The Macau-Liverpool Border

Gregory B. Lee (1)

1 IETT - Institut d'Etudes Transtextuelles et Transculturelles

Some of today’s Macau landmarks stood in more solitary splendour in 1978 and were visible from afar. I stayed in the other-worldly Bela Vista Hotel for a night; while not too expensive, on a student budget I could not afford to stay longer. I recall that the staff, as in other hotels, would not accept tips. I’d visited Lisbon two years before, at the height of the mid-1970s Portuguese Carnation Revolutionary fervour where gratuities had, temporarily, disappeared, along with the old fascist order. But I hadn’t expected the tip-less culture to have been extended to Macau; but there again China’s Cultural Revolution had also left its scent. I stayed mostly in a cheap, ramshackle guest house on the island of Coloane, not far from the Tam Kung temple. The guesthouse, more a sort of a dormitory, was on a low promontory by the shore. The sunset over the channel that separated Coloane from China was almost magical.

Mots clés: Chinatown; Chinese seamen; diaspora; Liverpool; Macau; memory; Yeats William Butler; China

Domaines: Sciences de l'Homme et Société; Histoire; Héritage culturel et muséologie

Gregory B. Lee. The Macau-Liverpool Border. Cha: an Asian literary journal, 2019. ⟨halshs-02069979⟩