Pilgrimages: Memories of Colonial Macau and Hong Kong

Porto

Porto 9 Porto Pilgrimages: Memories of Colonial Macau and Hong Kong 10 A Pilgrim to Porto Fado singing actually sounded quite like Cantonese opera, I told myself as the train raced through the hilly countryside of Spain towards northern Portugal. Like José Saramago, I thought of myself as a pilgrim and a traveller, not a tourist. Like all pilgrims, I believed that I had a special relationship with the place I was visiting. There are invisible ties between Portugal and myself, not at all apparent to outsiders. My birth certificate (Assentos de Nascimento), my identity card (Bilhete de Identidade), my fingerprints and other essential data are stored at a place called Conservatória dos Registos Centrais in Lisbon. Childhood, to me, was images of an esplanade called Rua de Praia Grande, palm trees and lush gardens, pink villas and yellow baroque churches. My Macanese childhood made me feel much closer to Portugal than to the small towns in Southern China, where my parents and their parents came from.Which explains why in late June, a Chinese woman got up at five in the morning as the sleeper train crossed the line between Spain and Portugal. I wanted to be awake at this moment. I tried to identify the countryside, but all I could see was the sun coming up behind the hills. Still, I said to myself, “I am home.” Having read Saramago’s Journey to Portugal, I was prepared for a country of stark landscape and hardworking people. There were olives trees, and sheep, and rough stone huts. There were little towns with shuttered storefronts and buildings that needed a new coat of paint but looked as if they didn’t care. My romantic heart sank; I hoped that as the train pulled closer to Porto, the landscape would change. It did. Before reaching Porto, the train stopped at oceanfront towns such as Esinho, where women hung colourful laundry on lines that ran parallel to the train tracks. And pizza takeouts. And video rentals. Portuguese towns looked not dissimilar from other suburbs around the world. By then, I was desperate for something evocatively Portuguese. Luckily, for a traveller hungry for “authentic” Portugal, there was nothing more satisfying than to step off the train and walk into the waiting hall of Sao Bento station. Quite a small station, built in 1900, its walls were covered by 20,000 tiles (so the guidebook told me), in the bestazulejos Porto 11 (painted ceramic tiles) tradition. Sao Bento was not an ultra modern station. It belonged to a different era, with its ornate but faded décor and travellers dressed in drab but functional clothes. There were no fast-food outlets, no insurance kiosks, no Relay bookstores. I was too tired, after nineteen hours on the train, to take in the significance of the tiles. But I was thankful that my first sight of Porto was a scene so intensely Portuguese and so unlike a generic, international train station. The hotel, located on the main street Avenida dos Aliados, was a turn-of-last-century affair. Dignified, ornate, but without fanfare. One walked up to the second floor where the reception desk was, and saw beyond, down a narrow corridor, the hotel sitting room for guests, with red plush sofas and antimacassars and aspidistras. Not unlike a sitting room one would find in a seaside hotel decades ago in England. I remembered living rooms like this in Macau too. Imported decors from colonialists. Later, when I explored the various corridors on the floor where my room was, I found one service stairwell and was enchanted to see white bed sheets hanging on rods to air dry. Who was washing these sheets? The shy woman who dusted the side tables with the plastic vases of flowers? Lacking a proper map of Porto, I went to the street indicated as the shopping street, Rua de Santa Catarina, where I found a small but packed bookshop just about to close for the weekend. Like many other shops on this and other streets in Porto, this unpretentious store had an Art Nouveau storefront of cast iron and glass worthy of Otto Wagner. The young woman spoke English well enough to show me where the maps were. She even tried to help me find books on Macau. We found none. Obviously, this former colony didn’t play a major role when the buyer ordered books for...