soft power. [west of the moon, 24 february 2018]
This trip last weekend, we were in the Bahamas for the long weekend, it was beautiful. We stayed at a brand new and very fancy resort complex; at some point I should examine why "so much nicer than our usual hotel" provoked such persistent class/status anxiety in me, but not right now. (It's like in the mindfulness meditations I should start doing again: notice the feeling, acknowledge it, let it float past you.)
The front entrance to the hotel was flanked by two massive Chinese guardian lions. It's been nearly seven years since our tour guide in Beijing explained the iconography to me, but I still remember enough to show Declan how one lion (the mom lion, I said, for simplicity) has a baby lion under her paw ("it's called a cub, Mom," he said patiently) and the other (the dad) lion has a ball. The cub was just about at Declan's eye level; the whole stone sculpture towered over my head.
There was a huge casino at the heart of the resort's interior. The casino turned out to be something of a letdown--at night, when Matt's parents were babysitting, they didn't have any blackjack tables with less than a twenty-five dollar minimum. I enjoy blackjack but I'm not really a gambler, and I'm still a little uncomfortable at ten dollars a hand. Twenty-five is madness. But the carpeting, both in the casino and around the edges, was all red-and-gold with Chinese coin embellishment. One bar area along the casino's perimeter was dominated by Lunar New Year red-envelope trees, twelve or fifteen feet tall and hung with hundreds of envelopes. Every casino we've seen lately has at least one noodle bar, but this seemed to have a few, along with one very high-end Chinese restaurant that offers special $270/person tasting menus with wine pairings. A hallway that led from the casino to one of the hotel lobbys was marked by an enormous sculpture of the number 8; from one side it looked like an enormous silver balloon-number and from the other side it was an enormous 8-shaped interactive screen that would let you turn your face into a custom emoji and send it as a digital postcard.
What I'm getting at is that this hotel/casino seemed, more than most I've seen recently, to be courting Chinese tourism. I have no idea if it's a plan that's going to work, but I will tell you that when I tried a few spins on the Chinese-themed penny slots machine (Golden Dragon Try Your Luck!) I tripled my money.