Everyday Violence in Macau
By now the story is already well-known and the details have been burnt and blurred into our collective consciousness. The long trail begins in a Guangdong police interrogation cell where a young man pleads innocent for the theft of his travel documents. Not surprisingly, he is later released. The torrential rains of mid-June come and a street cleaner happens upon three severed fingers, chopped off at the joints, with fingernails painted red. The Macau police say not to worry, the aforementioned incident is perhaps some sick form of retaliation: someone probably had a score to settle in the casinos. A day afterwards, detectives enter a hotel room finding blood stains on the carpet and a curiously blood-smeared shower. Two bloated and severed female heads, eyes wide and mouths agape, are found drifting in the bay off Taipa later that week. The link between all three incidents is that all lead back to a certain room in one hotel. My question is, what happened to bodies and why is it that no one heard the screams?
Violence is nothing new for modern society and certainly not for Macau. The city is one riddled with fear and run by subterranean currents; it is a place of institutionalized vice and sanctioned immorality. This is one side of Macau the government is careful to hide and downplay; for instance, one does not find brothels on places to visit in the city guides, eventhough they exist practically in the open for all to see. In relation to the rising crime rate, the official government line is that, "All is under control and that Macau is safe - so safe in fact, that families can stroll at night." Indeed Macau is an oasis of calm like the eye of a tornado, however police are arming themselves with submachine-guns for an impending triad war all the while reminding us that everything is under control. Only the very naive or deluded could preach safety amidst rising tensions - but then again, is this not Macau we are speaking about?
Triad members as well as a representative of the PRC-controlled Chamber of Commerce have recently gone on record talking about the mounting social pressure in Macau. They tell the press that the crime wave is basically a power re-structuring, and after some killings and re-organization of disputed rackets and territory, all will run smoothly. As for the transition, we are assured that the Chinese do not intend on eroding political rights, although they do intend on limiting democratic demonstrations in Macau. They will rule with "special concern for the Macau people." So, in essence, if one looks for trouble, one will find it in Macau.
In relation to the acute rise of everyday violence in Macau, things were not always this way although the potential always existed. By the time the British arrived en masse to South China in the late eighteenth century, Macau was already in full decay, not criminality. Its elitist families were prone to clan-fighting over who was the most Catholic or whitest of the lot. The British, following tentative Portuguese antecedents, found a lucrative trade in opium to the Chinese market. With Macau as a base, the addictive drug entered imperial China much to the dismay of some officials on both sides of the fence. Opium from India brought a brief respite for a frail city only to be given a death-blow in the mid-nineteenth century with the establishment of Hong Kong. All the best and brightest left Macau to languish for the newly opened treaty ports: they built Shanghai into a financial center and Hong Kong into the trade emporium which it is still today. Macau, desperate to survive in the new state-of-affairs, found itself legally sanctioning gambling, opium smoking and prostitution, creating a solvent tax-base for the City of the Sacred Name of God in China - a holy name for such a dark place.
Venturing to Macau for the first time years ago, I knew relatively nothing of its history, nor anything of its "interesting" past. Eventhough friends hinted that Macau was a haven for gambling and prostitution, "Sure," I thought, "its a Portuguese town transplanted in South China, or at least that's how the brochures depicted it." Stepping off the ferry from Hong Kong at midnight I found myself surrounded by a pulsing world of neon and bright lights. Blinking red and green Chinese characters advertised karoke-bars and saunas. "Where were the Portuguese?" I thought, and then feel asleep for a day.
Macau, I might argue, has never fully awoken from its dreams of past grandeur. The administration is often quick to point out that Macau has been a place of encounter of two civilizations, the East and the West, for four and a half centuries. Macau, they say, is a city forged from this nexus. Even if the previous assertion may have or have not been true in the past, it is interesting how peoples, ruling classes especially, create mythologies for themselves and how, after repeating such fictions frequently and with conviction, the speaker's mind comes to believe them. Most of the cultural encounters happening nowadays are between prostitutes and their patrons.
Returning to recent events, police reports illustrate the more macabre details of the crime at hand. Apparently after running exploratory runs in the hotel's sewer system technicians recovered a severed breast and other "soft body parts" - perhaps intestines or entrails of other sorts. We know that the bodies were hacked into portable pieces, as the blood patterns verify, and were not doused in acid or quick lime, as the pipes attest. This murder was not some spur of the moment killing, but a well-planned out and coolly executed maneuver. It was much too brutal to be a mere adjustment of accounts between wayward prostitutes and an angered pimp; it was rather an exhibition of unbridled rage and confusion - against whom or what, we can only speculate.
Modern social scientists are busy debating and discussing the role of the individual, the person and the concept of self in places of intercultural contact. Postmodernity theorizes that present Western society, in this post-colonial era, finds the center - metropolitan security and cultural hegemony - fragmenting and the peripheries converging into this chaotic maelstrom. Indeed, the modern nation-state is "under attack" from outside and within with ethnic and a myriad of other groups manifesting discontent after centuries of subalternity and non-recognition. It is understood in the social sciences that the epicenters of intercultural contact, on the traditional margins of modern consciousness, are fraught with "maladjustment, misunderstanding and failed communication." These places may not be prone to violent demonstrations of these factors, but more often than not, especially when speaking of the imposition of one system of cultural definitions over another, re-adjustments and eruptions of disorder often prevail.
Could the acceleration of everyday violence in Macau be an ingrained cultural response by the regional Chinese to the erosion of their traditional culture in South China being supplanted by Western values of capitalist enterprise and theories of communism? Perhaps, but I would venture a stern no. Chinese culture is much more resilient and fluid than to allow superficial changes on the social face to allow rapid disintegration - cultural boundaries change and peoples continue adapting and living as best they can in new circumstances. The violence in South China and in Macau and Hong Kong may be the continuation of an older system of beliefs re-aligning itself to current circumstances and using changed environments to its benefit. What we find with the killer in the Macau hotel, is a post-modern Chinese murderer with the residue of something traditional in his actions.
By observing the trauma on the severed heads, experts identify the deceased as victims of strangulation. Through testing the remaining blood that had not already leeched into Macau Roads, it is also determined that the women were also drugged. Late one evening (if we are to reconstruct the crime faithfully) a Chinese male overpowers, beats up a young man from nearby Guangdong Province and steals his travel papers and money. He later crosses without incident into Macau and checks himself into a hotel. In a sense, he masks his identity and leaves his person to become effectively invisible by creeping into the skin of another through the agency of a small book of papers and a photograph. He later mutilates two women and slips back across the border unnoticed.
The killer had already planned that that evening would be shockingly different and viscerally exciting than anything else he had done before. If he were to do something that would truly horrify the consciousness, no better place than to experiment than Macau, a zone of judicial extraterritoriality and social liminality - he would be free to do anything in complete anonymity. In the silence of the hotel room, he opens his sports bag and longingly looks at his knives and ropes. After taking a drink and a smoke, he probably ambles his way into one of Macau's many casinos and wins an amount of money, nothing significant, since the odds are always stacked to the house's favor.
Two mainland prostitutes, freelancing that weekend to make a little extra cash to support themselves and their habits, find commodifying their bodies into objects of male desire (or female, if the price is right) the quickest and easiest way to make some money - "We are using their bodies not our souls," they whisper repeatedly to themselves. They look out over the casino cashier's window from a discretely removed location and see a lucky proletarian cash in his chips. Through masks of cheap rogue and mascara, lipsticked lips invite the winner for a night of fun and cajole him with the promise of sensual pleasure. The man accepts.
Reaching the room, the three sit down and a price is determined for the services to be rendered that evening. In a false show of magnanimity, the two hookers are offered a little heroine. To lessen the tension, the three chase the dragon together. In a drug-induced haze the three engage in debauched pleasures. At the height of rapture, the killer strangles one of the women. The other watches silently in unbelieving horror as he continues to have sex with the once alive and vibrant corpse. In a moment, he turns to the other and mounts her as he smoothers her piercing cries with a pillow. A Portuguese man in the room next door, engaging in an extramarital affair, turns up his radio as not to hear his neighbors - he wants to savor his time selfishly and not hear the "joy" of others. For both, they are losing guilt in the ecstasy of the moment.
The killer then begins the long process of dismembering the bodies. Through the early morning, he proceeds tearing limbs, serrating flesh and taking apart the corpses beyond recognition, beyond difference. In the bathtub, the two women stop being whole persons, but fragmented bodies. When he is done, the killer muses with the idea of keeping perhaps a finger or breast as a trophy, but upon leaving, thinks better and flushes them down the toilet. He stuffs the two heads into a plastic trash bag and places the bodies in a garment bag. After fastidiously washing himself and combing his hair, he checkes out. In the tranquil quiet of the dawn he drops the bodies into the bay and catches a taxi to the Border Gate. By nine he is back in his old life and no-one suspects a thing.
When examining the actions of the Chinese murderer closely, we must pause for a moment and think about the space through which the individual moves and what transformations the human psyche undergoes in confrontation with difference. The most telling example of popular monolithic concepts of traditional Chinese culture is fed to South Chinese audiences via the soap-opera. Invariably, family is the backbone of most melodramatic spectacles played by the media. A familiar component of all is a mystic connection between the idealized place of man and women in the family equation; the resolution of conflicts between the two involves stripping the characters of any political or sexual agency. Interestingly mirroring the Cantonese soap-opera, the postmodern scholar, when confronted with the inherent difference in the other, seeks to divorce truth, justice and beauty from each other and break culture down to the barest essentials. Postmodernity and the soap-opera also seek the rupture between form and content. In applying both systems of thought to the killer, we find him reducing his victims to their basic components, completely obliterating their sexuality and individuality in a mass of body parts and internal fluids. He confronts the familiar prostitute in an alien territory, in the space of the casino, and rebels, in a sense, against his own set of morals and murders and destroys them - Chinese culture does not sanction such acts - becoming for an evening something completely different (he thinks) while carefully guarding his inner nature. As a further irony he accomplishes his goal of destruction of ineffable difference so thoroughly that examiners can no longer identify the women - they in turn become invisible and indecipherable through the slashes of the blade.
The muffled screams of these women are but only two of hundreds of men and women who are swept up in the violence of the modernization of South China. Perhaps if their pleas of help were not silenced with a pillow or the monotonous tones of a Cantopop song, the two women would still be alive today, always on the brink of uncertain oblivion selling their quickly aging bodies for a price. Perhaps if the gentleman next door was not so concerned with his respectability, then the killer would have been accosted. Perhaps, perhaps not. The facts remain and the violence inherent in a place such as Macau climbs with more and more acuity as cases such as the one presented occur each day.
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