The Peace Correspondent

by Garry Marchant

  Saturday is amateur day, with hobby drivers from the region racing their own cars. “These are guys who never get out of second gear in Hong Kong,” a track cynic says. “They have to clear the debris off the track whenever these half-fast drivers race.”

  Mid-afternoon, drivers from the Gentlemen Racers Club, whose first qualification is the ability to afford a fast car, rev up their Porches, Ferraris, a Corvette and a rare Lamborghini Diablo for the Supercar Challenge. When the flag falls, 32 high-performance sports cars screech off the grid, tear down the straightaway hell-bent for the first bend -- and a roar comes from the crowd. A television camera at Lisboa Bend, where so many drivers come to grief, shows a pile-up of cars scattered around the track, their racing days ended. It looks more like a demolition derby than a sports car race.

  “The Porsche dealer already has his calculator out counting his money from the repairs,” chortles the track cynic.

  As the Gentlemen finish their race, a Porsche chasing a Ferrari to the checkered flag, Classic Car Club of Hong Kong owners prepare their “unusual and exotic cars” in the pits. This is a mixed group -- MGs, Volkswagens, Alfas, Triumphs and Lotuses racing against a Ford Mustang, D-type Jaguar and a Ford Cortina. Classic drivers pulling on their helmets and gloves are paunchy, balding bulldogs, not the whippet-lean boys of the F3 circuit. Meanwhile, a Gentleman driver from the Supercar race whines to his doting girlfriend about how someone had done him wrong out on the track. He is near to tears of righteous indignation.

  What a motoring writer will later refer to as “the million dollar carnage” continues, with an AC Cobra smashing into a wall, several cars spinning out and a driver sent to the hospital. After 10 eventful laps, a Cathay Pacific flight engineer squeaks across the finish line first with his classic green 1957 D-type Jaguar to retain his title.

  The amateur events finished, Saturday night is serious party night with private celebrations, hospitality suites, cocktail receptions and dinners in Macau’s many hotels.

  In a reception in the Mandarin Hotel, hors d’oeuvres and drinks offered, several F3 drivers gather to sip sodas and mingle with the fans. Personable Paul Stewart, a second-time visitor, reflects on the Macau Grand Prix. “Local fans may know less about racing, but they are enthusiastic, because it is the one event of the year here,” he says. “It’s exciting for us, too, because the competition is great with so many good drivers.” Another driver is explaining the medic’s role to a circle of admirers: “If you’re in an accident, he’s there to make sure that your heart works and you brain works. That is it. He is an anesthetist.”

  When world champion bike racer, Texan “Revin’ Kevin” Schwantz -- who looks more a scrawny teenager just off his bicycle -- comes in, even the Formula 3 drivers are awestruck. Ignoring the party types, the young professionals gather together like a bunch of kids hanging around a street corner talking about their cars and bikes.

  Next door, the Mandarina Duck Gentleman Sports Club awards ceremony is larger and more lavish, with oysters and roast beef, sushi and a more generous bar. Club members applaud and distribute trophies from today’s competition, for first, second, third, best in the time trials, best improvement in the time trials and more. The driver from the pits, still scowling into his scotch over his injured pride, receives only a small trophy for participating.

  In a large ballroom, the organizers, sponsors and local officials gather at Watson’s lavish black tie dinner, with a live band playing and Champagne flowing. And all across Macau, bars are crowded with bike and car enthusiasts and visiting yachtsmen from the Grand Prix Regatta. A British reporter on the regular racing circuit observes between sips of complimentary wine, “This is the most fun meet of the year. It’s a party for the organizers, for everyone except the drivers. In Europe’s one day meets it is all tension. Here you get to meet the drivers, see them when they relax.” But they are a clean-living bunch, as their profession demands.

  At dawn Sunday, lights glow from the car park where the mechanics have been working through the night to get their charges ready for the race. The road outside the pits is a junkyard of novices’ pranged-up cars with crushed fenders, battered bodywork and crumpled wheels.

  Today, the professionals take over the track with the F3 and Guia races. Car racing is a family tradition, with names inscribed on some cars familiar to race fans of 20 years ago -- Stewart, Fittipaldi, Villeneuve. And there are so many Italian names, the lists of drivers resembles an exotic pasta menu -- Schiattarella, Gilardi, Ravaglia, Angelelli.

  One Guia car bears a mystical inscription that is either Zen philosophy or a Japanese T-shirt slogan:

  Born to infinity of

  a critical plane:

  A new dynamic relationship bonding body, machine and nature.

  Forging freedom, faith

  love of the track.

  In the midst of all the activity, a demure young lady in traditional Japanese kimono pitter-patters through the pits. A sizable Japanese film crew with cameras, tripods, huge reflectors and production assistants with clipboards, soundmen and boom men follows two “drivers” walking along, arguing. It is a Japanese movie being shot on location.

  The actors, even more clean-cut than the real drivers, walk deliberately towards each other. They stand, staring steely-eyed for a long moment, then brush past each other. The shorter “driver,” obviously the villain in this little drama, turns back to glare malevolently, with the kind of look normally found in Japanese Samurai comic books. Then the director, in a black beret, yells “Cut” in English.

  Meanwhile, real life dramas take place all around, as pit crews work feverishly to prepare cars for the high-stakes race. It is a mechanical marvel as they dismantle the precious little cars like intricate puzzles, replace parts or entire engines, fit on new fiberglass body parts, and stick on decals like kids building models. The small, low-slung single seat F3s look like toys close up, and drivers have to remove the steering wheel to squeeze in. But when they start, the bracckk-bracckk-bracckk shakes the ground.

  Throughout the afternoon, a crew with major problems works furiously to replace the engine as starting time approaches. Dripping sweat, they work silently, each man knowing his part, hands reaching for gleaming tools with the precision of a team of surgeons in an operating room -- except they use wrenches and screwdrivers instead of scalpel and forceps.

  While they battle against time, a public relations director in the next pit sets up his clients, posing drivers, mechanics and pit girls around the car for publicity photographs and press releases. Nearby, news photographers taking pictures of drivers in a rickshaw have pounced on American biker, Richard Shaw, as a favorite subject.

  Some journalists are interested in more than motoring matters, though. For days, a woman from a Hong Kong English-language newspaper prowls the pits trying to get the lowdown on the camp followers and the Hospitality Girls. Searching for the steamy, seamy side of the racing scene, she asks the models if they see the drivers after the races -- implying that they are fringe benefits. When she questions one particularly youthful driver if he goes out with the girls, he disarms her with, “Why, are you angling for a date?” She gets neither date nor dirt, and a story appears in the weekend paper about the clean-cut drivers.

  Not all of the “girls” are as demure as the diminutive umbrella bearers, though. Two short, dyed blonde poopsies in Day-Glo lime bathing suits, hot pink jackets, crimson shoes and matching lips pose provocatively with anyone interested. One keeps adjusting her suit to hide the tattoo on her breast.

  Races are best watched from hospitality suites in the Mandarin Oriental hotel across the street from the pits, with its complimentary bars and elaborate Asian buffets. There, privileged guests of race sponsors gather to eat, drink and watch cars screaming through Mandarin Bend below at maximum revs, and on TV monitors. Here, it is Champagne and caviar. Down in the stands, it is rice box lunches, hot dogs and beer.

  The Guia Race for Group A touring cars is the most grueling contes
t, the professionals doing 30 laps in about 90 minutes. When Watson’s driver Emanuele Pirro wins the big race, he takes the winners’ stand and pours Watson’s water over his head. These pros know on which side their sponsorship bread is buttered.

  The atmosphere around the starting grids crackles like a high-tension wire as the important F3 event approaches. With the clock ticking down, the benighted Japanese crew desperately works on its troublesome car. Fortunately, the races are running almost an hour late, giving them a chance to make it.

  The pensive young drivers pull on white balaclavas and sunglasses that make them look like sci-fi movie creatures, and squeeze into their cars while photographers and TV crews swarm over them, shoving cameras in their faces. Led by a $7 million Jaguar shipped over for the occasion, they take off for a practice lap, then line up on the starting grid.

  Three Brazilian dancers, colored ribbons hanging from shorts and halters, jiggle onto the track, dancing, singing, playing guitars and bongo drums. They gyrate over to the two Brazilian cars, driving photographers wild. The bemused announcer looking down from the control tower says “There are some young ladies down there with bits of colored paper stuck to their, ah, persons.” Meanwhile, team leaders hold intense, last-minute briefings with the drivers as crews check tire pressures and fuss over the cars.

  Finally, the Macau governor and racing officials appear for the starting ceremony, along with jumping, head-shaking green, yellow, gold and red paper lions dancing on the track as firecrackers explode. With the smell of black powder and high-octane gas, it seems highly hazardous. Just as the speeches end, the beleaguered Japanese car finally starts, and lines up last on the grid. The mechanics, at least, have won their race against time.

  The flag drops, the cars start in a great roar, charging for positions at the first bend like hybrid rabid beasts, so fast that roadlevel spectators feel the impact like a body blow. Young David Coulthard takes the lead and increases it convincingly, moving so far ahead that the TV cameras concentrate on the duels further back in the pack, to the dismay of his sponsors. The Scotsman wins the leg with a convincing nine seconds, making him impossible to beat in the second leg.

  It is like a rock concert down at the award stand, with police holding back the pushing and shoving crowd and photographers fighting for a place in front. The scene gets nasty, with one tough old Dutch Vietnam vet raging at anyone who pushes in front of him: “What are you wankers doing, you don’t even have a real camera, get outta there,” his big foot lashing out at intruders.

  Coulthard, who looks too young to drink, fumbles his magnum of Moet. There will obviously be more in his life. Then the cork pops, spewing out Champagne froth like great clumps of snow. The three winners spray the crowd in the traditional Grand Prix ceremony, and the racing part of the weekend is over.

  That night brings to mind a comment from a Macau Grand Prix aficionado in the wood-paneled room of Hong Kong’s Club Lusitano, weeks earlier: “This isn’t about little cars running around a track. This is a social occasion.”

  Across Macau, alcohol proves as powerful a fuel as Avgas as races are rerun with ever greater skill at the awards ceremony in the Mandarin and the lavish final party in the Lisboa Hotel.

  “Coming out of the hairpin, I blasted up through the gears, then down to Fisherman’s Bend …,” says one driver.

  “I was accelerating hard right up through San Francisco Hill when … ”

  It is all the racing they can do until the little cars with the big engines come back for the next Grand Prix.

  TAIWAN

  TAIPEI

  Snakes and Dragon Ladies

  November, 1980

  THE scrawny old man in baggy black pyjamas Brushes the Tail of the Sparrow, Bails the Moon from the Bottom of the Sea and Embraces the Tiger to Return to the Mountain. With slow motion t’ai chi ch’uan Chinese shadow boxing movements, the wizened warrior destroys imagined enemies while far below, Taipei, provisional capital of the Republic of China, awakes to another busy work day. Two dragons leaping from the upswept roof of the massive, Sino-Rococo Grand Hotel blink their bulging, 500-watt eyes at the hundreds of Taiwanese surging up the wooded hill to greet the dawn with t’ai chi, badminton, calisthenics or simply a walk.

  Having slept in to the decadently late hour of 5 a.m., I scurry out of my little room, which is buried in the depths of the ornately decorated Grand Hotel, to join the crowds streaming up the mountain. Skipping up the stone steps in my black kung fu slippers, I am soon lost in a warren of paths, temples, clearings, courts and exercise yards. All around, Taipeiers greet the day in their own ways. Students in bright sweat suits jog up and down the paths, do warm-up exercises and play volleyball or badminton.

  In a clearing to my left, 10 swordsmen slowly eviscerate illusory foes in unison with crude aluminum blades. Old gentlemen in baggy pants do ballet type stretching exercises, hooking their legs against tree branches. An old woman, grey hair chopped straight across high on her neck, sits on a marker stone facing the rising sun her head nodding up and down rhythmically. To the right, early risers, matutinal regime complete, gather at a temple cafe to drink tea and eat congee (rice porridge).

  In this clearing, five would-be warriors flail in unison in the age-old movements of temple boxing, kicking, punching and lunging - with restraint - at the air. As they move easily from Golden Cock Stands on One Leg to a graceful Arabesque, I wave goodbye to the kung fuers and scurry down the mountain. Colonel Chan, Kuomintang Army, retired, has promised to educate me in the culture and ways of the East.

  Over SCREAM BLED EGGS, as the menu calls them, the colonel gives me a quick rundown on Taiwan. This Holland-sized island, a province of China, is, he insists, the custodian of Chinese heritage and the best place to observe the true Chinese way of life. It became a protectorate of the Chinese Empire in 1206, the year Mongolian conqueror Ghenghis Khan founded the Yuan Dynasty. Occupied by the Dutch, Spanish, French and Japanese, the island was restored to China after WWII. (Although the colonel doesn’t mention it, this wasn’t entirely suitable to the native Taiwanese who revolted in 1947. The Nationalist Chinese army put down the brief rebellion.) In 1949, as the Communists took over the mainland, Chiang Kai Shek moved to the island with two million supporters and set up his “provisional” capital of China. But the colonel promises the nationalists will return.

  Meanwhile, the Nationalist Chinese brought the vast collection of art treasures of the Imperial Collection in China with them to Taipei, founding the National Palace Museum. This is our first destination, and my first lesson in Chinese culture. Jumping into a Yueloong taxi, we swing out into the broad, straight “American-style” streets.

  I am sure even the colonel will agree that Taipei is not a pretty city with its dull streets, grayness and traffic. You have to look closely to see the beauty and the life, but it is there in the ancient city gates, grand and small temples, and the bustling street life.

  Colonel Chan explains that Hong Kong tourists come here because of the open countryside, a break from the congestion of their city and for the culture. Americans and Europeans come for the food, and for the culture. Japanese tourists, well, the Japanese developed a taste for the sulfur baths and accompanying rituals during WWII.

  Around us, modern cars and buses pass, while slinky, Terry and the Pirates comic strip Dragon Lady vamps in high suede spike-heeled boots ride by on the backs of Hondas, reminders of how much more wealthy and sophisticated this city is than when I first saw it more than 10 years earlier. Taiwan has the second-highest standard of living in Asia, and it shows in the dress of most of the people.

  At the museum with the statue of Sun Yat-sen, father of modern China, the colonel wangles me an official photographer’s arm band - number 009. Museum guide Miss Celilia Hu explains that the museum, founded in Peking in 1925, houses more than a quarter of a million objects. Most of the collection is stored in a tunnel behind the museum, and even though exhibits change every three months, it takes 10 years to show the e
ntire collection.

  No superlatives could adequately describe this impressive museum of the world’s oldest civilization, a must-see for anyone interested in Chinese culture. Certainly, one day is inadequate to take it all in, and as we jog down the rows of exhibits of bronzes, jade, pottery lacquer ware, enamel ware, carvings, religious implements and paintings, I pause to note only the most unusual.

  Look at this Shang bronze wine vessel with the Tao-tieh in relief. The Tao-tieh is an ogre, a cross between a horned lion and a griffin, sometimes called a “glutton for a literal translation of the name. Imagine waking up after too many draughts of the bronze wine cup facing that grotesque creature and the word “glutton” ringing in your head. Perhaps the design was meant to encourage temperance. Early Chinese artists relied heavily on imagination rather than copying nature, Miss Hu explains. I hope this little beauty springs only from imagination, and perhaps a few too many pulls from the bronze wine jug: an owl head figure in marble with ram’s horn, monkey’s eyes, eagle’s beak, wings of a coiled serpent, elephant legs, human eyebrows and ears and body covered with fish scales. This night guardian of an emperor’s tomb can walk, swim and fly.

  But on to more pleasing exhibits, such as a jade battle ax with entwined serpents or 48-piece jade screen. On another floor, we see traditional Chinese paintings with the familiar jagged peaks, gnarled trees and lowering clouds and a carved ivory stand surmounted by 21 concentric balls each one carved in fine openwork design so you can revolve them separately.