Topic: Stories of Macao

Novels which mingle realism and fictional elements are gateways to understanding unfamiliar places. Despite characters and episodes being inventions, the scenery and background of such novels comprise verisimilitude. Consequently, The World of Suzie Wong served as a bridge which familiarised foreigners with Hong Kong; The Bewitching Braid by Henrique de Senna Fernandes also allows others to understand the Oriental city where the Chinese and Portuguese cultures meet. 

Macao has undergone earth-shattering transformation in the recent decade. How is the new Macao described by novelists? This series introduces Chinese and foreign novels based in Macao, and serves to familiarise readers with Macao through others’ lenses.

 Yan Geling’s writing skill is superlative. She can describe a gambler’s age and experience with a playing card and a gambler’s expressionless gesture with the textures of clothes. Her illustration of restless gamblers’ body odour is so palpable it’s as if it permeates the paper. She depicts the gaming addiction that gamblers are unable to extricate themselves from, and writes about various means of gambling – mirroring that Yan conducted a lot of researches before writing her novel. 

The protagonist of the novel is a female junket operator from the Mainland. Her ancestor goes to a foreign country, where he earns a large sum of money, but loses his family fortune on his homecoming voyage. Notwithstanding her detest of gambling the protagonist makes a living in a Macao casino, falling in love with an up-and-coming sculptor who indulges in gambling. The key of this outstanding novel lies in its portrayal of characters; the junket operator depicted by Yan is as impressive as a real figure. 

Picky readers may be dissatisfied that 80% of the setting is located inside casinos, and that Macao’s landscape cannot be seen in the work. However, Yan imperceptibly reveals the shortcomings of tourists who came to Macao for gambling only. Its male protagonist ends up abstaining from gambling, and the female protagonist says that they can eventually enjoy the early morning, market aura and grassroots life of Macao – this is exactly the Macao landscape that the novel is trying to convey, isn’t it?

Of all the novels set against a Macao backdrop, the writing of Macao authors should be able to reflect the reality of Macao most faithfully. With Cowardice, Tai Pei won the 3rd Macao Novel Prize. The book comprehensively illustrates the turmoil in residents’ lives: the towering price of private real estate, small spaces in social housing offered by the government, whilst the income of public security police cannot even match that of public relations practitioners in casinos – not to mention the forgotten ones who are living dismally. 

Cowardice is a detective story that depicts two related cases: the investigation of a case of arson after a rape and murder uncovers a dismemberment case twenty years before. Surprisingly, the victims in the two cases are mother and daughter. The protagonist of the novel is an unappreciated inspector, who was unable to solve his mother’s murder in the past. This time, he is committed to finding the murderer of the late daughter. However, he consequently unearths the illegal activities of the police circle. 

Tai Pei, originally known as Huang Chun Nian, is a young writer born in the 1970s. Cowardice, regardless of the episodes in the murder cases or dialogues during the policeman’s investigation, features the style of a TVB soap opera which has accompanied our growing up. Tai Pei’s writing skills cannot match Yan Geling, who is 20 years his senior but his realistic description of contemporary society can definitely surpass Yan and evoke a resonance with readers. 

Despite the title suggesting fan tan gaming, the novel features a male Scottish protagonist and a female Russian protagonist’s love story in Macao. While the novel was written five years ago, the background is set in 1920s’ Macao. This ambitious epic locates Macao in the world’s historical tide, involving historical events like October Revolution of Russia, the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War. 

The novel depicts the Russian female protagonist fleeing to Macao with her family to escape the Bolshevik Revolution. In this Oriental city where Chinese mingle with the West, she becomes sworn sisters with a Portuguese woman and falls in love with a British espionage agent. The years are of political unrest – at the beginning, the male protagonist searches for the female protagonist’s father, whose life was uncertain, in the USSR; afterwards, she has to rescue her husband, who is unaccounted for, from a Hong Kong prisoner-of-war camp. 

This pathetic story is not entirely plastic. Born in Hong Kong, Julian Lees is of mixed British and Russian ancestry: in those days, his great grandfather migrated to China to escape the October Revolution, and moved to Macao following his mother’s birth in Shanghai. Then, Julian Lees’ mother took root in Hong Kong upon meeting her British husband. Macao, a melting pot of Chinese and Western cultures, fuels Julian Lees’ own story and his novel substantiates this very well. 

This novel depicting Macao casinos was nominated Year's Best Book of 2014 by The New York Times and The New Yorker. While Yan Geling excelled in delineating Chinese people’s addiction to gambling, British writer Lawrence Osborne is adept at representing Macao’s extravagance; the chandeliers and paintings in casinos, Clube Militar de Macau on Macao Peninsula, and Restaurante Fernando in Coloane are subjects of his description. 

The novel features a British lawyer who embezzles money at work before fleeing to Macao, impersonates a noble gentlemen and gambles lavishly in casinos. He once loses his life’s fortune and starves, he also wins a huge sum of money and is interviewed by journalists. Superstition at the gaming table is the subject of his pursuit. The protagonist ultimately falls in love with a call girl from the Mainland, whom he gets acquainted with in a VIP room. Perhaps in contrast to the backdrop of this opulently ornamented setting, the earnest love is the most pathetic. 

Maybe Lawrence Osborne does not understand much about Chinese casinos – in comparison to the stake amount in hundreds of millions depicted by Yan Geling, but the protagonist of this book scrambles to win tens of millions; one cannot help laughing upon reading this episode. However, it could be seen that the foreign novelists emphasize  gamblers’ deluxe entertainment and enjoyment in lieu of their high stakes. 

In a book by Ana Maria Amaro about Macao we discovered a story about Macao regarding a  storyteller. 

Ana Maria Amaro knows that there is losing one’s memories is like losing one’s life and that one’s memories cease to exist once his homeland and those who make and maintain them are lost. It is therefore not by chance that the short narratives by Ana Maria Amaro begin with the pragmatic but still emotional evocation of  A’Kong, the teller of Stories. 

With mysterious and mythical contours, this person’s narratives ---  “Nobody knew his name nor where he was born” --- were based on some traditional narratives and others certainly imagined, but a sense of bond that reinforced the values of the community pervaded in all of them through the exaltation of its constituent elements: “honesty, filial love, loyalty and courage” amongst others. One day A’Kong was no longer seen in the spot where he normally told his stories, precisely the day after he finished telling the most iconic narrative. A story about an literate old man who in the context of the harsh war against the Japanese had gone into exile and found shelter in the Land of the Sea of Lotuses (name formerly given to Macao by the Chinese). 

It happens that in this place the literate old man came to lose his only daughter named Iok Lan which means Jade Magnolia, or more eruditely, Chinese Damsel. The daughter represented more than merely his future expectations, she also represented his memory, beginning with the memory of the wife he had lost at the hands of the Japanese during the war, but also the image of the homeland which he had to forcibly abandon. When his only daughter ran away with a Japanese who was passing through the Land of the Sea of Lotuses and left him without a single word, the literate old man now truly sampled the real taste of exile, the true and complete exile. 

Symbolically for me, it is a cruel blow rather than mere humiliation. What the elderly Chinese man lost irreversibly was the memory that bound him to his community. Without memory, one’s life loses all significance and sense. But if the life of  A’Kong, the teller of Stories was in itself important, it was even more so for the community since it was within him that a time that exceeded the duration of his life and where the collective memory resided.