During my first term at Cambridge, I took part in many clandestine poker games. Participants had to wear red-velvet smoking jackets and bow ties, and debts were written on pieces of paper and collected afterward with gentlemanly menace. I lost so much money at these aristocratic games—thousands of dollars—that over my first Christmas holiday I was forced to take a job on a North Sea oil rig in order to pay it all back. As I spent each day swaying in a force-nine gale on a tiny plank high above the sea, painting 20-foot numerals on the side of a British Petroleum rig, I wondered what form of insanity had driven me to spend all my scholarship money on seven hands of poker—a game I can't even play well. The release form I had signed with the oil company seemed, therefore, a justified punishment: It stipulated, essentially, that I couldn't sue if I lost a hand.
I recalled this sorry episode upon arriving in Macao, the 17.5-square-mile island off China's southern coast that is set to become the world's biggest gambling center. I hadn't placed a bet in 20 years. Now it was Chinese New Year, and I was spending a week at the notorious Hotel Lisboa—a lone gwailo (the Cantonese term for "Caucasian") with a dormant addiction ready to be aroused in the most seductively addictive casino ever built. The place was awash with package tourists from mainland China, the biggest gambling nation on earth, who descend in multitudes and with guiltless avarice on this tiny ex-Portuguese colony—an hour by hydrofoil from Hong Kong—that the Lonely Planet calls "a Sino-Lusitanian Las Vegas." Once there, they go berserk. I wondered if I would, too.
The baroquely curved Lisboa looks like an orange meringue pie from the outside, and a courtesan's bedroom from the inside. A lobby immediately disorients the newly arrived punter: coiled staircases, tangerine trees, blazing Breguet watch shops, and vast, breast-shaped droplet chandeliers. "Antique" jade sculptures with names like The Ancient Seismograph and The Realm of the Buddhas stand for sale in glass cases with dates attached to them—1988 for The Ancient Seismograph. A Filipino bellhop took me to the eighteenth floor. "All Chinese here," he told me wearily. "Crazy bastards." My room was black and gold, a wonderful gambler's den with a computerized steam bath. Gold taps, gold mirrors, gold door handles. It was close to midnight, but I noticed at once the din of a construction site outside. Through the curtains, I saw what looked like a monstrous metal lotus illuminated by arc lights. The porter explained that the owner of the Lisboa, Dr. Stanley Ho—an octogenarian ballroom dancer, billionaire real estate tycoon, and wine collector renowned for his impressive cache of 1961 Château Palmer—was building another casino next door, the Grand Lisboa, in order to profit from China's roaring gambling boom. The floral shape of the building was, apparently, "a symbol of Macao." Beyond the lotus spread a cityscape of flashing-neon casino signs and giant billboards for saunas: whale-size Nereids wrapped in towels.
At 1:00 a.m., gripping a cheap silver clip of Hong Kong dollars, I ventured outside the room. "Why not?" a little voice whispered inside my head, for I had felt at once a strange switch being thrown deep inside me. Opened in 1971, and as self-contained as a cruise ship, the Hotel Lisboa sports grocery stores, jewelers, travel agents, pharmacies, health stores with rows of cellophaned shark fins (an alleged aphrodisiac), subterranean cafés filled with willowy prostitutes, and miles of watch shops—or relojoalharias, the Portuguese name. The 37 exclusive "VIP rooms," popular with newly entitled Chinese millionaires, all have slightly desperate-sounding names: Club Golden Dragon, Club Wealthy, Club Hong Fok. Guests in cheap plastic shoes wander about this maze all night with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, loudly clearing their throats but not actually spitting. (The casino has several signs that read, "Spitting HK$600 Fixed Fine"—around $80 U.S.) The ethos here is not exactly pleasure: It feels more like a factory whose workforce has suddenly taken Ecstasy. Everyone has gone wild, but somehow methodically, without rapture.
