A student from the University of Macau (UM) won first prize in the 22nd Portuguese Speech Contest. The student delivered an insightful speech with a strong command of Portuguese and stood out among contestants from multiple higher education institutions.

The Portuguese Speech Contest, jointly organised by the UM Department of Portuguese and the Macao Foundation, aimed to encourage outstanding university students of Portuguese studies to apply their language skills beyond the classroom and improve their proficiency in Portuguese. The topic of this year’s contest was a line from the poetry collection Clepsidra by the renowned Portuguese poet Camilo Pessanha: ‘Vou a medo na aresta do futuro, embebido em saudades do presente.’ (I walk trembling on the edge of the future, lost in thoughts of the present).

In her speech, Wang Siyi, a student in the Department of Portuguese and Cheong Kun Lun College at UM, used her grandmother’s pepper shaker as a metaphor to explore the literary notion of ‘missing’. She described the feeling of missing someone as a subtle sadness that arrives before the loss actually occurs, as if the heart were anticipating it. She conveyed a thoughtful message to young people nowadays: to cherish the present and live fully in the moment rather than trying to hold on to it as time passes. Her perspective received unanimous praise from the jury, earning her first prize.

The jury comprised Gilberto Lopes, director of Portuguese news and programmes at TDM; Miguel de Senna Fernandes, lawyer and president of the Association for the Promotion of Macanese Education (Associação Promotora da Instrução dos Macaenses), and Vítor Rebelo, senior journalist at Jornal Tribuna de Macau. The jury evaluated the contestants based on several criteria, including relevance to the topic, structure and coherence, language proficiency, delivery, and intonation and presentation. They then selected the winners of the first, second, and third prizes.

The contest attracted participants from UM, Macao Polytechnic University, Macau University of Science and Technology (MUST), and City University of Macau. Wang Siyi, a UM student, received first prize from the Macao Foundation. Wan Yushen, a MUST student, received second prize from Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU) and Jornal Tribuna de Macau. Lai Huangbin, also a MUST student, received third prize from the Orient Foundation and BNU.