Introduction
The Rio 2016 Olympic Games are in full swing and many Chinese people are focusing their attention on the city. In fact, the Chinese began their “Rio adventure” 200 years ago. Some of them made a fortune, some lost their lives, and some experienced a rebirth.
1
In mid-November 2015, I was in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, attending a meeting organized by the World Health Organization. After the conference, I applied for a three-day vacation to Rio de Janeiro. At Copacabana Beach, I waited for Song -a Chinese pastor in Rio.
Rio de Janeiro is the second largest city in Brazil, which means “river of January” in Portuguese, and was the capital of the Portuguese Empire and Brazil from 1763 to 1960. There are currently about 100,000 Chinese living here, mostly from Guangdong, China, and almost all of them come from Taishan, a famous expatriate town in the south of the country, and are engaged in the same occupation – selling jiaozi (a type of fried noodles).
Most of them are illegally stranded in Brazil, through smuggling or other means. The church Song founded serves this group, who, in his own words, “are like lost sheep.
Although we were new to each other, we both had a common experience of living in Hong Kong. He came to Brazil from his birthplace in Hong Kong 30 years ago to make a living, and I went to Hong Kong from my birthplace in Beijing 10 years ago to study and work. In the Portuguese speaking world, two people who speak Hong Kong-Cantonese met at first sight.
As Song drove me out of the bustling city center of Rio, through the stretches of slums, and across the ramshackle Brazil Avenue, he had palpitations, “I passed by here the other day and caught a firefight with slumlords on both sides of the highway, bullets flying around, and we were all on the ground, nine dead.” Song lamented, “The security in Brazil is getting worse and worse, and the police can’t control things in the favelas.”
But after a while, he still looked at me and said, “You must go to the favelas.”
An hour later, we arrived in City A, the lower part of Rio, where Mats lives, in an old Portuguese residential building facing a small square in the center of City A. “Hungry?” Pine said, patting his stomach, “I’ll take you to eat something good.”
Popular in Brazil, the horchata was invented by the people of Taishan, Guangdong: the rectangular ones are stuffed with beef, the conical ones with chicken. There are many other flavors such as cheese. (Photo: Zhao Han) Popular in Brazil, the horchata invented by the people of Taishan, Guangdong: the rectangular one is stuffed with beef, and the conical one is stuffed with chicken. There are many other flavors such as cheese. (Photo: Zhao Han)
Without deliberate observation, one can find a snack that is particularly hot on the streets of Brazil. It is a kind of deep-fried pasta with filling, called “Pastel” in Portuguese and “Jiaozai” in Cantonese, which can be understood as deep-fried oil cake by northerners. The flavors may vary across Brazil, but the rules are the same: the rectangular ones are stuffed with beef, and the conical ones with chicken.
“Corner boy was originally invented by people from Taishan, Guangdong, and became popular throughout Brazil, and then Brazilians saw that corner boy was so profitable and learned it in droves.” Song said proudly, “But horchata is still delicious when made by the Cantonese.” His secret to choosing a store is to observe the store service staff, as long as the Chinese are collecting money, it must be opened by Taishan people.
2
There are not many Asian immigrants in Brazil. But Chinese immigrants have a history of about 200 years in Brazil. The entire Chinese population in Brazil is about 400,000, of which about 300,000 live in São Paulo, Brazil’s first city.
In the early 19th century, the Brazilian royal family, João VI, wanted to bypass the British merchants to engage in tea growing, and he was the first to “import” the Chinese. But the Chinese immigrants to Brazil was full of humiliation, they were called “piglets”, in Brazil to do mining, road construction, tea planting and other hard work, subject to persecution. This kind of tea plan eventually failed.
The second wave of Chinese immigrants occurred in the mid-19th century, unlike the first time, there was already a contract called “CULI” (hard labor) to protect them, stating that the Chinese were not slaves in Brazil, but workers, and after eight years, they were allowed to return home.
The third wave of immigration occurred in the late 1970s. At this time there was an influx of Taiwanese as well as Chinese from various countries, including many businessmen.
The Cantonese were the first Chinese to immigrate to Brazil and were the inventors of the horchata, which changed the pattern of street food in Brazil.
During the second wave of immigration, some Cantonese Taishan people worked in Portuguese bakeries and soon invented horchata, a crunchy and delicious food. Adding beef, chicken and cheese as fillings added to the taste. But eating horchata alone seemed to be missing something, and the people of Taishan soon discovered that horchata with a glass of freshly squeezed sugar cane juice was a perfect match.
Not only did the Taishanese think so, but the Brazilian owner also thought it was delicious. The people of Taishan suggested the owner to allow them to sell some horchata in the store for a try, and it didn’t take long for the horchata to spread all over Brazil. The store became a landmark for the Chinese in Brazil, or to be exact, for the Cantonese Taishan people in Brazil.
But Song didn’t take me to the Chinese corner store in the neighborhood, because “they must not charge me if I go there. Song took me to a Brazilian-owned street corner store. It was less than 5 RMB for a sizzling beef carpaccio with a glass of sweet and cold sugar cane juice.
The Taishan people’s horchata has been copied in large numbers, and more and more local Brazilians or immigrants from other countries are opening horchata stores. Horchata has plummeted in value from a dollar a piece in its heyday to about $0.30 a piece today.
“Twenty years ago it was still very profitable to do this.” Song recalled that at that time there were a large number of Taishan people smuggled to Brazil, do a full three years to pay off enough debt to the snakeheads, open a corner store on their own to start earning money. After hating the whole village to smuggle people to sell horchata.
3
After earning a certain amount of money in Brazil, solving the identity problem is the first priority.
Brazilian law leaves one way out for smugglers: as long as they give birth to a child in Brazil and become naturalized, the parents, as guardians, can obtain permanent residency in Brazil, regardless of their past. The other is to wait for Brazil’s “amnesty” every ten years or so to naturalize a group of “black” families.
“Over the years, I’ve seen too many parents use their children as tools.” In Song’s home, his wife, who is also a Hong Kong immigrant, confided in me her pain: “Too many Chinese have children to use, not to love.” Pointing to a photo on the wall of her home, she said that this family was an example.
The photo shows a mother and daughter who have typical Lingnan features. The girl is Mary, 19 years old and about to enter college, and the mother, Ying, is in her forties.
“For 19 years, they have never communicated verbally. It’s outrageous!” Sister Song is angry.
A Guangdong Taishan native’s Rio adventure
Ying, also a native of Taishan, came to Brazil in her early years to work as a helper in a corner store, following a fellow villager who was nearly 20 years older than her. She worked as a helper in a corner shop. During the heyday of the corner shop, she was able to make a lot of money. She soon found out that the man had several other girlfriends and children.
In order to spend all her waking hours earning money, Ying left her children with a Brazilian nanny. Sometimes for long periods of time without even asking. Throughout her childhood, Mary’s Brazilian nanny was her mother, and she spoke only Portuguese, not a word of Cantonese or Mandarin. As for how the nanny treated Mary, Ying didn’t care. In the opinion of many people who knew Ying in that neighborhood, “she only had eyes for money”.
Later, Ying gave birth to another daughter, who was also placed in the Brazilian nanny’s home and did not communicate with her. Now Ying lives with another man who is almost 60 years old, and Mary lives with them. Mary’s sister is with her biological father, living with his girlfriend and other siblings.
Three years ago, a North American church came to visit Song’s church, and they encouraged Mary to learn English. Now Mary is able to communicate in English at a basic level. She and I have become friends with each other in English. Before I returned to China, Mary invited me to her house.
Mary’s room was dark and messy. Her light had been broken for a long time and it was dark. “I’m used to it and just go in and sleep.”
She was studying for her make-up exams in the cramped living room; she had failed biology and chemistry this year. If she failed the make-up exams again, she would have no chance of going to college. Her dream, however, is to go to college for education.
I gave Mary a sculpture of a white bird from Nicaragua as a gift, and she was so happy that she took a picture with me holding the bird. I said to her, “You look like this bird to me, holy and beautiful.” The corners of her eyes got wet.
“In 19 years, I’ve never spoken to my mother.” Mary said. Throughout my interaction with Mary, her mother kept chiming in in Cantonese, “Are you from Beijing? Can I ask you to take me on a trip to Beijing next year?” She didn’t care what Mary and I were talking about.
Ying brought up a cut orange and pointed at Mary, “She never eats fruit.” I handed Mary a piece of orange and she ate it, saying it was very sweet. I asked her why she didn’t eat fruit and Mary said she liked it, she just never ate it from her mom, “I don’t know why.”
Mary said that her favorite classes were Psychology and Portuguese, and that she was doing well in English. During my conversations with her, Ying always complained, “That girl is so stupid! She doesn’t know how to speak Chinese! I asked Ying, “Why didn’t you teach her when she was little?” Ying didn’t answer. I asked Mary if she was interested in learning Chinese, and she said, “There is a chance, but I have never had the dynamics of Chinese.”
A second-generation local Chinese told me that, having been raised by Brazilian nannies since childhood, the language they hear, the food they eat, the way they think and do things are all Brazilian. They struggle with their identity and even feel shame when speaking Chinese, thinking that Chinese food tastes strange.
To make matters worse, while they feel that their parents do not love them, Brazilians are very warm and welcoming. They often kiss their children at home, saying “I love you” as they do so. In Brazil, this kind of parent-child behavior can be seen everywhere.
Ying’s main concern at the moment is to marry her two daughters to rich men as soon as possible.
4
The church Song founded has a total of 30 to 40 people, all from Taishan, Guangdong, engaged in the horn-boy business, and they enter Brazil through snakeheads, many of whom are in their early twenties.
Each snakehead charges a different fee, and it costs about 200,000 RMB per person to get a Taishan person to come to Brazil. Usually three years can pay off the head of the snake, after that the income will be their own. If you do well, you can also open your own store and get other people from your hometown through the snakeheads.
People who have applied for Brazil tourist visa know that Brazil tourist visa procedures are extremely cumbersome, and many people give up on Brazil tourism because of the difficulty of the visa. But in the eyes of the snakeheads, it is not difficult to get Brazilian customs, “as long as the corruption is not difficult to do”. One former snakehead told me that they have multiple flight lines into Brazil, and when they go through customs, they often buy the entire customs, and once people arrive, there are even special federal police officers to open the way and take the group through a special channel into Brazil.
“What if we get checked for identity on the streets of Brazil?” I asked the big brother of the snakehead. Big brother answered me
One word: “Money.” In fact, it does not take that much money to bribe the police, but some corner store employees are new to the market, do not know the market, immediately after the shock of offering hundreds of thousands of dollars. One way or another, not to mention the wealthy, but also raised the bribery threshold, and even become the target of robbery by locals.
The loss of money is nothing, sometimes also take a human life. Two years ago, A Rong’s husband was hacked to death, although we know who the killer is, but so far have not been able to arrest.
The incident took place in Ah Yung’s husband’s corner store, by the recently arrived fellow countrymen, using the kitchen knife. “Before the incident, they have noticed that the fellow countryman’s abnormal, he always said to the boss really want to kill you, but everyone did not take it seriously.” Sister Song introduced. The murderer is Ah Yung’s husband’s hair, the past is not worse than people, but see the former playmate now turned into a Brazilian corner boy big brother, can not help but eye red. “Why should I be your buddy?” Perhaps it was in this anger that he killed his boss.
The murderer absconded in a slum, where a Cantonese man who ran a corner store in the slum recognized him and informed Song. Pine immediately called the police, but this is how the police replied, “The slum has its own triad to maintain order, and we can’t even get into that slum unless you tell us exactly where he is hiding in the slum now, otherwise we will get lost even if we go in.”
And the slums here are often built on hills, where the paths often open up in the most incredible places, and when you go in you find another incredible piece of housing, like a maze, and even if you know how to get in, you may not know how to get out.
5
Before Song founded his church, there were no local Chinese groups or organizations. These young men, some of whom were in their adolescence, came to Brazil alone and could not resist the temptation of gambling and drugs, and even acted as triad fighters.
Song used to visit one corner store after another, order some drinks at each store, and talk about faith with the Chinese people in the store, but later got diabetes.
Song was mindful of the needs of each Taishan family. A certain corner store owner is going to jail for having a private slot machine; Mary’s relationship with her mother is strained; a certain couple has to send their child back home after having a baby and taking their identity; how to get new young people to learn Portuguese quickly; where to buy Chinese ingredients ……
Those Taishan people who choose to put down roots in Brazil often obtain permanent residency and some become Brazilian citizens. If the corner store is well run, the income is enough to buy a car and a house in the area. The Pine family stressed the importance of family education and encouraged these couples to spend more time with their children while running the corner store, and, “make sure to teach them Chinese and make sure to communicate with their children.”
Before the trip, Sister Song took me to the local supermarket to buy special products. On the way home, she introduced me to a couple from Shandong who had a stall downstairs. Sister Song only speaks Cantonese, she pulled me in as an interpreter, and the Shandong couple to talk. They are from Zibo, and someone from their hometown is doing a small business in Sao Paulo, so they introduced their family to them.
This stall was full of fake and copycat goods. The stall owner pointed out various metal chains, thick and thin, and asked me to pick whatever I wanted. But he was embarrassed and said, “These things lose their color and peel off in less than a month, they’re all fake.” I asked him if Brazilians like these, and he said business was good. They have a five-year-old daughter, born in Brazil.
Sitting at the far end of the stall was their 17-year-old son, who had just arrived from back home. He keeps staring at his phone. Sister-in-law Mats asked him if he was adjusting to Brazil, and he shook his head, “Not a word of Portuguese, no friends, very lonely.”
“I need to find someone to teach him Portuguese, he can’t stay alone like this.” Sister Pine pulled me home, she seemed to have an idea already.
I asked Pine what was different about being a pastor to these people. Pine said, “A shepherd has to be among the sheep, not outside the sheep pen.”
(All characters in this article are pseudonyms.)
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