What about Macao's perspective?
After graduating from university, Lam decided to return to his old high school, Pooi To Middle School, to teach history. Like many history teachers in Macao, Lam soon found himself frustrated by the lack of locally oriented teaching materials.
"Macao's history textbooks come from all over the place--Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. When students here study history, they're seeing it through outsiders' eyes, which leads the younger generation to feel more confused about and distant from their own home."
As Lam points out, despite all being Chinese-speaking territories, these three sources all have dramatically different takes on modern Chinese history.
"Take the Boxer Rebellion, for example--Hong Kong texts take the British perspective, considering the Boxers violent criminals; the Chinese, however, view them as patriots and heroes of anti-imperialism. Another example is how Chiang Kai-shek's regime is called 'reactionary' in Chinese textbooks, while Taiwanese books refer to Communist China as 'communist bandits.'"
With Pooi To Middle School leaning more to the Chinese sources, as a student Lam became more familiar with the Chinese perspective on history. "I even, completely unawares, took to viewing Macao from the Chinese perspective, as an outlying region, forgetting I was Macanese born and raised," he admits.
While teaching a class on the First Opium War in 2001, Lam recalls that one student "stuck up his hand and asked, 'So what did Lin Zexu do here in Macao?'"
Lin Zexu's prohibition on opium was the catalyst for the First Opium War. At the time, Macao was a military mobilization center for the United Kingdom, and according to documents, after confiscating and destroying opium in the Guangdong town of Humen, in 1839 Lin traveled to Macao for an inspection, meeting with the Portuguese commissioner at Lin Fung Temple to communicate his anti-opium position and ordering the expulsion of British opium traders. "But the textbooks only discussed the positions of Lin and the British, with not so much as a mention of what Lin did in Macao."
Lam, driven by an awareness of the importance of history lessons being connected to students' lives, asked the principal to establish the "Pooi To History Association" to give a boost to more locally oriented history education. To that end, Lam began using his weekends and holidays to lead students on trips to various historical sites around Macao, helping them investigate the aspects of Macao's identity that had been overlooked by their textbooks.
As well as these field trips, "Mr. Lam has worked hard to gather together relevant books, such as Anecdotes from Macao, Records of Macao, and Ancient and Modern Macao, for use alongside the textbooks from China for contrast and reference," says one of Lam's colleagues and fellow Pooi To alumnus, Tam Hiu Wai.
"History is more than a simple academic exercise; it's a crucial means for creating a common societal consciousness. It's not just some step on the ladder up through the school system where just memorizing names, dates, and places by rote is good enough," says Lam.