A FIESTA

The hotel is one of three under the TH canopy: Century is where I stay normally since I can afford not to blink when the discount I am normally accorded is made; the Kanoa Resort is a bit rich for my wallet but for friends coming from outside the CNMI who pay for a hotel anyway, I take them to Kanoa as an excuse to visit Club C; but the place where I love to hang out happens to be the Fiesta Resort & Spa south of Micro Beach and just across from the Coral Tree Avenue entrance to the Garapan center, the Paseo de Marianas.

Location matters. The former Dai-ichi Hotel is well situated to the nightlife of Paseo de Marianas and the downtown Garapan area.

We report on new commercial innovations on island once. One of those is the Marianas Ink, the only registered tattoo place on Saipan, observing its one-year anniversary this April. We touched on it on our Rose Tattoo opinion piece, pointed to the tattoo parlor while celebrating the industry of the three Chan sisters Anna, Rose, and Cathy whose parents migrated from Hong Kong. In an earlier time, I attended events organized by the Chinese Association of Saipan, many of it held at the Hibiscus room of the Fiesta Resort. Rose is a principal and a director of the association.

I also looked into Fiesta’s recent extension to the open air terrace of the Chambre Bar adding space for 20 seats more. I met Das Krishnan, the food/beverage director, a gentleman of Tamil descent born and bred in Malaysia, and the hotel general manager, Abner Acosta, a young executive from the Philippines trained in hotel management.

Western preoccupation with the “new” is understood from the perspective of time. On the influence of Europe, America has a very keen sense of time. The past, the present, and the future tenses regulate its verbs, shown in its syntactical character.

Sinosphere of Oriental mind ignores linear time as not that essential but place and role are. The dynasties in China were names of places; Kim among the last names in the Koreas are about a fourth of all its last names, and that was because the royalty came from an area called Kim. So anyone who has pretentions on being on the higher echelons of the social pecking order is named Kim in Hanguk.

If the tenses of verbs are characteristic of European languages, the status of roles and known places is important in China. The mother of the husband in a family is called by one name, not the same as the mother of the wife. Both are referred to as “mothers” and are called as such but of different status. The male’s mother takes precedence over the female’s mother, true in all kinship relations.

The freshness of anything new is perceived to be creative in the European mindset. New cloths and fashionable attires avoid “old” age. Europe’s sense of time came to Zhongguo (the middle kingdom) during the Manchu reign when the East still considered the old and elderly as the precious assets of social stability and order, deserving respect and honor. They knew no time in the context of history but roles in the context of Oriental social relations.

In our use of the term “Fiesta,” our sense is of a feast of the East, a term I refer to the hotels on Saipan getting active when we welcome visitors to our shore. Elsewhere, fiesta designates a religious festival, observed more in tropical Hispanic countries rather than the austere Camino de Santiago de Compostela of Galicia. In a secular barrio setting, it is a huge party in the Philippines where folks go gaga over the crowning of queens and their princesses in the annual honoring of a patron saint, an excuse to hold a local pintakasi (a cockfight).

Hotels liven up Saipan’s life that increased the number of contract workers. They now outnumber indigenes, as the island economy cannot meet demands brought in by a wayward investment pattern, so laborers are brought in and then leave after their term. Right?

Hong Kong said the same and Victoria Peak got inundated. Outer islands, Kowloon and the New Territories absorbed excess. Singapura has space but a causeway to Malaysia chugs a great railroad system so it has a vent. Saipan has “military” Tinian next door, sparsely populated Rota is a jewel waiting to be found, and the bleat of the deer and goats of the Northern Islands awaits the human touch. But indigenes are being elbowed out.

Hotel personnel and construction workers on Saipan came to settle for good. Visitors take to hotels, workers hovel in shantytowns. Construction taxes infrastructures that could not be built fast enough for the burgeoning population. But my mostly migrant class sings as a round, “Free, free, free to decide. What this world is going to be. We decide, we choose, we are free, free, free…”

Does this song sound like a feast? Island life fuels celebrations; the singing is loud, the dancing shoe and the thick mascara are on hand. CWs are ever ready. Add the World Cafe, the Mai Teppanyaki, and the Chambre Bar, and the Fiesta is ready, too.

Shall we feast?