The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon
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The next day, after an early breakfast, they went for a walk. It was the first time they had ventured outside their secluded hotel: but they would meet nobody he knew at this hour in this part of Macao and even if they did they would not know Olga – even if they recognized her, so fucking what? She was a night-club singer, that’s all. And if they didn’t believe that, fuck ’em, he was a free man!
It was a hot Sunday morning, the church bells pealing. They walked hand-in-hand along the old stone Praia Grande, under the trees, past the gracious old Leal Senado, the legislative council, past the governor’s residence. Out there land-reclamation barges were at work building big dykes to hold back the muddy River Pearl, to turn the bay into freshwater lakes with artificial islands where giant modern buildings would go up, hotels and shops and offices, all connected with the old shore by sweeping thoroughfares. Hargreave had difficulty understanding it: for centuries Macao had been a small, sleepy, faded Portuguese enclave on the China coast, thoroughly neglected by Lisbon; now, four years before the joint was to be handed back to China, in 1999, there was this frenetic burst of staggering investment that would transform the place into a mini-Hong Kong.
‘Has Lisbon suddenly acquired a guilty conscience?’
‘No,’ Olga said, ‘it is all local taxes from the casinos, it’s called the Infrastructure Programme, to make Macao survive after 1999.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘It is in the newspapers.’
‘You read the Portuguese newspaper too?’
‘I try. It is interesting to know what is going on. The same is happening in Hong Kong, not so?’
Yes, the same was happening in Hong Kong and Hargreave had difficulty understanding that too. One and a half years to go before the handover to the Comrades and Hong Kong businessmen and overseas investors were pouring billions into land reclamation all along the waterfronts to make more of the most expensive real estate in the world for more towering buildings: even the highly successful Hong Kong Hilton, in Central, was being pulled down to be replaced by another towering office block. And now the colonial government was building a massive new international airport on reclaimed land off Lantau Island, and when it was finished the old runway jutting out into the harbour would be sold as more real estate to be crammed with yet more skyscrapers; and all along the old flight path into Hong Kong the existing height restrictions would be repealed, old buildings would be torn down and replaced by yet more high-rise development. Lord, was there no end to the optimism and sang-froid?
‘It is the China fever,’ Olga said, ‘now that Communism is dead, China is going to go vroom. Imagine: one thousand million new customers for the world! Russia can be the same.’
‘But,’ Hargreave said, ‘just up the coast are Shanghai and Swatow and all the other China ports, and just up the River Pearl is Canton, a huge port – fantastic development is going on in all those places too. Shanghai is going to become the biggest industrial centre in China, not Hong Kong. A businessman could build in Shanghai for a fraction of the cost.’
‘It is because Hong Kong has the experience,’ Olga said sagely, ‘and British laws.’
Hargreave snorted. ‘It doesn’t take a Chinese long to learn anything; Shanghai will soon catch up on experience and I think a lot of Hong Kong investors will burn their fingers. And I wouldn’t bank on there being British law for very long – China will throw it out the window as soon as it suits them. And,’ he added, ‘I wouldn’t bank on Communism being so dead, either.’
‘Oh, it is dead, darling! Finished, kaput! Look at Russia. Capitalism has proved it is the only way to succeed.’
‘But it only takes a military coup to put Communism back on the throne and then everything’s ruined again. And China’s massive army is all the Party faithful. There was a coup against Gorbachev, and against Yeltsin. And what about this New Communist Party in Russia?’
‘No,’ Olga said, walking along with head lowered pensively, ‘the spirit is out of the bottle, the people will never accept Communism again.’
‘China put the genie back in the bottle very effectively at the Tiananmen Square massacre, didn’t they?’
Olga tapped her head. ‘“Genie”, that is the word, not “spirit”. Yes, but that was the political genie, not the money genie. A thousand million Chinese will not let the genie go back into the bottle with their money.’
‘Mao Tse-tung,’ Hargreave said, ‘and the Bolsheviks made a pretty good job of it. The guy behind the machine-gun is always right. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see them doing it in Statue Square, Hong Kong.’
Then they came around the corner of the Praia Grande and there, towering up thirty storeys high, dwarfing all the buildings around it, was the new steel and glass tower of the official Bank of China. ‘There, darling,’ Olga pointed, ‘is the reason they will not go back to Communism!’
Yes, it was reassuring, like the new Bank of China building in Hong Kong; it tended to show that the Chinese took commercial stability seriously now that Deng had proclaimed, ‘To become rich is glorious’ – but if Hargreave were a businessman he would wait and see before investing his millions. Olga said: ‘And have you seen all the factories just beyond the Barrier Gate?’
No, he hadn’t, but he’d heard about it – and he’d seen the same thing across the Hong Kong border, in the new Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in the Samchun Valley where a few years ago there had been only sleepy paddy fields. Now the valley was covered in factories and apartment blocks and businessmen from around the world were setting up industries there because land, building costs and labour were so cheap. Yet just over the border, in Hong Kong, only ten or twelve miles away as the crow flies, on the most expensive real estate in the world the same damn thing was happening. It didn’t make long-term sense. Hargreave was no businessman but it seemed to him that there had to be a levelling of the two sets of values, and surely Hong Kong’s had to go down?
Olga said: ‘And now let’s go to my old Macao, where I live; I love it.’
They walked hand-in-hand up the narrow, crowded streets, the grubby Chinese tenements on both sides, their signboards fighting each other up to the sky, the shops selling everything from silks and hi-fi gear down to lizards’ tails, through the smells of gutters and restaurants and spices and butchers and incense and smoke and urine, through the coolies and shopkeepers and urchins and mangy dogs and scrawny cats and the hammering and the yammering and the clattering of mah-jong, until they came to a tailor’s shop near the old Central Hotel. Olga pointed up at the top floor of the joyless tenement building opposite.
‘Those are my windows. It is old-fashioned but nice inside. I would take you in but my girlfriends are asleep now. I like it here because it is the old China, so much life everywhere. And I would like to show you my cats.’
‘Cats? How many have you got?’
‘About twenty, but they are not really mine, they live on the roof. Every day I feed them there and they are very grateful. I will show you another time, darling, when I cook you a nice Russian stew. But –’ she held up a finger – ‘I am learning Chinese cooking too; perhaps I must give you that, to impress you.’
‘I’m already impressed.’
‘Yes, but that is in bed – I mean in the kitchen.’
Hargreave grinned. ‘Do you like your flatmates, the girls?’
‘Oh yes, they are very nice. Yolanda is my good friend, she comes from Vladivostok, she spent all her life in the orphanage, since a baby – I was lucky. But she is so stupid, always falling in love with silly men.’ She grinned: ‘Not like me, who only falls in love with very important lawyers.’
She led him through the narrow, jostling, odoriferous streets, till they came to a squat, modern, white building with sheet-iron gates guarded by