Crossing the road in Macao

A meditation on a particular problem in a specific place, this article ranges over a wide territory to consider the ethical and intercultural dimensions entailed in a simple act many would take to be the exercise of a fundamental human right - the right to safely cross the road at a place designated for the purpose. The place in question is East Asia's tiny city of Macao, former Portuguese territory and the newest part of China. As a long-standing site of cultural crossing and Europe's original China portal, focus on Macao offers the opportunity to examine what's taken for granted about universal culture, level playing fields and the rich/poor north/south gaps around the world. It's Macao's hybridity and undecidability of origins in terms of the East/West question which makes its landscape of objects and abstractions the right place to think through such quandaries. There's always an inaccessible intercultural dimension to ethical questions. It's thinking through the complicities and ambiguities, the connections and dislocations that will give us a view of what, of who, we must cross.