My life: Carlos Marreiros
The Macanese architect, artist, poet and cultural conservationist tells Catharine Nicol about his love for his hometown
I can speak Cantonese. My mother's mother is Chinese, my mother is Eurasian, my father European. My father is a newcomer, he only came (to Macau) in the 1950s; but on my mother's side, her father was Portuguese, born in Macau, and his family has lived in Macau for 200 years. I was born here and studied at school in Macau and university in Europe. I came back in 1983 (to work on the government-run Committee for the Defence of the Architectural, Environmental and Cultural Heritage). The first regulations in Macau in the modern sense started in 1983, 1984. I was in the team to draft the new regulations of heritage preservation and other legal amendments.