Church

Although Macau is fast becoming a city of steel and glass and gigantic modern buildings, there are dozens of Catholic churches and Buddhist temples scattered everywhere. Some of the churches date from the late 1500s, and the one we’ve discovered, on a hilltop about a 20-minute walk from our apartment, was built in 1865. Sunday Mass in Chinese is at 9 a.m., in English at 10 a.m. and in Portuguese at 11 a.m. We go to the 10, and our fellow churchgoers are primarily from the sizeable Filipino community. The Australian priest is humble, brilliant and a dedicated servant of God and his “flock” of parishioners. The choir of Filipino women evokes a childlike innocence. The place is filled with joy. I have been asked to be a reader each time we’ve gone there, and that role helps me be even more engaged in the service and sense of community. I don’t know that I’ve ever wanted so much to go to church on Sunday!

Prejudice

My wife, Elaine, a 55-year old grandmother of Scots, Welsh, and Germanic lineage, is also a full-time student here at the University of Macau. Like other Susquehanna students with us, she has had some encounters with prejudice. This is from a note she sent to one of our daughters:

I had a terrible/wonderful experience in my first Community Psychology class, last Friday morning. Arriving early, I had chosen a seat where I could be in the midst of the action. To my sorrow and horror, every one of the 19 Chinese students who came in later sat as FAR AWAY from me as they possibly could. It was excruciating!!! But, when the professor came in, she made some of the students come and sit near me ... which wasn't much better, because they still made it clear that I was not welcome. Still, over the three hours, our prof put me in a group with two other mainland Chinese girls (over 8,000 students from the mainland apply to the University of Macau each year, and only 200 are admitted, so they really are cream-of-the-crop spectacular students!!) and we had about 20 minutes to prepare a project on a community problem of our choosing. I mentioned the problem of "materialism" which was a totally new concept to my teammates. They had no idea what I was talking about. But they listened and thought about it, and BAM!!, when it came time to present our proposal to the class, my teammate stood, and nailed it in the most inspired demonstration of "getting it" (within a very short period of time) than I have ever seen! I could not help but clap spontaneously for her, and she in turn, high-fived me. In a way, she exemplified the rapid rise (within 15 years) of China itself - from an impoverished communist backwater ... to its role on center stage today.

At any rate, even though I was something of a thorn in the side of the class, politely raising my hand to point out every single (and they were constant) instance of anti-American bias, stereotyping and propaganda that underlies much of my classmates' personal ideology, by the end of the three hours, I no longer felt ostracized. My prof shared how she grew up in South Africa, spoon-fed the notion that black-skinned people were less intelligent than whites. She knew well that many Chinese think they are the superior race and that this elitism works against any notion of diverse community, which is what our class is partly about. ... So, it is all, um, very interesting! Frankly, because the students are truly top-notch, it is evident to me that they could very well think of themselves as "superior" to most anyone else on earth! THAT keeps me "ever so 'umble!"

Study Tour Group pics

We have returned to Macau from our study tour of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Classes have started, the weather has warmed (finally) and we all have begun a new chapter here.

Here are a few select photos of the many, many that were taken during the two-week excursion:

The group poses with some children in Vietnam, after a trip by sampan to see some fish farms.





We visited Angkor Wat, the huge Cabodian religous "city" dating back to the 10th-12th century. We were blown away.




On our last night of the study tour, we had dinner aboard a boat that cruised the Mekong River at Saigon (officially known as Ho Chi Minh City).

Grainy Photographs

Like most of us who watched the news during the Vietnam War, my images of the conflicts, battles and torn lives on both sides consisted mostly of grainy, black and white photos transmitted by wire to the U.S. Even thinking of friends I lost there, or friends of friends, the images in my mind were always low-resolution B&W.

How different to be there, to see the Viet Cong tunnels at Cu Chi, to tour the American War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, and to begin to understand, for the first time, the perspectives of the Vietnamese people who resisted and fought and killed my friends, and died. Dominated by the Chinese for a thousand years, colonized by the French for 90 years, these were people who had had enough control from outside interests, thank you, and who willingly gave their lives for independence. Kind of like their own Revolutionary War, which they won in 1975.

Drive-thru Supermarket

In Can Tho, Vietnam, I walked through a street market late in the afternoon, where people were buying food for the evening. Imagine a supermarket with one very wide and long aisle, and instead of shopping carts, everyone is on a motorbike, buying fish here, vegetables there, and pineapples down the aisle, haggling over prices, and receiving their merchandise in plastic bags that drivers put into little baskets or tied to handlebars or fenders. What amazed me most was how natural it all seemed; no one was honking or shouting, yet the entire scene was alive with activity and I, as one of the only pedestrians, had to weave my way carefully through the throng of vendors and motorized shoppers.

Drunk Driver

Highways in Vietnam are packed with zillions of motorbikes, many carrying entire families. It’s not uncommon to see a couple astride a motor scooter, with a small child or two on its mother’s lap, sandwiched between mom and dad. There are also large vans, buses, and trucks, and everyone is vying for position on impossibly narrow two-lane roads. It was terrifying to witness from the passenger seat of our bus, yet we only saw two accidents in some 200 km of frantic driving. We often seemed to be blazing along at reckless speed, but it was impossible to know how fast exactly, as almost none of our buses had working speedometers. Instead, most were “protected” by various amulets, and dried flower and ribbon charms “for luck,” dangling from the rear view mirrors. But more than luck was involved. We had countless near-misses, and give kudos to our drivers for their breathtaking skill.

At one point we saw a man on a motorbike weaving obliviously all over the highway, and almost tipping other scooters into the ditch or into the homes and small businesses set up where the road’s shoulders should have been. As we finally passed the bare-chested, middle-aged fellow, it was all too obvious that he was fall-down drunk, barely able to keep his machine on the road, and a threat to the already tenuous safety of everyone else around him. It may have been the first time ever that I saw so clearly the danger of driving while intoxicated.

Contrasts

We flew from Siem Reap, where we’d seen the amazing structures at Angkor Wat, and landed mid-afternoon in Pnom Penh. Our guide took us immediately to the “torture prison” where Pol Pot and his cronies imprisoned and tortured some 17,000 of his countrymen before sending them – beaten, blindfolded and broken – to the killing fields outside of town. Official estimates are that 1.5 million Cambodians were killed by the Kmer Rouge regime, but that doesn’t include the additional 1.5 million who starved or worked themselves to death just trying to stay alive. The photos in the prison include a wall of children, most taken with, and executed with, their parents. Another part of the prison consists of old school classrooms that had been divided into 3’ X 6’ cells, where landowners, doctors, teachers and anyone who might possibly have resisted were chained, with only a small bucket for collecting their own waste.

We left the prison and checked into a very nice 4-star hotel in the heart of town. One baffling feature was an insanely high-tech shower, measuring 3’ X 6’ and featuring remote controlled stereo sound, nozzles and air jets, a steamer feature, and gosh only knows what else. Within a mile of one another were examples of man’s capacity for unspeakable brutality, and human ingenuity that turns taking a simple shower into a memorable (although complicated and not altogether pleasant) experience.

Elephants

One feature of our time in Thailand was a 45-minute ride on an elephant. We’d all eagerly looked forward to this unique experience. I’ve concluded that thinking about taking an elephant ride is more fun than actually taking it. Pictured here are Susquehanna students Alex White '09 and Amy Markowski '09.