Just a Bed
Tony, Lai Chou In
While some people on top of Macao Tower are excited to jump off to explore the limits of their life, a 62-year-old man nearby on top of his bed is trying to get past the trough of his life.
With a slightly stained white tee, a pair of frayed cut-off jeans, and white slippers, Chan, who goes by the last name, is just like everybody, or somehow resembles a construction worker. But it is beyond comprehension to judge from his appearance or his characters that he has been ending up on the street since his unemployment early this year.
A bed mattress under the flyover at Praca do Lago Sai Van - the open area adjoining Macao Tower and Sai Van Lake – has become Chan’s recent living space, where he has only been staying for a few weeks.
“I had stayed at several places like Barra and Patane (沙梨頭) before I cycled to here,” said Chan, noting that Sai Van has more fresh winds and air.
A bed mattress, a bicycle, a few cardboards, and some clothes. Those are what Chan literally owns now and carries with him from place to place. Most of them are from the times when he still had a regular living space - a home. They can bring him a fleeting sense of home, such as sleeping on the bed mattress.
“Sometimes when I am just awake, I feel like I am staying at home, not in the street, for some seconds,” said Chan.
Chan had been like most of the local citizens – he had a home and a job – before his life started to turn upside down.
After separation with his wife more than a decade ago, he rented an apartment with two friends for several thousand patacas. During the times, he had worked at a local bakery until he quitted the job this year for his age and health.
“It was more like a mutual decision. Chan knew that his shoulder and back could not stand with the hard work and our boss thought that his performance could not reach the standard,” said Ah Cheng, Chan’s friend and colleague in the bakery.
Afterwards, he has difficulties in reentering the labor market, as his age has become one of his obstacles. So now no job, no money and no living space.
“They [Chan’s children] know my situation but what they can do,” said Chan, having a son and a daughter who also suffer from economic difficulties to support their respective families, needless to say in providing him a living space.
With scarcely bank savings, he now only relies on the general subsidy offered by the Social Welfare Bureau and a few hundreds he barely gets from his children. But it’s still not enough to get him a regular dwelling.
“I know he wants to rely more on himself rather than to become a burden,” said Ah Cheng.
With an aim of getting a regular living space like sharing an apartment, Chantried to find a job by getting news from his old acquaintances and flipping through some newspapers fetched from the janitors of the public toilets.
Qin, under a fictitious name, a toilet janitor, has seen several homeless staying in that area in these few years. She had an experience that the homeless would always make a mess like puddles of water in the toilet after they had used it, but Chan turned out to be different from other homeless.
“He’s gentler than many people I have seen here. We sometimes talk when I have finished my work and he is not asleep, though he isn’t a talkative type,” said Qin, who used half of her salary to rent just a bed in a shared apartment. “I understand what he’s going through.”
Once he had an appointment, set up by his children, with the staff from Social Welfare Bureau about his housing condition, but he didn’t go as he said he had forgotten it. He only revealed he might seek help from the government again later.
Chan said, “Staying in the street is just a choice without alternatives that you have to deal with.”