Then & Now | Remembering Sonny Sales – a true Hong Kong patriot, 1920-2020

Sales was a politically talented, supremely civic minded – and occasionally divisive – local legend

He personally negotiated the release of Hong Kong athletes taken hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics

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Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, popularly known as Sonny, in 1983. Photo: SCMP

Jason Wordie

Published: 8:30am, 19 Mar 2020Updated: 9:53am, 19 Mar 2020

Local Portuguese community leader Arnaldo de Oliveira Sales, popularly known as Sonny, who recently died aged 100, was a prominent, and intermittently polarising, figure in Hong Kong’s wider community life for more than 60 years.

Born in 1920 on Shamian, the Anglo-French concession island in Canton (Guangzhou), Sales was educated at La Salle College in Kowloon, and – like many among Hong Kong’s Portuguese community – spent the Pacific war years as a refugee in neutral Macau. He later married Edith Nolasco da Silva, an heiress and a member of one of Macau’s wealthiest Macanese families; they had no children, and she died in 2006.

Sales was an example of a type once widely found among Macanese – and Filipino – cultures; the mestizo-branco (“mixed-white”) who rose to social prominence and community influence in race-conscious colonial or semi-colonial societies. In both of these groups, those who oriented towards their Western side – and could pass for white, as Sales did – tended to reach higher positions of power and influence than those of mestizo-Asiatico (“mixed-Asian”) appearance.

Sporting interests – field hockey, in particular – were a lifelong passion. For decades, he chaired the Victoria Recreation Club – Hong Kong’s oldest sporting club, established in 1849; its magnificent Sai Kung venue exists because of him. Sales’ iron-fisted determination ensured that Hong Kong competed as a separate international Olympic entity from the rest of China.

Negotiators talk to a Palestinian hostage-taker at the Munich Olympic Village on September 5, 1972. Photo: AFP

A brave man, he personally enabled the release of Hong Kong team members taken hostage by Palestinians at the 1972 Munich Olympics. He did this through Cantonese fluency – a skill he tended to keep quiet – by telling them to slip away. His spoken Portuguese had a pronounced British accent; politically, he remained a lifelong admirer of Portugal’s fascist dictator António Salazar.