Our Desk | Before they become Macau tourists

Julie Zhu

We all know that one hundred people have one hundred pairs of eyes, which reflect to their owners different perspectives on the same things.

How locals see Macau is very often different from how tourists see Macau. Furthermore, there are different kinds of locals as well as different kinds of tourists, which means there are many different descriptions of Macau out there.

However, due to the simple analytical nature of the human brain, we subconsciously build ideas about a place based on various things we see and hear about it throughout life. Different people can thus quite quickly arrive at many widely-held stereotypes about a city, without even visiting it.

Today, the common opinions I would like to share are held by more than 80 percent of the people I have ever talked to or heard from, about their image of Macau before they first came to the city.

The most common ideas coming from these people, prior to visiting Macau, is the similar kind of information one would expect from a child,  that they never have heard news regarding there being some kind of dissatisfaction in Macau, and that Macau is obedient.

The silver medal of preconceptions goes to notions of Macau’s large gambling industry… but wait, it is not about the casinos (in the way you could be thinking), nor is it about the gambling companies. It is about Macau’s own legend, Stanley Ho, who represents in their minds, Macau’s visit card, and the pronunciation of the last character of his name in Chinese. Then, of course, we have all those stories about his families.

After people have consolidated these opinions, normally they imagine Macau as a gold palace. They wonder what the casinos might look like… but the images are always either exaggerated or shrunk by the news, movies, and other entertainment sources.

Some people picture casinos popping from the ground everywhere, some imagine them as if they only have gaming tables, slot machines and cameras. People are often surprised by the fact that shopping malls exist inside the casinos, that there are also restaurants.

The third most commonly heard idea about Macau is that the territory used to be a Portuguese colony. When we reach this point, things start to look more like our own life circle: everything, every thread goes back to where it started.

When people start talking about Macau’s colonial identity in the past, people end up discussing the reasons behind Macau’s quietness, and they frequently associate Macau’s quietness to the Portuguese… suddenly, the conversation no longer concerns Macau. It becomes a comparison between the Portuguese and the British because of the Macau and Hong Kong brothers.

Only then would I say people really start making educated guesses about Macau’s casinos, and about other topics concerning gambling, movies, gangsters…

The four words “World”, “Tourism”, “Leisure”, and “Center” have never been mentioned during the conversations I have heard, nor have the terms “Portuguese Chicken” or “Gastronomy”.

These terms start surfacing once someone plans a trip to Macau, but even so, “World”, “Tourism”, “Leisure” “Center” and “Gastronomy” will never be the words they would use to describe our city.