Macau Sã Assi

The song and the album

Macau Sã Assi opens the album of the same name, released in 1994 on the Tradisom label, which has also published the recording on its YouTube channel. According to Discogs, the 14-track CD was recorded at the studios of TDM–Rádio Macau, with liner notes by Veiga Jardim, and its tracks include Marcha Vapor and Mâmâ Sa Filo, which Wikipedia describes as a Patuá version of the Brazilian carnival march Mamãe Eu Quero.

In Patuá, sã is a form of sâm, “to be”, and Portugal’s public broadcaster RTP used the phrase, spelt Macau sâm assi, as the title of a radio report, glossing it as “Macau é assim”, Macau is like this. The song stayed in the band’s repertoire: in April 2012, at the first rehearsal she attended, the researcher Si Man Chan sang it with the band, and her master’s thesis on Tuna Macaense, completed at the University of Aveiro in 2018, still lists it among the band’s songs.

The sweet speech of Macao

Patuá grew up among the Macanese, Macao’s community of mixed Portuguese and Asian heritage, during the centuries in which Portugal administered Macao; since 1999 Macao has been a special administrative region of China. Its poets and speakers call it doci papiaçam, “sweet speech”, and UNESCO’s atlas of endangered languages classes it as critically endangered.

Music is one of the ways it survives. Chan writes that the band’s members, whose own Patuá is limited, use what they know, along with lines from Patuá poems, to write lyrics that keep the language alive.

The same phrase, Macau sã assi, was also the title of a 1968 book of Patuá writing by José dos Santos Ferreira (1919–1993), known as Adé, a poet who championed the language. The band’s leader, Filomeno Jorge, is Adé’s nephew and has set his uncle’s Patuá poems to music.

Tuna Macaense

In Spain and Portugal, a tuna is a band of university students who play traditional instruments and sing serenades; in Macao, Wikipedia notes, tunas blended the form with carnival balls and street festivities. Tuna Macaense dates from 1935, when it had about 30 members playing guitars, mandolins and violins, and it was known for turning up unannounced to play at weddings and parties. Some accounts name Adé as its founder, but its leader told Chan that nobody knows who started it.

The band faded during the Second World War and was reorganised in the 1980s, when it registered as a non-profit association. It sings in Portuguese, Patuá, Cantonese and Mandarin, and has performed across Asia and in Europe. Chan describes it as the last tuna still active in Macao. When she finished her thesis in 2018, its members’ average age was about 60, and they feared that no one would carry the band on after them.

In Emblem World, Macau Sã Assi sits in the Macao music collection, where people discover and rate local food, drink and music.