Capturing a city:
abstraction and the desire to catalogue Macau
When thinking of Macau my thoughts initially meander confused through the musty litter-covered alleyways of the Chinese Bazar, start to jostle against one another in the cramped space of a bus to Hac-Sa, and then return to the intimate faces of my friends over dinner in Taipa or sharing a coffee in Coloane village. I see people walking in and out of the Casino Lisboa, a man smoking a cigarette, and another hailing a taxi with an odd tattoo on his arm - maybe he's a triad member, I can't tell. I hear children running down the street laughing and kicking a ball. It's the Day of Portugal and I'm hopelessly lost near Cam›es Park, I ask a policeman for directions but he doesn't seem to understand my Portuguese. Another nearby policeman asks a dark-skinned Chinese for his identification papers and a group of half-curious onlookers stand spitting at the sidewalk.
Looking at some of my immediate memories of Macau, in a sense, I order the abstract space of an anonymous city and the multitude of sensations bounded by time and physical reality into highly personal and discreet moments. Through defined pauses Macau ceases to be an amorphous thought and becomes a familiar entity. Images, words and sensations may at first come like a chaotic blur, but certain details begin to stand out and become more real or valid than the other components that comprise of my memory of Macau.
If we look at the process a little closer, what I have unwittingly done is broken the concept of an experience and an array of memories down to their lowest common denominators - their barest essentials - and then layer these disparate parts into a meaningful depiction, although not altogether coherent, but meaningful and an almost tangible depiction nevertheless. If we wanted, we could link these memories together and present them as a story or paint pictures of the scenes; lending the abstract some definition through boundedness. Or, we could take the totality of these experiences and weave them into an organic narrative, rich with melodic texture and evocative personal insights. But, no matter what we do, we classify and make coherent sensory processes: capturing fleeting moments in an imaginary, but felt city. Briefly, and without getting into polemics, the modern mind categorizes, labels and ascribes meaning to things, while the post-modern mind, reciprocally collects these parts and attempts their synthesis, keeping in consideration the validity inherent in their difference.
Curiously and not surprisingly, keeping the last thought in mind, one subject infinitely popular with the people of Macau are the complementary themes of classification and remembrance. Often a common topic over tea or the telephone is one's family: where the family came from and what they did - it's all about classifying oneself through group memory or remembering. Garden-variety discussions of sexual impropriety and substance abuse in younger Macanese are gaining prevalence, but family always seems to be a good stand-by for lack of anything else to discuss.
Similarly, over the last decade or so with the news of Macau's transition to China in 1999 made public, there have been a handful of cultural exhibitions in Portugal and Macau dealing with Macau as a place and its unique populace. Numerous catalogues, some didactic in format, others not so, present the City of the Sacred Name through text and images to a larger audience; some contain very vague and self-congratulatory openings and others are subtle and unassuming. However, one thing that stands out in the catalogues, especially those which are ethnographic or historical in nature, is the "images" presented. Before continuing, I pose a question: if we consider books as documenting memories and guardians of the past, what and whose past are we presenting in these exhibition catalogues?
Two particularly interesting catalogues are Um Olhar Sobre Macau (A Look at Macau) and Macaenses em Lisboa: Memórias do Oriente (Macanese in Lisbon: Memories of the East). Both are textual guides meant to aid the exhibition and to orient a reading of the objects presented. The former has a cover with a black and white photograph circa 1925 of a Macanese family. There are five children, all decked out in dark sailor-suits (a girl in one, too with a huge ribbon and smile to match), an attractive woman in her twenties with a very Latin air, and behind them all, the pater and materfamilias: he in a starched shirt, dark three-piece and pearl tie-tack and she completely in black. The mother looks enigmatic, almost fearful of the camera, regarding it with an apprehension and knowledge that her intimate, private space is being invaded. And now, over half a century later, I sit here gazing into their eyes - eyes that do not see, but peer lifelessly from the cover.
Macaenses em Lisboa was published for an exhibition held in 1992 of family keepsakes at the Missão de Macau in Lisbon. In the back are some photos and bare descriptions (I guess I'll never know what Fai-chi looks like...) of the material objects gathered into handy categories like: family memories, clothes from today and yesteryear, hours without time, the first commandment, etc. The ordering of these objects into a corpus is fascinating, but what comes before them is even more interesting: the essays meaning to give us a sense of who and what is Macanese. The authors are well-known and familiar to just about anyone who studies the Macanese: Estorninho, Boxer, Batalha and Amaro (plus a relative newcomer, C. Piteira) with the noted absence of J. Pina-Cabral. Amaro organized the exhibition and wrote the captions, so we can consider this endeavor mainly hers. However, returning to the essays, they attempt to give a biologically determinist view of who the Macanese are and speak of the origins of their language and them as a people. One text points to blood ratios and serum samples as an indicator of Macanese-ness and yet another attempts to use survey data on religion and beliefs to define the Macanese community.
Speaking from a highly personal standpoint, one which is prone to subjectivity, I would venture and say that such quantitative measures of definition as presented in Macaenses em Lisboa are potentially dangerous. The methods employed ascribe and define an identity that evidently does not embrace the great variation within the represented group. Certainly, some Macanese in Lisbon can point to themselves and say that the images presented do represent them; others, no. We could say that the exhibition attempts to capture the very abstract concept of Macanese and define through tangible methods, using medical science and physical objects to quantify, that which defies complete quantification: cultural dynamism. When presenting a people, an exhibition should not attempt to define, rather highlight the contours of memory and present a personal side of that which is depicted (each object has a history, familiar or otherwise, so what's the Fai-chi's story?). In a sense, such a catalogue is like a butterfly collection, the individual insects are desiccated, pinned in a box, and arranged in a way that suits the fancy of the collector. Peoples and cultures should not be viewed like butterfly-collections (butterflies, too, but that's another topic entirely), rather in vivo and in constant change. Indeed, the catalogue is about memories and keepsakes, but it crosses the line and presents the past as the present: that is dangerous.
The other catalogue, Um Olhar Sobre Macau is thicker and is a very evocative text - not so much for what it presents, but what is offered. It accompanied an exhibition held at the National Ethnographic Museum in 1991 under the auspices of the Instituto de Investigação Cient&icute;fica Tropical. The organizer was the prolific Amaro and she brings together texts by Estorninho, Batalha, Soeiro de Brito and herself. This book is important because it honestly represents a new direction in Macau studies, one of an interdisciplinary approach, combining History, Linguistics, Urban Studies and Anthropology to provide a rounded glimpse of present and past Macau. The last section of the catalog provides a list of the objects presented representing some of the cultural artifacts used by the three main groups that comprise Macau: Chinese, Macanese and European Portuguese.
Once again, I will focus on the capturing of the abstract - rather, the city in question. This book does not have the central goal of defining the Macanese, nor the Chinese, nor any people in particular, rather to extendd a view of a totality of Macau. The cover is a lorcha (a heavy junk) sailing the Pearl River delta - beautifully simple and elegant in its singularity. There follows a Preface and then the essays. Focusing on Soeiro de Brito, she writes about the city and provides mainly statistics and census information to give the reader a sense of Macau in numbers. She outlines urbanization patterns and in doing so she gives the buildings an identity, a personality of their own, almost as if they are living, speaking and growing. In her bounding of the abstract she takes the real to the extreme and gives the inanimate an agency unto itself, filling uncertain and unknown spaces with the familiar. However, it is important to remember that a map is just that, a map: a representation of a space to be felt through and negotiated physically. Giving the rocks, soil and buildings of Macau personality, psychically makes thinking about such a pluri-ethnic context easier mentally, but still altogether confusing and disorienting.
Amaro offers a description of the three groups residing in Macau: the Chinese, Macanese and Portuguese. Her presentation of the Chinese and Macanese is heavily dependent upon graphical and tangible references and breaks culture into defined and delineated categories. I've already offered a critique of this practice, but it is worth mentioning again that such generalizing categorizations are problematic depictions, and that ordering culture is dangerous. The descriptions are interesting, but life, which Amaro attempts to capture, is lacking. The dynamism and daily interactions, as suggested in a single photograph of two Europeans with a tin-tin, exists in Macau, just not in this text. Humanism in Anthropology calls for an awareness that the Anthropologist is a participant in the process of representing the other, not just an impartial observer...
Moving beyond my very general qualms, these catalogues are like instamatic pictures of a reality, frozen in time and used to construct memory. It is sometimes thought that photographs do something much like some social scientists wish their theoretical paradigms would do: capture truth. But, the photograph is but a mere image burned into an emulsifier and transferred chemically to a sheet of paper. The photograph, although ostensibly thought to present physical, tangible truth, is a reflection of light and a two-dimensional depiction of a moment. It captures an angle, but not all angles and depending upon the lens used, only certain wavelengths of light. If anything, a photograph plays on shadow and is a visual outline that evokes feelings and memories from within the viewer. Exhibition catalogues about Macau should be viewed along the same lines: they're a view of a place, an attempt to capture the variation of the city and a description of what is found there.
The exhibition catalogues I mention previously, indeed are problematic in their depiction of Macau, but are worthy of merit since they do present aspects of a Macau reality. That being the case, other aspects of Macau's plurality are desperately needed, especially given the very delicate political stage Macau is entering at the moment. Eulogizing the past in the current state of affairs, as much academic work is currently producing about Macau, does not aid in any understanding of where Macau is going, only where it has been. Popular topics involving politically kosher subjects revolving around the discoveries or commodity histories from the past century are in vogue. Discussions of prostitution, triad violence, political corruption or contrary notions of Macanese ethnicity are frowned upon. At a recent conference given on Macau at the University of Macau, precious few papers touched on the territory and even fewer addressed these areas; only a more frightening dialogue (monologue) was offered: scholars from the People's Republic of China laughed while speaking of "our Macau" being returned to the "motherland." Irredentia seems to be on the rise on the other side of the border, and there is a need to show the uniqueness of Macau not just from a past standpoint, but in the present.
Tentative work is being undertaken at this moment, in Portugal at least, by a few academics, to offer new discourses on twentieth-century Macau. They too fall into the same pattern of furtively trying to capture the abstract, however they are not involved in revealing the truth about Macau, only other visions of the place. One involves sociological work on gambling, another on political events in the 1960s and finally one explores the opium trade. Each of these three scholars offers a fresh voice for Macau and all that Macau has to do is listen.
Are you listening Macau?
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