Wordie ambles down byways of Macau

by Jason Wordie
Angsana
4 stars
Mathew Scott

Saudade is a Portuguese word that's generally given to mean an inescapable sense of longing or of loss that is most commonly found in poems or other works of literature or that you might find following you around, like some ghost, at the end of an affair of the heart.

The word pops up in local historian/writer Jason Wordie's fascinating exploration of the history of Macau and of its people, as might the sense itself if ever you find yourself whiling away time by wandering down the city's backstreets and contemplating its rich heritage.

Wordie, a longtime contributor to the South China Morning Post, has seemingly spent an age charting the history of Macau and of the many and varied characters who have added colour to it. There's a touch of that longing for the past here, but more in a sense that it be preserved rather than repeated; it was often brutal and tragically unfair, as the author points out.

We are taken on a tour of Macau, Taipa and Coloane from end to end and nothing, it seems, is missed, other than the recent developments of the Cotai Strip - justifiably so, too, given there is no real history there.

In his book, Wordie reveals a Macau that has been maligned as many times as it has been immortalised. He shadows the city's many glories with the realities of life as it was for people through a Portuguese colonisation that began in the mid-1500s and continued through to 1999, and then on to its (re)incarnation as one of China's Special Administrative Regions.

And so when he recounts Macau's quite spectacular defeat of invading Dutch forces in 1622 - celebrated in the city's Jardim da Vitoria ("Victory Garden") - the fact that it was achieved by a force comprising local people and slaves reminds us that colonial life for the majority was harsh indeed. This brutal side of life returns when Wordie walks us through the streets that surround Igreja de S. Lourenco (Church of Saint Lawrence or Fung Shun Tong) and his attention turns to the remains of "barracoons", or holding pens, still visible there along Rua dos Cules or, simply, the "Street of the Coolies". Many became wealthy on the sweat of others - around 500,000 Chinese labourers are said to have made their way into the world from Macau through means legal or (mostly) illegal.