Opinion

With friends like these…

In Macau, a land of constant change, we are always saying goodbye. Farewell to the little shop and the restaurant that closed, to the old building that fell down, to the landscape that you can no longer see, to the law that, after all, was not so essential. Of course not. It was, in fact, obvious that the little shop and the restaurant were going to close, that the building was going to collapse, that the landscape was going to be lost among so much cement and greed. It was just a matter of time. But even time, that great sculptor, can mess with our fate. And in this constant change, sometimes it seems that we go backwards. And we really do.
 
On the Wednesday that happened to be February 17, 1932, the Voz de Macau newspaper, the “morning daily paper (it is not published on Mondays)”, had its front page dominated by the situation in Russia (“A civilization cannot be built from one moment to the next, only by the will of a man or a party”); then, it carried a sensational piece of news (“It may be possible to change the sex! An Austrian scientist, Dr. Eugenio Steinach, a well-known gland specialist, almost guarantees it is”); and finally, tucked in the bottom right corner of the page, an article simply titled “Macau”.
 
It began thus, “I saw you, Macau, years ago, and how I don’t know you!”
 
If the reader is like me, instinct drives the gaze to the end of the article looking for a signature. Instead, we find a cryptic but somewhat telling “A friend of yours.” It is not, you see, ours. It is a friend of Macau. And any doubts about it would immediately dissipate once we continued reading: “To remember you is to remember the charms you have lost, it is to be saddened by the spectacle that your development offers!” 
 
If the reader is like me, you’d refocus for a moment on the newspaper’s headline, just to make sure you haven’t got that Wednesday wrong. No, it is really the one that happened on February 17, 1932. 
 
Let’s proceed. “I saw you romantic, seductive, lazy; I saw you chaste and naive; I saw you mysterious. Today, I see you realistic, active and boisterous, a miniature of the great cities of the East.”
 
Our ‘friend’, with whom we have already identified, then evokes what already exists only in his memory. “Your winding streets, with a soldier of the Police Corps, with long mustaches and a wide-brimmed hat, at every corner; your tall ‘rickshá’ painted red and with iron wheels; the little green chairs, of the square, and the white ones, private ones, that crossed each other and did not break the monotony of the streets; and, from time to time, the bell of a private ‘rickshá’, pulled by three ‘culis’ in garish uniforms with silver trimmings; the old cries, at the sound of which I fell asleep; the long gourds of pigtailed Chinese men; the mysterious elegance of the high-society Chinese women, who could hardly be seen; the low roofs of your unpretentious houses, scattered about you at random; your constant dances, dinners, and soirées in private homes and clubs; the wealth of your people; the frank and friendly life we enjoyed, all this has died, all this has succumbed to progress, to your development.”
 
In that year of 1932, the scene is of a city that had lost its innocence, left behind one life and embraced another, unknown, unrepentant, and forgetful of what had passed. The feeling is one of disorder, of confusion. Time off track. “The movement in the streets, the car horns, no longer let you hear the birds singing, which no longer have shelter in the eaves of the roofs, cut down and replaced by reinforced concrete. Your Areia Preta beach where beautiful afternoons were spent in sweet conviviality, the meetings in the S. Francisco Garden, where the Police Band played; your famous 11 o’clock mass, attended by the troops and where the Band played, all this is dead; all this has disappeared.”
 
Leaning back in our chair and with our eyes now flying over the front page of A Voz de Macau, we realize that the highlights of this issue have a common theme: the world was changing. Depending on preferences, not always for the better. While some were ready for the most dizzying leaps of faith in progress, others were wary of promises that were perhaps too full of themselves. Little Macau did not escape the accelerated general movement that was taking its toll. “Today you are neither what you were nor what they want you to be! You are in the antipathetic transitory period of your existence. What longing, what memories of your sweet past!”
 
Regrets like this have long become commonplace in Macau, and only very recently have they disappeared from the territory’s public space, from public and published opinion. Indifference reigns, even from those who used to swear a more than faithful love to a land that they insisted on saying was theirs and nobody else’s. Everything is dying and succumbing, as described by the friend from 1930’s Macau, and its people remain mute. 
 
“Soon I will leave you, and if I ever come back here I don’t want to find a single stone that reminds me of this Macau that I loved and that will never come back,” said “a friend of yours” on that Wednesday, February 17, 1932. It was wounded love talking. Remember, Macau, there is a saying that “with friends like these (the bad type, of course), who needs enemies?” And while it may not seem so at first glance, the author of this newspaper article really seems to be one of the good ones.
 
This article is dedicated to the memory of Aida de Jesus, one of the last fluent speakers of the Macau Patuá and the “godmother of Macanese cuisine”, who passed away on March 17, at the age of 105. She witnessed all of Macau’s great transformations and how’ve they turned her beloved city upside down. And there she was, Dona Aida, always with an open smile, welcoming whoever came to her cozy restaurant “Riquexó”, where she enjoyed reading the Macau newspapers.
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