felt that one club was trying to be better than the other or steal members from the community. However you want to interpret this. But there existed a big problem and I am accused personally of being one of the people that started this problem. Well, whether I did or didn’t I think it was a good thing because the young people were not joining UMA. We were losing them. And if I got them through sports and today we have 800 members, I don’t think I did such a bad thing. But I’m sorry I created a rift between the community of Hong Kong, the two communities of Hong Kong, the younger one and the older one, and then the Shanghai and so on and so forth. And then when the government of Macau

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offered money to clubs, these clubs if they were named Casa de Macau, all of a sudden Casa de Macau in California formed a club to take advantage of that. I don’t blame them. They were right to do so. Lusitano and UMA were not willing to change their names but we were given by the government then the opportunity to retain their names of UMA and Lusitano and yet at the same time be considered “Casas de Macau.” And that is the beginning of these associations and how they happened. Hope I answered the question. That right?

05-00:14:48

Warrin: Yeah, you did. No, that’s all very interesting. And all three of these clubs are still active? Functioning?

05-00:14:56

da Silva: Yes, all still active

05-00:15:00

Warrin: And in a way, typically a bit of ethnic rivalry here or intra-ethnic rivalry which exists in communities, the Azorean community, for instance, you see a certain amount of rivalry between clubs or something, the associations or something like this. You can’t please everybody with one organization, right?

05-00:15:25

da Silva: That’s true. You see, rivalry will exist anyway, from city to city, town to town. Soccer team to soccer team. There’s rivalry, there’s friendly rivalry. I’m not saying that we had bad rivalry but there was a lot of suspicion between one group or another and trying to take advantage of grabbing one member from one club or the other club, let me put it that way. Probably that’s not well-put but you know what I mean.

05-00:15:55

Warrin: Exactly. And who has published these various books?

05-00:16:01

da Silva: Well, most of my books, except for the Diáspora Macaense to California, were published by the Instituto Internacional de Macau, the IIM. The other one was published by the Associação Promotora da Instrução dos Macaenses. The IIM published the other one and were also publisher of the first three. So they contributed to the first three but they published that other one on their own.

05-00:16:27

Warrin: Yeah. Now, you have a book coming out scheduled for next year, “Macaenses, the Portuguese in China.”

05-00:16:34

da Silva: Correct.

05-00:16:35

Warrin: And could you briefly describe that?

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05-00:16:37

da Silva: Well, first of all, the book should be published by February. Maybe before. There’s no definite date for it. About then. What the book is about is—it’s about the Portuguese in China itself, and I claim that most of the Portuguese in China should be recognized as the Macaenses because the Portuguese themselves came out as traders, they came out as sailors, they came out as administrators and so on and so forth. But the Portuguese, and they were Portuguese by birth, Portuguese by nationality, were the people that lived in Macau. Intermarried as they have been with other nations, mainly Asians in the beginning, they are the Macaense people. And the book is about where they came from and how they originated. So the book starts from a departure from Portugal, the Portuguese departure from Portugal after the taking of Ceuta, which is 1415, and voyages of discovery and began—then Portuguese started to travel to the coast of Africa, west side, and then over the Horn of Africa and on to India thereafter. But when they were doing that they stopped and maintained trading bases or small communities and they intermarried with the local population. And later on these people traveled on and intermarried with those that they found in Goa and Goa became a Portuguese territory, so on. And then from there they went to Malacca, from Malacca to Macau. So it all links to the Macaenses because the intermarriage started from the Portuguese that went to Africa, then India, then Malacca, and Timor and so forth and then to Macau and even from Japan and back from Japan, if you like. So that explains the ratio in the mix of the Macaense people. And this book also spends a lot of time talking about the difference between Macanese and Macaense and the reason for that being that the people of Macau have to be acknowledged as people with some Portuguese genes or some Portuguese blood, to put it in simple terms. Many people today in the history books are called Macanese. Macanese interpreted in the history books and in some dictionaries are people of Macau, people from Macau. And some historians even say that it doesn’t matter whether they have a drop of Portuguese blood or not. Well, I disagree with that and I’m trying to bring to the forefront of historians that it is important that the people with Portuguese blood are recognized as Macaense and that the Macanese can be recognized as Indians born in Macau, Chinese born in Macau, anybody born in Macau, with or without Portuguese blood. It’s fine with me. But when you’re talking about the history of a people, of a vanishing people, I think they have to be recognized for who they are and for their ancestry. And so I am differentiating and not for purposes of discrimination. Or we can call it discrimination in a dictionary term. I am discriminating between one and the other or defining one from the other but not discriminating people because of race or color or anything like that. But a lot of it in my book also talks about discrimination. It talks about race, it talks about color because the Macaense have been discriminated against and anybody married out of the European community, whether it be in Goa, whether it be in Africa, have been discriminated against since the discovery of the different parts of the Portuguese territories in Asia, and that goes for Goa and so on. Some of them were not even allowed to be priests or soldiers if their parents weren’t both born in Portugal. And that’s a

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fact and my book reveals a lot of those facts. And this may sound like me being upset about it. I’m not upset about it. All I’m trying to do is to put history in the proper context so the historians will stop guessing about who we are and what we are and even among the Macaense themselves there have been quite a lot of meetings in recent years. And I mean in the years 2013, even as recent as that. There have been meetings about the Macaense people to try and describe who the Macaense people are. I think it’s about time that we stopped trying to guess who we are. We know who we are. Somebody has to write it down. I’m writing it in English because most of the Macaense today are not living in Portugal and I would say the greater percentage do not speak Portuguese anymore. So I’m writing it in English and I know that there will be historians that will disagree with me and will argue with me. Fine, because I’m arguing and disagreeing with them.

05-00:21:22

Warrin: Good. Yes. As you intimated, it’s a very complex situation when one thinks that we’re talking about Portuguese who came to China and intermarried with the Chinese in Macau. First of all, they were much more likely, as I understand it, to intermarry with somebody from Goa or Malacca or something like this and the Chinese would sort of shut themselves off. Am I correct there?

05-00:21:53

da Silva: Yes, you are correct. No, this is sequential in terms of time. They first intermarried with the Goans and then the Malaccans, when we discovered Malacca shortly after Goa, and then we went to Macau and the Chinese always thought of the Portuguese as barbarians. They would have nothing to do with us. And then even the Japanese intermarried with the Portuguese before the Chinese intermarried with the Portuguese. Not saying that there was no relationship between Portuguese sailors and Chinese people, let’s say boat people or the natives. But always in the background. Never intermarriage in those days because they [the Portuguese] were Christians and they thought of us as barbarians, anyway. According to what I’ve written about, it is only up until about 1700s that the Portuguese first started to be recognized as marrying or having relations with the Chinese people. The Macaense people were originally from Goa, from Malacca, maybe a few African slaves that they cohabitated with, or from Japan when they were thrown out by the shoguns and so on and they had to come to Macau. The Chinese came afterwards. And many historians think and are writing, still writing about, that the Portuguese first intermarried with the Chinese. That is not true.

05-00:23:12

Warrin: Well, it’s certainly an interesting point. Let me ask you about the current situation of Macau. What is it like? What is Macau like at the moment in terms of its economy and the population?

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05-00:23:31

da Silva: Well, let’s start with the economy first. Very briefly, the economy is flourishing. It’s doing very well. It’s doing almost as well in terms of making a fortune—the golden era has returned from the times of the Japan trade. It sort of died after the Japan trade and now the handover to China has brought that back and more. It has probably the biggest money-earning casinos in the world and the people there have a lot of money. There’s work, there are jobs and there are people from Portugal, who can’t get work in Portugal today in the year 2014, that are going to Macau to look for jobs. So Macau economically is doing better than Portugal. It is doing better than many parts of the world. Now, Macau, as far as the people are concerned, some of the Macaense have remained there, some of them have actually given up their Portuguese papers in order to take Chinese papers and there are rules and regulations about doing that which I will not go into at this point. It’s in my book. But they seem to be perfectly happy there and a lot of us that have visited Macau still enjoy going to Macau, enjoy the food, and enjoy that.

My sadness about Macau is that a lot of the history, the historical buildings, and the feeling of historical Macau, you have to look for. If you know where they are you will find it. But in between you have to go through all the casino buildings, all the tourists, and so on and so forth. And there are all sorts of tourists. They have the tourists looking at old Macau, tourists just there to gamble and most of them are from China and other parts of Asia, to go out there to gamble. And that’s all well and good but Macau, historical Macau, has disappeared into the background and overshadowed by some of the very, very tall buildings and some of these very ugly buildings and you have to look between them. As I said earlier on, have to look between the cracks to find historical Macau.

05-00:25:25

Warrin: But it could still be found.

05-00:25:26

da Silva: To me that’s a tragedy.

05-00:25:27

Warrin: It can still be found?

05-00:25:28

da Silva: It can be found.

05-00:25:29

Warrin: If you know what you’re looking for.

05-00:25:30

da Silva: Oh, yeah. And actually the Chinese government and the Portuguese before the handover, they’ve actually gone and painted some of the older buildings. They have refurbished some of them and so on. So a lot of good has been done but the whole thing, it’s in the shadow of—like in the old days, I could go to

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Macau in the sixties and approaching Macau I could always see the lighthouse of Guia on the one side and the Church of Penha on the other and I would say, “Ah-ha, I’ve arrived in Macau.” Right now when you go there you see a few casino buildings and nothing else and maybe a monument from China. Macau is not visible from the sea anymore. You have to be in it to find it.

05-00:26:07

Warrin: Right. But isn’t this transformation so typical of the twenty-first century world in so many urban centers.

05-00:26:17

da Silva: That’s true. And it’s good for many urban centers. Macau has had its historical purpose and its historical face for so long that all of a sudden for that to come up and just block it all off I think is a shame. Hong Kong, for example, had its own historical past but little by little it’s been transformed. But Hong Kong is now, I consider, a beautiful modern city. I couldn’t consider Macau a beautiful modern city. Maybe Taipei and Guangdong might be more beautiful. But what they’ve done in Macau, in the early days of its evolution from historical Macau in the forties and fifties and sixties, it’s changed even before the handover. So I can’t blame the SAR for changing it. It was changed by just the local people who wanted to make more money. And just boom. It is people trying to make money that have no consideration for the architecture or the history of Macau as such.

05-00:27:17

Warrin: What is SAR?

05-00:27:19

da Silva: SAR is actually the government. It’s the government of Macau. It’s a Portuguese abbreviation and I don’t remember it off the top of my head. Hong Kong is what? Hong Kong is—ah, I guess I’m getting on in age.

05-00:27:39

Warrin: I don’t know.

05-00:27:40

da Silva: Anyway, it means the temporary government, the Chinese government of Macau. It’s called the Macau SAR.

05-00:27:49

Warrin: But now Macau—

05-00:27:52

da Silva: Fifteen years have gone.

05-00:27:53

Warrin: Macau is strictly run from China, right?

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05-00:27:55

da Silva: Yeah, but with its own government. And that government, which is not a government of China—it’s still the government of Macau but it is approved by China and that had fifty years. The same with Hong Kong. Each one has fifty years from the day of the handover and it has its own government and so on. It’s working quite well in Macau. I think it was working well in Hong Kong until the recent problems that we’ve had in Hong Kong. But it’s a temporary government.

05-00:28:22

Warrin: Okay, Tony, anything that I haven’t mentioned, that I haven’t asked you that comes to mind?

05-00:28:28

da Silva: Off-hand I can’t think of anything but I’m sure as soon as you leave I’ll think of lots of things. I just hope that the people that read and see this will appreciate that this community, this Macaense community is in its last days and it’s worth preserving and it’s worth preserving historically as well as just in passing. In other words, as being a footnote in history, which I have a problem with. I think there’s a lot to it. We are the people that actually sustained Macau, made it possible for the Portuguese, and even for the British, et cetera, to negotiate and keep Macau as an open trading port through the centuries. I think the Macaense deserve a lot of credit for that and I hope the world recognizes it, and I hope the Portuguese government will one day give us thanks.

05-00:29:21

Warrin: Good. Well, thank you and we look forward to your upcoming book.

05-00:29:26

da Silva: Thank you.

[End of Interview]