By Alex Lam, Genista Wong, Jekskrim Fu, Yan Siu

Over the years, Macao has been developing rapidly after the handover to China and opening up the casino concessions. It thus attracts tens of millions of people from Hong Kong, mainland China and Southeast Asia to come to visit here, and even work here.

With all these different ethnicities (people from different cultures and races), what is the impact brought to local citizens in terms of fashion, cuisine (dietary habits), housing and transportation? These four aspects constitute an essential texture in our livelihood.

In this report, we are going to explore the status quo in Macao: the multi-cultural society, different ethnicities, problems in urban housing, traffic and transportation, and deviant behaviors. It attempts to divide it into different parts to present an expansive picture of the issues from a sociological and stereotypical perspective instead of focusing on one problem in detail.

There are pros and cons about having diverse ethnicities in Macao. Cultural integration allows us to have a variety of choices in clothing and restaurants. However, it may also lead to problems of the quality of life and transportation.

So what do students think about different ethnicities living here? We have conducted a survey and gathered opinions from 100 students at the University of Macau (UM).

We wanted to find out what are the advantages and disadvantages caused by different ethnicities living in Macao from the students’ point of view. We conducted a survey to ask UM students the questions about different ethnicities’ influence on fashion style, dining habits, living problems and public transportation. We started the survey on October 22-23 and randomly selected 100 UM students to participate. Here is the summary of the results in these abovementioned four perspectives:

Fashion

In recent years, a lot of small boutiques with different styles have been launched in Macao, especially Japanese and Korean styles. The Japanese mall Cerejeira has two branches in both Macao and Taipa. Koreans also started their fashion boutiques in Macao. It is good that Macao people now have more choices in terms of fashion. According to our survey results, about 89% of the students think different ethnicities in Macao brought a positive impact on fashion to them. They think that they can have more choices in clothing such as Japanese and Korean dressing styles. 10% of the students think that there is a negative impact because they think that the Chinese dressing style is enough and other ethnicities’ styles may be too much for them.

 

Cuisine (Dietary habits)

Aside from fashion, there is also a huge variety of food to choose from. From food shops to restaurants, Macao people can find fresh and creative new styles of food all over the city. Besides traditional Cantonese food, we can enjoy different Chinese cuisines like Sichuan, Shanghainese , Taiwanese and Chaozhou food. International cuisines like Italian, French, Japanese, Korean, Burmese, Vietnamese, Indian and Portuguese food are all available here as well. Macao is a small city by size, but it is a place of choices in cuisine. About 84% of the students surveyed think that different ethnicities in Macao brought a positive impact on dining habits to them. They think that the food and cuisine from other countries or regions are delicious so it is good to have various foods in Macao. However, 11% of them think that the foods from different ethnicities are not delicious, or too spicy or not healthy, so the non-local dietary habit is not appealing to them.

Housing

Due to the large population that has expanded in Macao in the past few years, decent living quarters have become an intense social problem. For instance, Filipinos are comparatively active after midnight; they like to live in an apartment together with a group of five or more, which can be annoying to neighbors. Local Macao people have been experiencing a tough time finding an ideal living place. From the survey, 33% of the students think that it is acceptable to have neighbors from different ethnicities. They think they can make friends and know more about other cultures. However, 58% of them believe there is a negative impact. For example, one of the students said that he has some Filipino neighbors who always make lots of noise at night. The other student has a Vietnamese neighbor who always sings loudly in the afternoon. Both of which are annoying to them.

Transportation

It has also become a challenging social problem for the government. Despite the continuous improvement that the government did, it is still not enough to meet the demands of citizens. Macao people complain a lot about not being able to get on public transportation due to the massive number of tourists. Laborers and tourists from the mainland often occupy buses from 5pm to 7pm daily. The situation that taxi drivers often reject local Macao people is also cited as a serious factor that leads to poor transportation service. When asked about what influences different ethnicities have on public transportation, 19% of the students think there is a positive impact. They think that it does not cause any problems to them. But 78% of the students think there is a negative impact on this issue. For instance, there are not enough buses for Macao citizens.

It’s without a doubt that foreigners and immigrants in Macao do affect the normal livelihood of local citizens in ways like transportation and housing. The problems can become very serious if appropriate policies are not set up, and they could even trigger dissatisfaction of local citizens towards foreigners and immigrants.

For us, we do not find that particularly a big problem when sharing our neighborhoods with people coming from other parts of the world – most of the time we believe they are not intervening in our lives and we can all perfectly face each other with total respect and understanding; and we found consonance of this perspective from most of the local citizens, too.
But the problems we mentioned previously do not originate from their existence. There is no problem for us to communicate with foreigners and immigrants, and we would not be dissatisfied as long as they do not change the already established social norms in our society – but sadly, sometimes they do.

Now the habits of taking public transportation of local people have changed. The environment of the residences has changed. Cultural values are more diversified but not mutually respected. Even between local people and Chinese from the mainland we could see many cases of differences between cultural practices and beliefs. From the way of driving a car to the level of volume when talking in a restaurant, the differences can sometimes become quite problematic to both groups of people.

Ironically we do not think there is any solution to this matter, as it almost happens everywhere in the world. Cultural differences are going to happen all the time and we cannot simply deny the rights of foreigners and immigrants to come in.