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Although so much of Fernandes’s work is set during the first half of the twentieth century, many of the author’s concerns reflect very closely the need for Macanese to identify more closely with the indigenous Chinese culture that surrounded them, at a time when it was becoming more apparent that the days of Portuguese rule in Macau were coming to an end. If the inhabitants of Macau had not begun to feel the winds of change already, certainly the 1974 coup in Portugal, which brought down the right-wing dictatorship, was a tangible development on the road to a possible handover. The reassumption of diplomatic relations with China that ensued, the rise to power of Deng Xiao Ping after the death of Mao, the pursuit of modernization and then the emerging concept of one country two systems that led to the accord with the United Kingdom for the return of Hong Kong, and finally the equivalent agreement with Portugal over Macau, all caused the Macanese to reflect upon their own future in the territory they called home. Fernandes’ answer was to reconcile the Macanese with their Chinese cultural roots, while also seeking to provide for posterity a literary evocation of Macanese cultural identity and Macanese cultural history during the twentieth century.

What this author’s fiction also illustrates are the degrees of ‘Macaneseness’ that exist among the Eurasian population of this former Portuguese territory and its diasporas. Maurício, the poor boy made good, displays the Macanese qualities of bonhommie and cosmopolitanism mentioned by Carvalho at the beginning of this paper, but is also at home in an essentially Chinese world. Candy is essentially a captive subject of the British Empire, a kind of lost soul, whose recalled links with family and ethnic origin are only articulated later in her life, when they have been irretrievably lost. It may well be that Adozindo is Fernandes’ ‘doppelganger’: a man who never leaves the tiny world of Macau, is enabled to overcome the centuries of prejudice among the Macanese towards their Chinese heritage, but who at the same time helps assimilate his Chinese wife into his own hybrid, frontier culture, suggesting that Macanese cultural values may survive into the years beyond Portuguese colonial rule.