In the last two posts, we have seen, from archival materials and participant observations, that the belief and festivity of Tou-Tei expresses its malleability and multivalence in its age-long continuous practice and goes beyond its label as a heritage and merges with people’s lives in Macau. In the following space, we close up to Tou-Tei’s relationship with the people, bringing up the dimension of memory in reading how the past has continued into the present, and how heritage is about compatibility rather than preservation.

“Participating in the festivity is essentially a journey to retrieve memories,” Peter, a middle-aged core member of the general committee of Cheok Chai Yuen Tou-Tei temple, told me.* Besides him, everyone with whom I interacted would just start talking about their memories during these six days of celebration:

“His grandpa was organising all the statuettes…”

“I used to learn stuff from his mother…”

“He used to prepare all the suckling pigs, but now, there is a problem…”

The festivity is as if it were a huge event where people just sit down and tell stories. But it is this capacity for memory-sharing that holds people together, sprinkling extra flavours for the festivity. Reflecting on the “Street Banquet”, Peter continued,

Seeing each other’s old friends, seeing everyone is here, healthy and sound…One can bicker, one can eat; one can play around and enjoy oneself…We return to dine because we want to meet our old friends…to look at some old images, to look at some old spaces, old places, to conjure a memory

 John, another core member and former neighbour, in his thirties, reflected on the effect of the yearly celebration on his sense of the passage of time:

"When I was small, I always knew that during this period of the year, my parents would come down and get roasted suckling pig for us. I never knew why it was so, but I knew that, ah, a year had passed. This period of the year has always been marked with a different vibe, which has finally drawn me into active participation in this celebration."

Memory is, thus, somehow latent, but such latency is nevertheless not merely passive: it can induce later meaning-making and actions. In a sense, it is also the adaptation of a piece of memory that allows someone to carry out a present action. In Peter’s testimony, it is the wish to refresh one’s memory that people come back to the neighbourhood annually; in John’s case, it is the retrospection of one’s past that provides him with an incentive to participate.

Reflecting on what effect the yearly celebration has on the people, Peter told me:

"My family stayed within this neighbourhood for almost one hundred years. Elderly people always talked about Tou-Tei, and I saw people coming to the temple day after day, year after year. Going to the temple and helping in the celebration have also become a part of my life. You see, the celebration of Tou-Tei’s birthday is no mere ceremonial ritual, but a chance for our neighbours to repeat what is always part of their life and habits."

Pondering upon the customs of Tou-Tei being a piece of heritage, John asserted:

"Though now the celebration of Tou-Tei’s birthday has been enlisted as an intangible cultural heritage of Macau and of China, I don’t think that only one thing happening per year would make that thing become heritage. People come and stay around the temple, chatting with people you meet by chance; volunteers take care of the incense burners and clean the altar table; seniors sing and rehearse plays regularly. I would just say that all these social tidings culminate at Tou-Tei’s birthday…which also gives substance to all these daily interactions and activities."

Prolonged and daily practices allow for the continuity of certain pieces of memory—in this case, the neighbour’s memory of the neighbourhood, the customs of Tou-Tei, and the communal affection in between—and that is precisely what I have reasoned in the last blogpost as the life of heritage, a life that overlaps with people’s own lives. This also reflects the delicate relationship between people’s sense- and memory-making of Tou-Tei and the sustenance of the practice of Tou-Tei.

John put it this way:

"No one really knows how and why such rituals have to be performed like that; we remember how it works because people around us do it in certain ways. As customs are brittle, they acquire support from the communal understanding of those customs. They probably have no inherent rules, but they have to be comprehended in some way."

Perhaps no one really remembers how certain rituals have to be done in certain ways. No one would go so deep as to understand the whole cosmology of “Sky and Land” to go to Tou-Tei shrines now, and it equally does not make sense to understand the metaphor of celestial governance at a time when there is no more Heavenly Son and no soil to plough. But the practice of Tou-Tei sustains and evolves because those who actively participate make sense of it according to their own ideas and experiences. Meanings are given to how people remember the past, and practise the past as habits and customs in the present. But since everyone’s memories and habits are different, that is why customs are brittle, as John observed.

The practice of Tou-Tei may prescribe no inherent rules, no procedures. But every day, people gather around the temple and talk a little bit about it; they bow at their familiar niches a little bit; every year, people gather around and plan every bit of it. The continuous practice, therefore, depends on all these everyday experiences of Tou-Tei.

Perhaps, though denoting an idea of “soil” and “land”, Tou-Tei migrates along and sediments with those who believe in and remember them. Tou-Tei not only migrates across time and space, but also across memories and meanings. Migratory, fluid and organic as Tou-Tei is, Tou-Tei teaches us how heritage can reach today and how the time past can be remembered, not as defined by a specific aspect of an item nor as narrated in a certain discourse, but by how a group of people can always relate to that item or that period of time, and how that affords affective remembrance within the group of people.

* The names given here are pseudonyms; the participants gave consent to participation in the interviews and the use of transcriptions on the condition of anonymity.