Whereas the Irish tend to socialise in pubs, many Chinese like to visit casinos, where they might not gamble, but play cards or mahjong with friends, writes Ruadhán Mac Cormaic,Migration Correspondent.
IT IS almost 11 o'clock on a Friday night and about 70 people are hunched over green felt tables in the gaming room at the Fitzwilliam Card Club in Dublin. It is more subdued and less gaudy than you might expect - the harsh lights and quiet industriousness more suggestive of an open-plan office space than the purple-lit, filmic extravagance of the Las Vegas strip.
But there is the high-end surveillance. Some 60 cameras glare down from the ceiling and beam over-the-shoulder shots to staff in the multi-screen control room out the back. At a wooden podium in the middle of the hall sits the "pit boss", manning a bank of screens that help him keep an eye on staff and punters, lest they be tempted to pocket some plastic. There are seven or eight Chinese players in the gaming hall this evening, but give it a few hours, says Becky Chen, and the place will resound with Cantonese and Mandarin.
Chen, a student from southern China, has been working as a waitress in the club for four years and spends much of her typical night dealing with compatriots. "It's part of the social life for the Chinese, especially at weekends," she says.
When the Fitzwilliam opened five years ago, the proportion of Asian to white Irish customers was 65-35 per cent. Now it's closer to 50-50, but a glance through the Chinese newspapers published in Dublin shows that this is not the only casino to do well out of the overseas Chinese. In one recent issue of the Shining Emerald, casinos accounted for about three-quarters of all display ads.
And all this for a "paramount evil", as China's Communist Party called gambling when it banned the activity on coming to power in 1949. With the exception of the tiny territory of Macau, which returned to Chinese rule in 1999, most types of gambling remain illegal in China.
The main sanctioned forms are the two state lotteries, but their revenue is meagre compared with that generated by mahjong (a classic tile game), cockfights and underground betting syndicates: the China Centre for Lottery Studies at Beijing University estimates that the black market (including betting on overseas websites), generated as much as 800 billion yuan (about €73 billion) in 2006. That is 10 times the amount spent on both state-run lotteries that year.
As in so many other countries, gambling has been part of Chinese culture for centuries, says Frank Heran Suo, editor of the Shining Emerald, and the interest being indulged in Irish casinos every weekend is very often acquired at home.
As Becky Chen explains, a casino is also a useful social space for those not drawn to the heavy drinking of a typical night out in Dublin. Some come and barely gamble at all, preferring to play cards or a game of mahjong among friends. And with so many Chinese working in restaurants and hotels, a 24-hour casino is one of the only places still open when they finish work. The Fitzwilliam's diversity owes as much to its staff as its patrons. Half of all employees are foreigners, and 19 different nationalities are represented on the payroll. The principal reason for this, according to managing director David Hickson, is the absence of an adequate training course for croupiers in this country, which means the club must recruit abroad, mainly in the UK and eastern Europe.
Strikingly, the Chinese customers who come to the Fitzwilliam are not quite typical of Dublin's Chinese immigrants. The average age is 40, and many have the sort of disposable income that would be unthinkable to the younger students who comprise the bulk of the city's Chinese.
"It's mostly successful men who own Chinese restaurants and take-aways. Some of them don't care about the money they lose," says Chen.
She reckons that up to 80 per cent of the Chinese she meets here belong to that group of "settled" Chinese, Cantonese-speakers who came from Hong Kong via Britain since the 1950s and still number a few thousand in the city. "They have loads of money and they don't know how to spend it."