I teach and research cultural studies, an area that, in Ien Ang’s analysis, “conceives of itself as a borderland formation, an open-ended and multivocal discursive formation.” Certainly, the implied transcultural and transnational nature of intellectual borderlands appeals greatly to someone who grew up in one culture and nation and works in another culture and carries a different passport. Furthermore, borderland existence, to borrow Ang’s term, promises liberation from a past perceived as burdened with the inauthentic baggage of colonial acculturation. Thus, I experience borderland existence both geographically and metaphorically. However, this liberation is short-lived when I start writing a memoir...

Fado singing actually sounded quite like Cantonese opera, I told myself as the train raced through the hilly countryside of Spain towards northern Portugal. Like José Saramago, I thought of myself as a pilgrim and a traveller, not a tourist. Like all pilgrims, I believed that I had a special relationship with the place I was visiting. There are invisible ties between Portugal and myself, not at all apparent to outsiders.

My birth certificate (Assentos de Nascimento), my identity card (Bilhete de Identidade), my fingerprints and other essential data are stored at a place called Conservatória dos Registos Centrais in...

Last night I dreamt of Vasco da Gama again. In my dream, I was not transported back to the sixteenth century, sailing across the restless oceans as Camoens tells us in The Lusiad. In my dream, da Gama wore a two-day stubble, dark against a strong jawline and framing a face with high cheekbones. He walked beside me, silently, along the Rua da Praia Grande, occasionally looking out at the bay, at a landscape changed and defaced by constructions of one kind or another. In my dream, we were in Macau, the Macau of the twentieth-first century.

I never understand...

If my father were still alive today, I wouldn’t be writing this narrative, nor would I be living in Canada. He would have risen in rank at the bank; I would have followed in the family tradition of going into banking. I might be significantly better off in material terms. But I would not have become an academic.

He was not an authoritarian. He wasn’t even a disciplinarian. But in the Chinese tradition, his words were law and I wouldn’t have gone against his wishes.

My father came from a landowning family who made money in gold and money exchange...

It can be said that I spent the first twenty years of my life — or at least the major part of these twenty years — wanting to be a different person. I didn’t want to live in Hong Kong. I didn’t like being Chinese. I couldn’t imagine myself becoming established and growing old in this city. I couldn’t get along with my mother and didn’t really want to have much to do with any of the many relatives on both sides of the family. Even good friends disappointed me in that, though they received the same education, read the same books,...