I Feed Dead People

Went to Macau for two days and a night, where entrance into the city from the port terminal requires all disembarking passengers' temperatures to be taken by a sophisticated infrared scanner. As the scanner bobbed up and down the queue like a nodding head I saw peoples' blue and blobby infrared selves broadcast on a screen. Did not have a fever, obviously. Was closeted in a hotel that resembled a sunken ship, the designer's idea of style being grey marble and ivy everywhere, with my room being alongside a sharply triangular atrium that reminds me of being inside a ship's prow. The rest of Macau, however, was very sunny and Mediterranean.

I went with my mom, grandma, aunt and uncle to several Chinese temples, one dating from the 13th century, partly for sightseeing and partly for paying our respects to the dead. I marveled at how even indoors everything seemed so outdoors; almost every single room lead into some garden, courtyard, or portico, so that at least one side of each room seemed exposed to the open air. We went to a wall lined with the names and photos of the deceased and left oranges and a cake for my (other) uncle to eat in the afterlife, and burned gold and silver foil for him to use as money. It was a shock to see his photo since I'd expected him to be older. My mom told me the story of his death when I was very little and teenagerdom seemed the pinnacle of maturity; I had formed a mental image of a young man in his late teens, tall and strong and unaware of the cancer eating at him, but in the photo he is younger than thirteen (his age of death my mom says though my aunt says fourteen), and looks only like a grave and somber boy. Afterwards my grandma told me to eat the cake, taking the very prosaic attitude that cakes left at temple are left for someone to eat anyways, so it might as well be me, but something flashed through my head impulsively and perhaps not very rationally. I did not want my grandmother to watch her spoiled granddaughter eating a physical cake in the place of the wispy shade of her son eating a wispy ghost cake (in my imagination he is superimposed over me like a photo that's been double-exposed) and wondering how it came about in such a bitter turn of fate that this wretched girl of 18 should live while her boy of thirteen-fourteen had to die. Neither he nor I have done anything to deserve our respective fates. Towards the end of this train of thought I was not seeing it as my grandmother would see me but how I would see myself. I did eat one of the consecrated oranges, however, since my family was eating the other oranges, and had no hands remaining to hold the last one. I talked to my mom about this later; she said that the spirits are only meant to eat metaphysically and that eating their offerings physically is okay. Apparently the clementines left for my father's deceased parents at home only sit and rot because we forget to remove them.

We also went to see the facade of a 17th century church (the rest had burned down) and looked through catacombs and Catholic relics, but it was creepy. St. Francis of Assisi is for some reason associated with skulls; his statues always bear one. My cousin Lydia, who is a devout Baptist, told me that she finds Catholicism grossly tacky to the point of being occult-like. She asked me later (using as an example the decor of another church we were in at the time, this one intact) why Mary was mounted on the throne of God instead of Jesus, and I couldn't answer her except to say that historically speaking at least she's not the only non-Catholic Christian to voice that complaint. Some museum-going as well, where I faked being able to speak Portuguese because I'm one of the few Asians in Asia who can fake a relatively decent Latin accent. Discovered that the Chinese had invented something called a two-piston bellows, an ingenious double-chambered device for fanning forge flames. (Alliteration!) While air is being forced out of one chamber into the fire, the other chamber is expanding, (like a piston; hence the name) so that both pushing AND pulling on the handle will force air into the fire. I wish I could describe it better. It is cool.

In the rest of Macau, the buildings are shorter than in Hong Kong, with the famous Portuguese ironwork, colonial-style Catholic churches, Spanish stairs, narrow cobblestone streets, red-roofed villas and broad avenues with a line of trees running down the middle of the road, so the area feels more open in general. I went to a black-sand beach at sunset, where the sand is so soft I barely left footsteps in it, the total antithesis of Hong Kong Victoria Park's "foot massage garden," where you step gingerly along painfully pebbly paths. We went to Fortress Hill, which my mom onced climbed when she was little, spraining her ankle in the process. We took a cable car up it and went to see the fortress which was once patroled by Negro guards whose (supposedly) fearsome appearance dissuaded schoolchildren from playing there. The guards are gone, but cannons poking out of their embrasures in all directions still remain. There are streets with balconied two-storey buildings, all lined with shops that sell exactly the same thing; crumb cakes, eggrolls, and beef jerky. Competition was fierce. The stores rained free samples. You could see batter being poured onto griddles and being folded into eggrolls, and flour being pounded into molds, so you knew samples were being made right before you ate them. They're best that way.

The payoff for this is of course that there are not spectacular skyscrapers so the night view is not as nice, except for the single Macau Tower, which I went to. I went to the 58th floor observation deck and stood on a glass floor with nothing between me and concrete and ocean 600 feet below, except a few inches of glass. This is as creepy as it sounds and you have to fight your physiology to get onto the glass; sweat, terror, and every fiber of your being wanting to bolt. I walked from the central platform where the elevators are, to the glass, and could only get myself to cross the glass by walking along the metal frames that grid the floor like large sidewalk cracks. After crossing the glass moat, I clung to a column beside the normal, vertical windows. I think everyone who went there for the first time had that reaction. Fish, who is taking Psychology, (taking, not took- the Hong Kong school year is extended until the beginning of August due to their month-long SARS holiday) said that he discovered a new-found appreciation for babies forced to crawl over a "visual cliff." It's worth noting that on the glass floor of the Macau Tower observation deck, in an unintentional recreation of the visual cliff experiment, a little toddler began crying, much to the amusement of his parents, and could not be cajoled into being into a position over the glass, even with his dad holding him in his arms.

I discovered that it becomes much less frightening the more you get used to it. I planted myself at first firmly on the middle of a pane, and made myself look down and relax, and then began pacing the glass floor steadily, back and forth. I started jumping up and down. (The reason for the walking and jumping is that any sort of movement is creepier than just standing; additionally, the tremors in the glass caused by jumping lend an additional aspect of terror). I took off my shoes and paced the floor (surprisingly, it's actually creepier with shoes off, as if having soles between your feet and 600 feet of thin air was any protection), and then began jumping onto the windows from the opaque stairs leading down onto the glass floor, which initially was very alarming because for a few seconds you really do feel as if you've jumped out a 60th storey window, until you land quite solidly just a few inches below. Finally the view directly below me did not seem life-threatening but was emotionally sterile, like any other view from a safe height, like an airplane or a hill or the balcony of a building. I'm quite proud of myself for doing this. I imagine that the only person less frightened by those windows than me is the fellow who has to wipe them off with windex everyday.

Signs are in Portuguese and Chinese; I have an incomplete knowledge of both but between my bits of Chinese and bits of Spanish (which Portuguese is like), I can figure things out. Policia= police, igresa= iglesia= church, saida= salida= exit, turismo= tourist information, etc. Portuguese food is... interesting.

I also went into a casino, but it was very smokey and crowded and looked dumb. I thought it would be more glamorous; at least if you're going to be addicted to a sin, find one that's not retarded.

My mom was disappointed with Macau though; things have changed since she grew up there. Now she is confused from seeing it all again, and has a difficult time distinguishing modern Macau from her old memories, and says it was better remembered than reseen.