The Migration

When I was born my father Francis was a clerk working in the North Point Stores of the Hong Kong Electric Company. My grandfather (“Grampapa”) was offered two positions for his sons: one was with Hong Kong Electric and the other was with Hong Kong Bank. My father being the eldest got to choose first, so he chose the job with Hong Kong Electric where he worked until he retired. My father’s brother Eric took the job with Hong Kong Bank where he worked until the family migrated to America.

I remember that day well. We were able to go on board ship until the ship’s horn sounded. I stood tearfully on the docks waving my cousins goodbye. Eric Junior and I were very close. I was eleven years old at the time, Junior was nine.

At the time we did not understand why we had to be separated and we did not know if we would meet again, despite the assurances from my father that one day we too would go to live in America.

We never made it to live in America. My father regretted that all his life and he was only thankful that his family who had emigrated there were strong enough correspondents to keep the family link alive, although he was always sentimental receiving their letters.

Twelve years passed before I could travel to America on my way to settle in New Zealand with my husband.

It was then that I was able to see my Grampapa and my Avo, my three aunties Dorothy, Mildred and Yvonne, and my Uncle Eric who was by then widowed, and my cousins who I thought I would never see again.

Dorothy recollects: "I left Hong Kong in January 1959 and arrived in America in February 1959. The day I left Hong Kong I stood on deck “bawling” away watching the rest of the family chug back to the Hong Kong shore in a “walla walla” . I wore my beautiful light blue warm suit. The ship was a brand new Norweigan Freighter named the Ivarian and it was on its maiden voyage."

Dorothy was our “Family Adventurer”. She was the first in the family to venture to the New World. Mildred went to America ten months later to join her. Aunty Dorothy went first because she had a girlfriend living there who sponsored her and she lived with her girlfriend's family for six months before finding a place of her own with enough room for Mildred. She also went to pave the way for Grampapa and Avo because the quota system then did not allow too many visas for Portuguese people worldwide, and both Grampapa and Avo who were born in Macau would have had to wait twenty years for a visa. Being born in Hong Kong, she went under the British quota which had a lot of visas worldwide and as the American Vice-Consul suggested, she was single, of age, had working skills and would not be a burden on the American taxpayers.

It took three weeks to sail from Hong Kong to San Francisco because it stopped along the way to pick up fresh tuna in Taiwan and Japan to bring to America for canning. There were only seven passengers and Aunty Dorothy was the youngest at age twenty-five. She took her friend's advice to travel by freighter instead of the President Lines but it was a mistake because it was too lonely for someone so green and travelling alone for the first time in her life. The older Americans were very nice and took her under their wings and she saw a lot of Taiwan and Japan. One good thing was the food on board. There were three Chinese cooks on board and the passengers ate like kings. Aunty Dorothy was so skinny in those days that they had to put a long bolster under her mattress and she slept in the V of the mattress against the wall because every time the ship rolled she landed on the floor. One night her room-mate opened the porthole and when the ship rolled, half the ocean poured into the cabin. Aunty Dorothy became a US citizen after five years' residency which was the required waiting time. She was then able to sponsor Grampapa and Avo who joined her a year later.

Aunty Mildred left Hong Kong on the MS Troubador in September 1959. She was 24 at the time. The ship was bound for San Francisco but they had a strike so a pilot ship pulled up alongside and told them to divert to Los Angeles. Aunty Mildred said she was teary-eyed, shook up and scared as a kitten. She was accompanied by two girlfriends, sisters Betty and Teresa Marcal, the sisters of Marie Marcal Xavier, my mother's best friend. They were not worried because they had family in Los Angeles who could take care of them - the Justo Sequeira family who are very nice people.

Meanwhile Mildred was in a tizzy not knowing what was going to happen to her. So she talked to Aunty Dorothy ship-to-shore for the first time in her life - a funny experience as she didn't know how to communicate in this fashion as it was not like a phone. Aunty Dorothy told her not to worry. When she arrived in Los Angeles the Sequeira family insisted she stay with them also and see Los Angeles before going up to San Francisco. They took her to see Disneyland, Hollywood and all the sites. She spent five days there and visited my mother's sister Mercedes and her husband Reggie Baptista. That was when she tried their recipe for "Limao Timor".

Aunty Mildred fell in love with Los Angeles so that she didn't like San Francisco when she went there because the houses were all stuck together and the weather was cold. But after a year there, San Francisco grew on her and it became home.

Mildred sponsored Uncle Eric and his family.

That type of visa quota system changed when President Johnson came upon the scene in the mid-60's which was why Yvonne wrote to Lady Byrd-Johnson in order to get in.

Aunty Yvonne and Uncle Robert left Hong Kong in 1963 and immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In 1967 Yvonne and Robert immigrated to San Francisco. At the time it was very difficult to enter the United States because quotas for those born in Hong Kong were limited.

A bright idea struck the Rozarios and they decided to write to Lady Bird-Johnson, the then First Lady of the United States, and as a result President Johnson instructed the American Consulate in Vancouver to grant them special visas for entry into the United States.

Shortly thereafter, my Grampapa and my Avo went to live in America too. Uncle Eric and his family joined the others, sailing on the President Wilson. They arrived in San Francisco in January 1965.

My father Francis was therefore the last remaining member of his family in Hong Kong. He continued to work hard to bring up his young family. We continued to live in the Hongkong Electric Staff Quarters at 332 Fortress Hill, an apartment Grampapa passed to him. I remember the day Grampapa gave us his television set. It was the only television set in the whole block of flats and the neighbours’ children all piled in to watch The Lone Ranger with us, in black and white, of course. Because we no longer had any of my father’s family left in Hong Kong, we grew close to my mother Aida’s family. We spent Christmases and saw in the New Years in together.

My father was very much an outdoors man and he organised many family camping trips to Silvermine Bay and Pui O on Lantau Island. We used to play card games while on the three-hour ferry trip. Once he also hired a tour bus to Thirteen-and-a-Half-Mile Beach and included the Fernandes children. Grand Uncle Anibal had eleven children and they would take turns to come with us.

In the years that followed, one by one the families we knew left Hong Kong so that only our family and the Sousa family were left.

One of my most memorable outings with the Sousa’s was when my father took us on a launch trip in the Hong Kong Electric “Delta”. We continued our practice of carrying pots of 'aros gordo' and cooked food with us on our adventure.

When I married a New Zealander and left Hong Kong in 1975, my parents, brother and sisters remained behind.

Having failed in his attempts to take the family to America due to corruption in Hong Kong at the time, my father said he would go and live in Portugal when he retired.

So it was, that after 40 years working for the Hong Kong Electric Company, my father retired as Deputy Manager.

The management and staff gave him a grand farewell dinner for his years of loyal service to the company. It was a great honour for him as my grandfather also worked for Hong Kong Electric before retiring to go overseas. In June 1985, the family left Hong Kong for Portugal.

On the way there, they stopped over in England to visit my father’s cousin Betty White.

The apartment he bought was in Faro, which is the capital city of the Algarve region. The building was called “Tridente” because of its three-cornered shape and it was newly built. He also toured Spain across the border. His sisters from America went to visit him there.

However, as fate would have it, the family felt prejudiced against and did not feel welcome in the country of their heritage.

They began to feel homesick so that after 16 months in Portugal, my father found himself returning home with his family to Hong Kong.

Unfortunately, he was cheated by a Chinese man out of the proceeds of the sale of his Faro apartment and therefore endured the difficult years in Hong Kong that followed. This was when I brought my sisters out to New Zealand one by one so that we could sponsor our parents.

Portugal had been my father’s dream after an earlier aborted attempt to emigrate to America to join his family due to corruption in the Hong Kong immigration system.

Immigrating anywhere in the world has never been easy and even when my parents and sisters came to New Zealand, we had to fight a four-year battle with the immigration authorities and through the courts before they could remain in this country.

It was therefore natural that my father felt anger at being so outcast from the ports of this world, so that in the last years of his life, his memories returned to his childhood, to the homes and the people he knew and loved in Hong Kong and Macau – to a bygone era to which we will never be able to return.

And so, in the last part of his life, he asked me to write this book for him, remembering…

By introducing the members of our family in the following chapters, I hope to share with you the rich tapestry of our lives, in tribute to my father and my grandfather.

Zinha Ribeiro