A tiny 9 square kilometer city containing half a million residents Macau (muh-cow) makes a charming place for an evening stroll in mid-March, provided you watch out for the killer buses rounding the corners of narrow streets at high speeds.
It is also an exceedingly strange place. Settled and colonized by the Portuguese in the 16th century and "returned" to China in 1999, it has seen ten years of growth and change even more dramatic than that occurring on the mainland. Numbers tell part of the story: in two of the last ten years economic growth has approached an unbelievable 30% (4% is typically considered healthy and stable). Geography tells another: "reclaimed land" has more than doubled the area of peninsular Macau (its landmark lighthouse is now quite far from the coast), and the islands of Taipa and Coloane, shown as separate below, have recently been completely conjoined.
Although an extreme case in many ways, Macau's extraordinary history and contemporary situation tell us many things about the big world we are living in. I would love to teach a class someday that used the city as a way of understanding the big trends of the last several hundred years. I would begin by talking about Macau as a trade center, a missionary outpost, and a Portuguese colony. The area's history complicates the mistaken assumption that globalization is somehow new: there was trade, cultural and linguistic exchange, and even frequent intermarriage between Indian, Malaysian, Portuguese, Chinese, and other national groups several hundred years ago. Macanese food epitomizes this mixture, featuring paella-like seafood dishes, Indian spices, delicious egg tarts, and lots of Chinese vegetables.
I would also explore how Macau becoming a Portuguese colony and Hong Kong becoming a British colony illustrate the justifiable fear of early 20th century Chinese citizens that their nation would be carved up by foreign powers as well as the widespread contemporary belief that China's late development is greatly due to the unfair treaties and punitive trade policies forced on the young nation by colonial powers.
Colonialism, like feudalism, sounds like something that happened long ago, but that is more a reflection of what we would prefer to believe than the truth. In a Macau drugstore, a security guard noticed the faded henna on my feet and asked me where I was from and where I had been traveling. He was an economic migrant from the Philippines, which he called with a chuckle a "former colony" of my country. He had worked near one of the Philippines many American military bases before it was closed and had been earning remittance money in Macau for four years now. He recognized the henna because he said Indian migrants in the Philippines often hang out on the beaches offering to paint young backpackers with it. This is not what we usually think of when we conceptualize globalization.
Rapid economic development has attracted a steady stream of international migrant labor to Macau to build hotels, infrastructure, and flashy new casinos, and to work in the ever-growing service sector. Gambling revenues make up a huge percentage of total government revenue and the excess in funds has lately ensured that cultural institutions (museums, public art, architectural heritage) libraries and education have been heavily invested in. Our group was treated to many tours and talks about all the work underway to protect and preserve cultural heritage, from listing the city as a UNESCO world heritage site and the old Macau patois as an endangered language, to restoring old buildings, to developing cultural education programs for schoolchildren. This is all good news but it is worthwhile to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. There would be no money for these programs without the casinos, and there would be no casinos without the wealth coming from the mainland with all its new billionaire industrialists and developers. It's hardly the Butterfly Effect but China's growth has changed Asia in a thousand tiny ways we hardly ever see.
We are so awfully accustomed to the discourse that it seems obvious that money ought to be invested in preserving cultural heritage that will attract tourist dollars but I always like to ask those uncomfortable questions that force us to see that things haven't always been this way and that in fact they could be otherwise. At other times in human history structures like St. Paul's Cathedral from the 17th century
were built for the glory of god (or perhaps the glory of the religious men and benefactors who were believed to be the gateway to god); three years ago in Beijing many a stadium was constructed to celebrate the nation on the global stage and no cost was spared. I'm not saying these reasons are superior to the justification that capital ought to be invested that it might attract more [tourist] capital, only that we ought to pay attention to what we, as societies, think worthwhile and that there are other justifications for social and government expenditure than the almighty dollar/yuan.
And the last lesson on the contemporary world I took from Macau? We, the human race, are still extremely far from being post-nation, post-race, post-gender, post-ideology, end of history, etc.
It would be tempting to see the apparent melting pot of Macau as the future: in that tiny place, after all, there have been hundreds of years of cultural coexistence and intermarriage, not to mention the fascinating objects and delicious foods that result from intense cultural interaction. The head of the cultural heritage preservation office, for instance, is originally from Scotland, but now speaks Portuguese, Cantonese, and Mandarin as well and has lived in Macau for decades with her Chinese husband and their children.
There appears to be more openness and tolerance in the port cities of the South China Sea than in the rest of the continent but even if race has become less of a focal point for difference and hierarchy (though I don't know if my friend the Filipino security guard would agree) it has been supplanted by concerns with national origin. The Macanese are far less concerned with skin color than with political ideology, as 40% of the city's infants were born of mainland mothers and are seen as likely to grow up with views and values similar to them. The days of self-administration, civil rights, and open political criticism may be short, illustrating that in Macau, as in the whole of this interconnected, globalizing world, national origin is becoming more, not less, significant.
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Okay, class dismissed! you can look at the pictures now...
Yes, that is a public dog toilet. What a civilized place!
It was surprisingly touching how many of the graves and tombs had been sponsored by the shipmates (and in at least one case, "messmates") and friends of the deceased, rather altering my image of sailors as callous "yo ho ho and a bottle of rum" types. But maybe that's just pirates; maybe sailors have been gentlemanly folks all along.
