Word: macao
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Driving up Macao's Rua Padre Antonio one cool, drizzly morning a few weeks ago, two youths found their way deliberately blocked by a pedicab. At that moment, three men forced themselves into the car and, at pistol point, made the youths drive on to an empty bicycle shop on a lonely street. Here the kidnapers hauled them out, stuck oranges into their mouths, blindfolded, trussed and loaded them into gunny sacks, dumped them into a couple of rickshas. Singing gay Cantonese songs to drown out any possible outcry, the men pulled the rickshas to an empty house...
Back & forth, back & forth, like the surge and sound of the sea itself went Michael Patrick O'Brien, the stateless soldier of fortune-possibly Hungarian, possibly American-who boarded the Hong Kong-Macao ferry last September, only to find that he could not land on either shore because he had no passport (TIME, Oct. 13). By last week O'Brien had completed his 44th round trip between the China Sea ports. He had reached a sort of understanding with the Lee Hong's captain and crew. O'Brien, who was once a ship's engineer...
...passenger on the Hong Kong-Macao ferry last week was as weather-beaten, ageless and nondescript as a chunk of driftwood. Like the driftwood, he seemed doomed to float from shore to shore on the China Sea forever. He had no passport. His name, he said, is Michael Patrick O'Brien, but he readily admitted: "Back home in Washington and Oregon, they call me Steven Stanley Regan." He never knew his father; his mother was Hungarian; the only identification he possesses is a Red Cross certificate which calls him "a stateless Irishman...
...last month, not even Michael himself could plot with any certainty the course he had sailed over the last 40-odd years to reach the Portuguese outpost of Macao. It had included hitches in both the U.S. Army & Navy, a job as a bartender in Shanghai's notorious Blood Alley, a spell in a Japanese prison camp, numberless scrapes with the law, occasional berths as ship's officer on vessels hard up for mariners, and long years as a soldier of fortune in oriental ports. When he hit Macao three weeks ago, Portuguese authorities took one look...
When the ferry landed at Hong Kong, 40 miles away, British officials refused to let him get off because his papers were not in order. Back went Michael to Macao, then back to Hong Kong: this week he was still traveling back & forth, like the Flying Dutchman. The ferry line lets him ride free. A friend has sent him money to buy food on the boat. The Lee Hong's captain knows him quite well by now and often invites him to share breakfast. "But," says Captain William Layfield, "he can't stay here forever...