Prelude
“This bread is as dry as a stick,” Sandra said despondently.
It’s strange-the thoughts that go through your head on a holiday. While one should be inspired by new culture, architecture and sheer joy of traveling, it is the hum-drum trivialities that tend to occupy your mind for a disconcertingly large part of the day. The same day-to-day concerns that occupy your mind during the working week tend to rear their ugly heads when you’re away as well.
It was the same from the very beginning of the trip. Even on the flight from Bangkok to Macao, when I should have been salivating at the thought of one month exploring China, I found myself fixated by a group of Arab travelers sitting across the aisle from me. However, it would have been difficult not to notice them, as they were so loud and brash. They spent the flight shouting, waving their arms about and seemed incapable of sitting down, like noisy children in a fairground Once or twice I dozed off in the surprisingly comfortable chair, but I jolted back to consciousness by someone screaming in my ear. At least, it felt like he was bellowing at me, but as I wiped the drool from my chin, I noticed that the man with a moustache as large as a hedge, was, in fact, gesticulating wildly at the at the man in the cheap suit behind him, who also sported a moustache that looked like it was ready for an Olympic challenge in the ‘Thickest Moustache in the World’ competition. If there had been any wind on the plane, I’m sure it would have danced along with it. There were three moustaches altogether, and behind them a group of young Chinese girls, in garish costumes and of questionably virtue, who hung back and waited for their sponsors to throw some idiotic witticism in their direction, and dutifully replied with some forced giggling. Are these girls trained in giggling and fawning, I wondered, or do they just pick it up along the way?
The other Chinese and Thai-Chinese on the flight pretended not to notice these shenanigans, but they only ‘seemed’ not to notice. Asians, in general, do not show emotions as blatantly as westerners do. They consider it uncouth. However, small gestures are permitted to show their displeasure, such as a slight downturning of the mouth, and a tiny arching away of the body and not looking in the direction of the offending behaviour.
The Chinese, I have heard, view the world in terms of a hierarchy of races, much as the old imperialists did, except they see themselves at the summit, rich whites immediately behind them, other Asian groups next, and blacks and Arabs at the bottom. The idea of Arab men openly consorting with Chinese girls was probably a very unpleasant sight to them, especially when you remember that open signs of affection, even between ‘pure race’ Chinese couples, are highly frowned upon.
As China rapidly resumes its historical place as the world’s most powerful country, the citizens of the ‘Middle Kingdom’ will, I suspect, show their hidden contempt for other cultures more clearly, and their body language may become more blatant. It will still be missed, no doubt, by myopic Westerners, who are blind to all but the most blatant gestures. Can you imagine, for example, Eminem or some other rapper, indicating his contempt for modern society by turning the edges of his mouth down slightly and refusing to make eye-contact with the camera?
But to return to my original point, it is the hum-drum, day-to-day concerns that most conscious though on any holiday, however much you’d like to believe you’re on some epic adventure. At this very moment, for example, I’m sitting in the very centre of Macao, Asia’s first colony, on a bright morning. I should be noticing the tiny pebbled paving stones and the centuries old patters that have been laid into them; I should be marveling at the Portuguese architecture and the fascinating history of the place; my attention should be grabbed by the 400-year fusion of European and Asian cultures.
I should be, but I’m not. My mind’s preoccupied by the pain in my hand brought on my writing with a pen. I’ve been using a keyboard for so long that p pen feels like a pickaxe in my paw, an alien stick-like object I can’t control properly. I’ve also got a dodgy stomach brought on by cheap wine and a gorgonzola pizza from last night vying for my attention and clouding my thoughts.
Most of all though, I’m preoccupied by a manager who’s hovering vulture-like around my table, looking nervously at my nearly empty latte and wishing me gone. To add insult to injury, I’m in one of the comfy chairs, the type that don’t induce pain and numbing of the backside after twenty minutes, so she knows I could lounge around here all day if I wanted to. All these chains, from McDonalds upwards, only want you to stay for a limited amount of time, just long enough to shovel their pre-packaged poison into your bleeding stomach, and then they demand you return to whatever box you came from ASAP. They are appalled by the idea of customers loitering in their domain. I’m sure that, at the executive level, there are graphs with the x-axis representing the amount of time a wastrel like me leaves his useless ass parked in a comfy chair, and the y-axis showing the profitability of that said chair during a given time frame.
Of course, they can never openly admit this. After all, Starbucks, as their advertising constantly reminds me, is only in the café business because of their love affair with coffee, and the money aspect doesn’t bother them at all. Indeed, they’re practically a charitable institution. Following the recent tsunami catastrophe, they donated 10 per cent of the profits from their most expensive brand of coffee, a brand I’ve yet to see anyone order, to Tsunami relief efforts. It was just for one day, of course, but you can’t question their golden heart is in the right place. Nevermind that their advertising for this glorious deed probably exceeded the actual money donated. Nevertheless, they can’t ask me to leave, but the manager will keep eyeing me nervously.
Hum… I think I’ll really piss her off by moving to another chair, a smoking chair, and bring my cold and nearly empty cup with me. As long as I don’t actually finish the cold latte, she can’t ask me to leave. Ha Ha, the taste of victory-this is how Chairman Mao must have felt after the Long March. As I began by saying, it’s difficult not to fixate on the irrelevant, so very difficult.
Macao
Macao, or Ao Men in Chinese, is now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China, like Hong Kong. It was the world’s first Asian colony, and for 400 years the Portuguese held sway, but they were always a racial minority, and in the 20th century they rule was nominal and ghost like. The old town still looks remarkably Portuguese, except that 98 per cent of its inhabitants are Chinese.
It still has its own currency, the Pataca, and-nominally at least-its own local government, but in reality, Beijing calls all the shots. It’s also got the highest population density of any city on earth. If all the people who live here, about half a million, tried to leave their tower blocks and stand in what little pavement its 25 km squared offers, they’d kill each other in the resulting squash. Thankfully, it’s never occurred to the Macanese to do this. It would be like this in most cities, I suppose. We’ve all got so used to living in boxes that ‘outside’ is merely a medium to get from one box to another. To succeed in life is to live in a bigger box. We’ve all forgotten that ‘outside’ is where we belong.
Macao’s current ‘raison d’etre’ is tourism and gambling. Casinos are illegal in Hong Kong and China, so the weekend sees ferry loads of Hong Kongers and mainlanders descend on the roulette wheels and black jack tables of Macao’s many casinos to place their bets. I went to one of them once, the Lisboa, one of Macao’s largest, replete with garish lighting and well-worn, but once plush carpets. What I remember most was the air of desperation in the place. It was almost palpable. The gamblers look like drug addicts desperately craving their next fix. I’ve never seen a crack den, of course, but I imagine they have the same atmosphere. Of course, there aren’t any flashing lights, expensive suits or cocktail waitresses to distract you in a crack den, but the psychological cues and triggers are fundamentally the same.
I didn’t do any gambling in the Lisboa. In fact, I have never gambled. I could never see the point of it, as the ‘house’ always wins. The gambler is doomed to failure. The facts are irrefutable, so why anyone gambles, and why the Chinese in particular-surely the world’s most logical and calculating race-are so addicted to gambling is a mystery to me. Psychologists, or rather behavioural psychologists, argue that gambling is addictive because of the power of variable return reinforcement schedules. To oversimplify, the possibility of short term reinforcement (winning one game of cards) outweighs the lack of long-term reinforcement (eventually losing your money, your rings, your car and your house). Other mammals, from rats to republicans, demonstrate this same tendency. We are wired to think short-term, it would appear. This might also explain why we are making our planet uninhabitably polluted so we can drive large pieces of metal from one box to another. A depressing thought really.
But again, I digress. The SAR of Macao is divided into three areas; Macao proper, Taipa and Coloane. Actually, recent extensive land reclamation makes the word ‘islands’ somewhat misleading. Macao proper contains the old town and the historic heart of the city, Placa del Leal Senado. It’s a beautiful old Portuguese square with white and black cobblestones inlaid with ships and other patterns, and over the exquisite square 18th/19th century Latin European buildings have been carefully preserved. At one end of the square, an old church remains open for business, but most of the business these days is not the devout, but the hapless tourist. Now and then, however, an aging Portuguese resident ambles in, kneels and prays in a pew, temporarily oblivious to the end of the world she had known. The old town only extends for a few blocks and is rapidly swallowed up by massive, and massively ugly, tower blocks. During World War 2 and the Chinese civil war, refugee numbers massively swelled the city’s previously tiny population, and the government could either let them die on the street or build high rise monstrosities to house them all. I guess if you’re dying on the street, a high rise monstrosity looks pretty good. Land pressures mean the streets are narrow but somehow not too clogged with traffic, as Macao is small enough to make a car completely unnecessary.
Near the end of the old town, an old fort, Monte Fort, still stands on top of a hill and its cannons and watchtowers appear to guard the city. Beside the fort, the front of St Paul’s Cathedral, Macao’s emblem, somehow remains standing, but the rest of the cathedral was destroyed by a massive earthquake. This is taken by some as miraculous, but I fail to see how 90 per cent of a church collapsing, killing those inside, and a piece of it not falling down, can be seen as divine intervention.
In the distance, an old lighthouse stands on a distant hill, and if you look in another direction, China proper builds itself from farmland to city, skipping the intermediary village and town stages, with cranes and sheer determination. The polluted brown grey waters of the Pear River delta discolour the sea, and are further evidence that the China, the ‘sleeping dragon’ is waking up.
In the afternoon, we headed down to Coloane, Macao’s wooded island park for a small hike. The minibus from central Macao only costs 5 Patacas (50 cent) and if you’re quick, and a little bit childish, you can sit up front next to the driver, in what must be the only bus ride in the world that feels like being in a grand prix. The engine roars, and the minibus swerves to and fro around the narrow streets.
The strange thing is that this park/island is almost always empty. Only about 2000 people live there, and since new construction is prohibited, the rest remains unspoilt, However, on our hike, we only came across a couple of other people there. |
