A short story by Hu Xudong originally published in Rule of Three, a book that brought together the texts written by the authors / guests of the 3rd edition of The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival in 2014.
It was purely coincidental. I had picked up the Portuguese language during my stay in Brazil a decade ago, as I turned thirty, and, ever since returning to China, the name Macau had taken on a whole new meaning for me. I was conscious of the fact that one could experience that same Portuguese language there, despite the notable variations between the European and Brazilian dialects, and that it was somehow natural for two Portuguese speakers to encounter one another there, while anywhere else in East Asia it would feel rather like a rendezvous between spies. Before leaving Brazil I had read China Tropical by Gilberto Freyre, the founding father of the Brazilian social sciences, in which he presents a perspective on the historical influences that flowed from Macau to colonial Brazil, and, informed by this concept of China Tropical, my urge to visit Macau was a natural outgrowth of my yearning for Brazil. Nevertheless my hoped-for trip there would be postponed time and again. Of the places often crudely bundled together in Mainland China under the heading “HK/MAC/TW”, I had made seven trips to Taiwan and five to Hong Kong by 2013 but still hadn’t set foot in Macau, despite my having more desire and reason to do so. I have made up for that fact, however, since 2013, with several visits to this magical conduit connecting China and the Lusophone world.
My long-held image of Macau as an East Asian reflection of the Portuguese world clashed violently with the more overwhelming, chaotic reality I encountered, cluttered with tourists. As a person who hasn't the slightest interest in gambling, I would often experience a sense of involuntary teleportation when passing through the eerie environs of the Grand Lisboa and Venetian casinos. An invisible screen would pop up in my head: “An error has occurred. Wrong game. Initialising.” Despite Macau’s small size, I often took advantage of the free transportation, using the so-called “good fortune” shuttles that travel between the hotels and the major casinos, but riding a bus full of elated, ambitious warriors eager to roll the dice only exacerbated my disapproval. The fact is there are plenty of places to visit that aren’t about making easy money: Senado Square, the Dom Pedro V Theatre, Camões Garden, Old Taipa. The prevailing architectural beauty at these sites resonates with the Macau I have always imagined, though they are always “people mountain, people sea”. Tuxing Sun’s ability to burrow underground would come in handy, particularly in front of the Ruins of St. Paul’s.
Thanks to an invitation from the Macau Literary Festival in the spring of 2014, I was offered another chance to explore Macau. Apart from my own appearances in the festival, and attending the rest of the exciting programme arranged by the organisers, I spent the time I had to myself frequenting areas of the Macau peninsula and Taipa that have nothing to do with shopping or gambling. More than once I strolled along the infamous Rua de Felicidade, depicted in a travelogue by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and captured in Wong Kar-wai’s film 2046, and I visited the Camões grotto where Luís de Camões is supposed to have lived, so many times that I could find it blindfolded. I had finally run out of ideas to kill time, and I was contemplating surrendering myself to the vulgarity of the imitation canals and artificial sky of the Venetian Macau, when I was rescued by a friend, who led me to the unknown area of Coloane.
The southernmost extent of Macau’s territory, Coloane was originally an island that was later made contiguous with the island of Taipa as a result of land reclamation. Macau’s diminutive landmass is aptly illustrated by the fact that the entire territory of the Macau SAR is a mere fortieth of the size of Hong Kong. People accustomed to more spacious Beijing suffocate in Hong Kong, let alone Macau. But anyone who has been to Coloane knows that Macau, despite its small size, originally embodied the couplet “dense and airless / horses run free”. Coloane is where the horses can gallop; it’s the last “sanctuary” of Macau.
Riding the bus to Coloane with my companion, the high-rise buildings disappeared in an instant, and refreshing, idyllic green lay before my eyes along the winding, secluded roads. There wasn’t a trace of human habitation. Particularly conspicuous was the absence of Mainland tourists. The only edifice in sight was the newly-built public housing, said to be Macau’s Tin Shui Wai, but more upscale than the high-rise “city of sadness” of Ann Hui's films. We got off at Hac-Sa beach on Coloane's east coast and then strolled along from east to west on the Morro de Hac-Sa Family Trail, where we were met with peculiar rock formations and a tranquility that is priceless in Macau. The eco-sites on this rocky seaside are well preserved. Blooming wildflowers and chirping birds come easily into view. It looks as though the government has made a huge effort to protect this “virgin land”. The flora of interest is accompanied by metal plaques complete with illustrations and bilingual descriptions. If one had the patience to read it all, a hike along this trail might well become an outdoor lesson in natural history. Walking on sloping paths adjacent to the elemental nature of water and earth, I completely forgot I was within the borders of Macau.
We emerged at the western trailhead onto a verdant road leading to the urban centre of Coloane, which is no more than a meagre intersection of a few small streets lined with low houses. There, an austere little shop beckons to the foodies. It is the world-renowned Lord Stow’s Bakery, birthplace of the Macanese egg tart. In 1989, former British pharmacist Andrew Stow opened a bakery here, and in 1990, he successfully transformed the Portuguese egg tart recipe with a taste and visual appeal that triumphed over the original version. Sold as Lord Stow’s Egg Tarts, they have a reputation that has attracted numerous gourmands to this once desolate side of Coloane. Later, when Andrew Stow parted ways with Margaret, his ex-wife opened Margaret’s Café e Nata on the Macau peninsula. With a more aggressive business strategy and a contract with KFC, Margaret’s egg tarts came to dominate Andrew’s, but in the eyes of the sophisticated pastry connoisseur, the original Lord Stow’s is still the one and only. After waiting in a long queue for the legendary egg tarts, I sat down on a stone bench under the old banyan tree and, feeling very pleased with myself, proceeded to devour the whole box of the delicacies.
In the midst of eating, the grizzly 1993 film The Untold Story featuring Anthony Wong sprang to mind. A die-hard fan of Hong Kong cinema, I had learnt of the film’s premise, derived from an appalling murder-dismemberment-cannibalism case that occurred in Macau in 1985. Though the details of the case vanished with the suicide of culprit Wong Chi Hang in prison, the film, which errs on the fictional side, still sheds some light on the actual event. The Eight Immortals restaurant was located on the Macau peninsula, but the body parts were found on Hac-Sa beach. My companion, who also enjoyed digging up anecdotes behind HK cinema, in an attempt to ruin my appetite invited me to visit the spot where the discarded human remains were discovered. Far from repulsed, my brainwaves merrily jumped to the infamous Cannibal Manifesto that emerged from the Brazilian modernist movement…
Across the water from the bakery lay a small fishing village on Zhuhai's Hengqin Island. The houses there were vibrant with juxtapositions of bright red and green, yellow and blue. This lively, lucid style was a clear demarcation of freedom. On my first visit to the Macau Museum, I bought several souvenirs, unique Sino-Portuguese bilingual street signs, white with blue lettering, displaying such addresses as Azinhaga dos Amores, Travessa das Lindas, Travessa do Penacho and Azinhaga dos Piratas. Indeed, I found these signs to be imbued with the quintessence of Macau culture. With their Arabic influences, these labels present a style reminiscent of the Portuguese azulejo tile tradition, bearing the names of streets christened by the Portuguese in former colonial times, and, alongside these, the local Cantonese translation of the street names – a “deconstruction” of the “colonial discourse” described above, their ideographic tension combining seamlessly. To my knowledge, all of these conspicuous signs belong to the alleyways of Coloane Village. Also to be found in the village is the Chapel of St. Francis Xavier. It is more discreet and humbler than St Dominic’s and St Lawrence’s on the Macau Peninsula, for its amiable colours are all-embracing, reminding me of the littoral churches I’d seen on the southeast coast of Brazil, a kawaii version of a small Baroque village. It is a strange sensation; the kind of saudade evoked by Macau does not engender in me a nostalgia for Portugal, or for the Late Chinese Empire’s Pearl River Delta. It’s a saudade that reminds me of Brazil, on the other side of the planet. An indication that, though I have been speaking Portuguese for ten years, I have never been to Portugal, only the people here have.
The square in front of the Chapel was a location in the Hong Kong film Look for a Star, the place where Andy Lau proposed to Shu Qi. It also appeared in a popular Korean drama, and you can still find hopeless Korean soap addicts wandering about the spot. At the opposite end of the square is an obelisk, a memorial commemorating “The Defeat of Pirates” with a terse inscription: “Battle in Coloane, July 12-13, 1910”. A reverie featuring Late Qing Government officials, swashbuckling pirates, the Catholic church and fishermen springs to my mind from this riveting marker, a Rashomon-style story of its day. But, in reality, Coloane is just a small fishing village, oblivious to blood-slinging drama, a quiet countenance squandering its desolation in an expensive land, the last “sanctuary” in this city, home to the “Utility of Futility”.
