Riding the Iron Rooster

14: The International Express to Harbin: Train Number 17

I wanted to see Harbin at its most characteristic: in the middle of winter, frozen solid. It is in the far northeastern province — part of what used to be called Manchuria. Now it is Heilongjiang, Land of the Black Dragon River. The Russians refer to the river as the Amur. It is one of the disputed frontiers between the two countries, and over the past twenty years has been the scene of armed conflict as well as low farce — the Chinese soldiers provoking incidents by dropping their pants and presenting their bare bums northward, mooning the Soviet border guards.

The train I took was going on to the border town of Manzhouli and then into Siberia to connect with the Trans-Siberian. I took it because it was the quickest way to Harbin, and also because I wanted to see who was continuing into the Soviet Union. In the event I discovered that very few people were crossing the border. It is the most roundabout route to Moscow, and no one ever goes to Vladivostok.

I left Peking on a cold afternoon, the train traveling through a landscape of black and white — trees and light poles and furrows set into relief by the snow. The countryside looked like a steel engraving, and it grew sharper and fresher, for the dusty snow of Peking gave way to a snow of intense brightness in the clearer air of the Chinese hinterland. It was exciting to be heading north in the winter, and I intended to keep going, beyond Harbin to the forests in the north of the province. I had been told there was wilderness there — real trees and birds.

Three swarthy Hong Kong Chinese joined me in the compartment. They said they were cold. They wore thick nylon ski suits that screeched when they walked or moved their arms, and the noise of the rubbing fabric set my teeth on edge. This sleeping car was all Hong Kongers in screechy ski suits. They had traveled nonstop from Kowloon. They had never before been to China, had never seen snow; their English was very poor — and yet they were colonial subjects of the British Crown. They did not speak Mandarin. Like most Hong Kongers I had met, they were complete provincials, with laughable pretensions. Was it the effect of colonialism? They were well fed and rather silly and politically naive. In some ways Hong Kong was somewhat like Britain itself: a bunch of offshore islands with an immigrant problem, a language barrier and a rigid class system.

"Going skiing?" I said.

They said no — they had picked these ski suits up at a cut-price department store in Causeway Bay.

They were looking out of the window at a fat woolly sheep that was nibbling at a hank of brown stubble it had found sticking out of the snow. The sheep glanced up and stared back at them.

What did they think of China so far?

"It's thirty years behind," one said. This from a person who lived in one of the last colonies on earth. In a political sense Hong Kong had hardly changed since the time of the Opium War.

"Thirty years behind what?" I asked.

He shrugged. It was probably something he had read.

"Do you think there's any difference between a Chinese person here and one from Hong Kong?"

"Oh, yes!" several of them said at once, and they were incredulous that I should ask such an ignorant question. But I pressed forward nonetheless.

"Can you recognize a Hong Kong person when you see one?"

"Very easily."

"And a person from the People's Republic?"

"Yes," he said. And when I asked for details, he went on, "The Chinese here have rough faces."

"What sort of faces do Hong Kong people have?"

"Gentle."

He said the way they talked and dressed were dead giveaways. Well, even I knew that. The Hong Kongers were either overweight or else stylishly skinny. They yelled a lot and wore brand-new clothes and trendy eyeglasses. They fancied themselves up-to-date, and they believed in the myth of their modernity. They were often all elbows, very impatient and demanding. They fussed over each other, they were philistines. A great number of their traits were the result of being British colonials. The colonial system really is paternal in an almost literal way. By treating the people like children it turns into a messy family, and some of the children are favored, others become spoiled brats, and still others delinquents and rebels.

I did not bore my compartment-mates with this reflection. I simply sat there wondering why they didn't take off their ski suits.

One of them was engrossed in a palmist's manual. Before dinner, he read my palm.

"That is your star line," he said. "Notice it is connected? You are very emotional. That is your life line. You will live to be about eighty or eighty-five."

"Tell me more."

"I cannot," he said. "I am only on chapter five." And he went back to his manual.

Dinner in the big steamy dining car was a noisy affair. At first it was full of Hong Kongers, but they hated the food, found it uneatable, and left in a huff. There were about forty of them altogether on the train. They screeched back to their compartments and stuffed themselves with chocolate cookies.

Their mistake had been in ordering the expensive 20 yuan meal. The one for 10 yuan was better — no boney fish, no fatty pork, no canned Spam; just vegetables and soup. I liked the mob, the nagging waiters, the spilled food, the people stuffing themselves. It seemed like chaos, but really a strict routine was being observed: the progress of the courses could not be interrupted. Most waiters on trains had a sort of surly friendliness. They weren't ill-natured, merely bad-tempered because they worked so hard. They were not servile, they weren't hustling for tips — there weren't any; they were single-minded and offhand without being actually rude. If someone barked at them, they barked back.

We stopped at Shenyang and Changchun in the night, and I woke because of the cold and the noise. The attendant had given me a quilted bedroll and a horse blanket, and yet the train was very drafty. There was snow tracked into the corridor and thick frost on all the windows. When I pissed into the Chinese toilet, which was just a hole in the floor of the train, a great gust of steam shot up, as if I had pissed on a hot stove.

The young men from Hong Kong shivered in the compartment like prisoners in a dungeon. They drank hot water. I offered them some of my green tea (Zhulan brand: "A tea from ancient kings for those with kingly tastes") but they said no; they preferred drinking hot water. "White tea," the Chinese call it, bai cha.

At five-thirty in the morning the door banged open and the attendant came in, put down a thermos of water and yelled, "Get up. Time for breakfast."

When she had gone I switched off the light and crawled into bed again.

She returned a few minutes later.

"Who turned off that light?" she demanded, switching it on. She stood in the doorway, breathing hard — steam was coming out of her nose and mouth. "I want the bedding. Now hand it over!"

But the young men from Hong Kong were too cold to surrender it, and I saw no reason to — we weren't due at Harbin for four more hours. It was the usual rigmarole: they wanted to have everything folded and accounted for long before we arrived.

"They need the bedding," one of the young men said.

"Maybe she wants to wash it," another said.

"No," the third one said. Were they talking in English for my benefit or did they normally converse in this almost incomprehensible way (Dey nee da baydeen, and so forth)? He explained, "A Chinese guy told me they only wash it every fourth day, even if four different people use it."

Later I inquired about this and found it to be a fact. That was why they were so finicky about giving every passenger a clean towel to place over the pillow.

The train attendant came back several more times and eventually just snatched the bedding in the usual way. It struck me that these attendants — usually women — would have made wonderful matrons at English boarding schools. They were bossy, they were nags, they were know-it-alls; they had piercing voices and no sense of humor; they were inflexible about the rules. They were more than tough — they were indestructible. They kept the trains running.

It was not yet dawn in Heilongjiang, but people were hurrying through the darkness, along snowy paths. I saw about fifty black figures moving through the snow, all bundled up and roly-poly. They were big and small, going to work and to school.

When the sun came up — fire crackling through frost — the sky was clear and the snow a pale northern blue. People cycled through the snow and ice on the uncleared roads, and men drove wagons pulled by shaggy horses. The great flat snowfields all had stubble showing through. That was the main difference between this province and Siberia, which was just next door (we were farther north than Vladivostok). This was all farmland, and Siberia was mostly forest and uncleared land. The trip to Harbin was essentially a trip across plowed fields. The snow was not deep enough to hide the furrows.

In some villages and little towns the houses had the look of Russian bungalows. And their most un-Chinese feature (as peasant huts) was their roof, steeply pitched because of the snow. Some of them were big brick houses with fat chimneys, like old American homesteads, and others were the sort of snug bungalows that I had seen along the route of the Trans-Siberian, made out of wood, and with stovepipes sticking from the eaves. Not much smoke was coming out of these chimneys. The reason was pretty simple. The frugal Chinese, even in this freezing place, always skimp on fuel, and take a certain pleasure in living in a cold house. Why waste coal, they say, when all you really need is another pair of long underwear?

In this land of red wind-chafed cheeks and runny noses, Harbin seemed an unlikely city. It looked Russian (onion-domed churches, villas with turrets and gables, office blocks with pompous colonnades), and it had that strange fossilized appearance that cities have in very cold countries — a sort of dead and petrified shabbiness. Its Russian ornateness was overlaid with soot and frozen slush. Here and there was a Japanese roof or a Chinese ministry or statue — mostly monstrosities, which added to the weirdness of the place, because in addition to their odd proportions, they were also hung with long, gnarled icicles. I liked the city best in the early morning, when it glittered with frost — little prismatic pinpoints on its ugly face.

It was not much more than a hundred years old. It was a fishing village on the Songhua River that had been turned by the Russian tsar into a railway junction when he extracted permission from the decadent Qing Dynasty in the 1890s to make a shortcut through Manchuria to Vladivostok. The city went on rising and the various railway lines kept running after the Russo-Japanese War (1904), and the Russian Revolution. The greedy Japanese presence was powerful — they had planned to take over Asia, beginning here — but their puppet state of Manchukuo lasted only from 1931 until 1945, when the Russians reasserted themselves after the Second World War. Harbin's boast had always been that it was only nine days, by train, from Paris; so it got the fashions and the music and the latest papers long before Shanghai. The striptease and the Charleston and Dixieland jazz were introduced to China in Harbin in the 1920s because of the Trans-Siberian link with Paris.

Times had changed. Harbin's sister city was now Edmonton, Alberta. You guessed that somehow, when you looked at Harbin. There was something in its severity and its dark and funless nights that resembled a remote city in Canada.

And yet in Canada people joke and gloat about the cold. In Harbin and in Heilongjiang in general no one mentioned it except outsiders, who never stopped talking about it. I bought a thermometer so that I would not bore people by asking them the temperature, but the damn thing only registered to the freezing point — zero centigrade. The first time I put it outside the red liquid in the tube plunged into the bulb and shriveled into a tiny bead. So I had to ask. It was midmorning: minus twenty-nine centigrade in the sparkling sunshine. By nighttime it would be ten degrees colder than that — so cold in the more familiar figures of Fahrenheit that I didn't want to think about it.

I wore mittens and long underwear and thermal boots and a hat with earflaps and two sweaters under my leather jacket. One overcast day of paralyzing cold I wore more than that, put on all the clothes I had with me; I turned myself into a big padded and bulging fool, and yet I was still so cold I had to rush inside occasionally and jump up and down. The Chinese were well wrapped up, and some wore face masks, but on their feet many wore no more than corduroy rubber-soled slippers. Why didn't their feet fall off? They were enthusiasts for heavy knitted underwear that gave them elephantine legs, which contrasted oddly with their skinny frostbitten faces.

They didn't wash, for many reasons, the main one being that they did not have hot water or bathrooms. It hardly mattered: stinks are seldom obvious in icy northern lands. They did not take their clothes off, even indoors — neither their hats or coats, even when they ate. It was easy to see why. The heating was turned to an absolute minimum — the Maoist doctrine of saving fuel and regarding heating and lighting as luxuries except where they affected production of something like pig iron or cotton cloth. This constant wearing of coats and hats, inside and out, had given them some very bad habits. The worst was that they never seemed to close doors, and wherever you went there was a door ajar and wind like a knife coursing through it.

My hotel was so cold I always wore three or four layers of clothes. It was called the Swan — I thought of it as the Frozen Swan. It had a rock garden and ornamental pool in the lobby, but the lobby was so cold the fish had died and the plants were stiff and brown. Manchus and Hans sat in thick coats and fur hats on the lobby sofas, smoking and yelling. I was told there was a warmer hotel in Harbin, called the International, but it did not seem to matter to anyone in Heilongjiang whether a hotel was heated or not. The great boast of the hotels was their cuisine, and they vied with each other in offering grilled bear's paw, stewed moose nose with mushroom, Mongolian hot pot, white fungus soup and monkey-leg mushrooms and pheasant shashlik.

I arrived on Christmas Eve — the Russian Orthodox Christmas Eve, at the end of the first week in January. I went to one of the churches, where a shivering mustached man — possibly Russian; he was certainly not Chinese — was draping pine boughs upon the holy pictures and the statues. The interior of the church was sorry looking and very cold. The next day there was a Christmas service, twenty people chanted, sang and lit candles. They were all Russians, and most of them were old women. They had the furtive look of Early Christians, but it was obvious that no one persecuted them. They went about the Christmas service in a morose way and wouldn't talk to me afterward — just crunched away in the icy snow.

Even in January most events take place in the open air. The market is outdoors in the thirty-below temperatures. People shopped, bought frozen food (melons, meat, bread) and licked ice cream. That was the most popular snack in Harbin — vanilla ice cream. And the second most popular was small cherry-sized "haws" (hawthorns) which they coated with red goo and jammed on twigs. The market traders were cheery souls with rags wound around their faces and wearing mittens and fur hats. It went without saying that they spent the whole day outside, and when they saw me they cackled and called out, "Hey, old-hair!"

It was the Harbin expression for light-haired foreigners (lao mao zi), because old people are associated with light-colored hair. In this regard they have a special phrase for Russians, "second-class light-hairs" (er mao zi), which is intended as a term of disrespect.

A few days after I arrived the Harbin Winter Festival opened. It was a gimmick to attract tourists to this refrigerator, but it was a good gimmick. Most of it was an exhibition of ice sculpture. The Chinese expression bing deng is more accurate: it means "ice lanterns," and these ice sculptures usually had electric lights frozen inside them.

The whole city of Harbin was involved in it. A sculptor would stack blocks of ice around a lamppost and then chip away and shave the ice until it resembled a pagoda or a rocket ship or a human being. There was an ice sculpture on every street corner — lions, elephants, airplanes, acrobats, bridges; some of them were thirty or forty feet high. But the most ambitious ones were in The People's Park — there were eighty acres of them. Not only a Great Wall of China in ice, but a smaller version of the Taj Mahal, a two-story Chinese pavilion, an enormous car, a platoon of soldiers, an Eiffel Tower, and about forty more displays, all cut out of ice blocks in which fluorescent tubes had been frozen. Because of the lights these ice sculptures had to be seen at night, when it was nearly forty below. But no one minded. They shuffled around, they slipped and fell, they ate ice cream and goggled at these wonderful examples of deep-frozen kitsch.

'The Russians introduced these ice sculptures," a Japanese man told me. 'This is not an ancient Chinese art. But the Chinese liked them and developed the knack of making them. And it was their idea to put lights inside them."

Mr. Morioka in his tam-o'shanter and miracle fibers had taken a sentimental journey back to Harbin. He said you had to come to Harbin in the winter to see it as it really is. The pity was that so few foreigners dared to visit in the winter months.

I said it might have something to do with the stupefying cold.

"Oh, yes!" he said. "I was here in the thirties. I was a student. This was a wonderful place — full of Russian nobility who had no money. Some of them brought jewels and sold them here to keep themselves going. A few lived in style, in those villas that you see in town. But most of the Russians were poverty-striken émigrés. It was a Japanese city."

We were strolling through the ice sculptures; through an ice tunnel, down the main street of an ice village, past a pair of ice lions.

Mr. Morioka said, "As you pined for Paris, we pined for Harbin."

"We pined for sex and romance in Paris," I said.

"What do you think we had in Harbin? We had strippers, nightclubs, Paris fashions, the latest styles — books, songs, everything. This was like Europe to us. That's why our boys used to yearn for the bright lights of Harbin."

That seemed a very unusual way of describing this Chinese refrigerator, but of course he was talking about Manchukuo, Land of the Manchus, owned and operated by the Sons of Nippon.

"The strippers were Russian. That was the attraction. Some of them had been very grand, but they were down on their luck. So they danced and they performed in the cabaret—"

And as he spoke I could see a roomful of libidinous Japanese with their mouths open, transfixed by a wobbling pair of Russian knockers.

"— and you know, Russian women are very beautiful until they are about thirty or so," Mr. Morioka said. "These were fine women. Very lovely. I tell you, some of these women were aristocrats. I remember one cabaret singer telling me how she had gone to great parties and fancy balls in country houses in Russia."

This was an interesting story from the Old World, even though it did stink of exploitation. He said that in a Harbin nightclub there would be eighty percent Japanese and twenty percent rich Chinese. "Almost no Russians," he said. "They couldn't afford it. In Shanghai in the thirties it was fifty-fifty, Japanese and Chinese."

I wanted to talk to him a bit more, but my feet were so cold I was seriously worried about frostbite. I apologized and said I had to get out of this park and into a warmer place.

"There isn't much more to tell," he said. "It all ended in August 1945. when the Japanese front collapsed. The Russian soldiers, who had all been criminals and prisoners, were unmerciful. They took this city and began raping and murdering. That's another story!"

There were more ice carvings and ice monuments at Stalin Park on the riverbank — walls, fences, lions, turrets, and especially slides and sluices down which people rocketed in sleds onto the Songhua River. There were iceboats with sails and runners, and horse-drawn sleighs. Not many takers — no one had money. But there were plenty of people bruising their ankles on the ice-block helter-skelter, a spiral slide around a tower.

That made me think that of all the foreign companies that might soon start up in China the unlikeliest was an insurance company. I thought, Who would insure these people? I saw a man skidding at the ice sculptures. He slipped and cracked his head and was dragged into the snow, where he remained inert. It was a country of bare wires and potholes. Tourists have been known to disappear down elevator shafts and the claims by tourists against the China International Travel Service for injuries, missed cities and sickness are astronomical. The average Chinese factory is a death trap, and yet the Chinese blithely escort visitors through them and past machines that snatch at your hair and poke you in the eye, past gaping holes in the floor, and pools of toxic substances and crackling furnaces. Hard hats are not common, and few welders I saw wore masks.

My hotel was very cold but very hospitable. It was so friendly it actually aroused my suspicions — like the man who is such a glad-hander you suspect he is picking your pocket. I was on the eleventh floor. Welcome to Our Floor! the signs said. That was very unusual. Good health! more said. And many said, Prosperity and Long Life!

I asked the floor attendant what was up. He just grinned and said, "Welcome to our floor!"

"Why are you welcoming me to your floor?"

"I want you to be happy."

"No one has ever welcomed me to their floor in China," I said.

"It is a very good floor."

His insistence in his squawking voice only made me anxious, and so I looked deeper into this and discovered that the previous year there had been a terrible fire in the hotel in which two people died. The eleventh floor had been burned out. The man who had started it was an American businessman. He was said to have been smoking in bed. He was detained by the Chinese and — so I was told — confined to a hotel for quite a while because his company refused to pay the $70,000 damages that the Chinese demanded. And yet no security precautions were taken after the fire. No fire stairs, no smoke detectors, no fireproof furnishings. All the Chinese had done was print hundreds of cardboard signs to be placed in every hotel room. The sign said Do Not Smoke in Bed.

One day in Harbin I met a Canadian who surprised me by saying that he was delighted to be here. His name was Scotty. He was of course from Edmonton, Alberta, the sister city.

"But I'm the only Edmontonian here," he said.

He was a stout and good-humored man and this was his first time in China. He could hardly believe the notoriety it had given him. He had been to a banquet with the governor and he had met many high Party officials in the province. He was the superintendent of a steel forge, on a two-year assignment, and was perhaps on the verge of believing in his importance to the future of Chinese industry. "It's hard to describe," he said. "But I'm a kind of unofficial celebrity."

"I hope it lasts," I said, because the Chinese were known to be rather brisk with foreigners they no longer needed. The philosophy of learning from foreigners was spelled out in the nineteenth century by Feng Gui-fen. Feng was an adviser to statesmen, and a teacher and advocate of reform. He regarded all foreigners as barbarians but said it was necessary to use them to learn various mechanical skills (shipbuilding and gunsmithing in particular). "A few barbarians should be employed," he said, "and Chinese who are good in using their minds should be selected to receive instruction so that in turn they may teach many craftsmen." He went on to say, "We should use the instruments of the barbarians, but not adopt the ways of the barbarians. We should use them so that we can repel them." These are to a large extent the sentiments of the Chinese government today and the reason for the large number of so-called foreign experts in China. A foreign expert is a barbarian with a skill to impart, but he should never make the mistake of believing that he is being invited to stay for an indefinite length of time. The experts are in China to be used, and when they are no longer useful, to be sent home.

I asked Scotty whether he got homesick. He said he had only been in Harbin four months — not long enough.

"My wife misses grocery shopping and she hates her kitchen," he said. "Me? I miss beef. There's no beef here."

I had not noticed that, but then you usually had to be told what was in a Chinese dish. The Chinese had a way of drawing a culinary veil over even the most obvious ingredients.

"How is your steel forge?" I asked.

"Old-fashioned," Scotty said. "So I have to be tough. I'll tell you frankly — I'm cruel. I have to be, to get the quality up. Take today. What did I do? I rejected a whole order. It was worth twenty thousand U.S. Hey, it worried them!"

"Why did you reject the order?"

Scotty became suddenly very enthusiastic about his work, and as he talked about forging steel, I was convinced that he was the perfect man to send to China — a hard hat with a mission. He didn't seem the sort of person who suffered fools gladly. If they called him a barbarian I was sure he would return the compliment.

"Every piece of steel has to have a heat number stamped on it. These didn't have a heat number. I just sent them back and said no." He smiled mischievously and added, "I'll accept the order eventually, when we get the number on it. But they don't know that. That's my secret. Let them stew for a while. Let them think about the foul-up."

"Was it important, this steel?"

"Sure!" he said. "Buncha pipe flanges!"

We talked about pipe flanges for a while. It is true that there's not much about pipe flanges to bewitch the imagination, but we were in one of the downtown hotels where it was warm. When it is minus thirty-eight degrees centigrade outside, it can be counted a pleasant experience to stand in a warm place talking with a fat Canadian about pipe flanges.

All this time in Harbin I was trying to make arrangements to go farther north into the greater desolation of Heilongjiang. I had not known that my destination, Langxiang, was closed to foreigners. But I prevailed upon the Chinese. I said I would behave myself and would not stay long. They said they would consider my request.

While I waited I rummaged in the shops. I bought a pair of gloves, but not a fur hat. Such lovely furs (ermine, sable, fox, mink); such hideous hats and coats. And how awful for a stag to be killed so that its noble forking antlers could be made into buttons for auntie's old coat. I found an ivory object at the Harbin Antiquities Store. "It is an ancient carving," the clerk said. "Of the earth."

"Impossible."

How did I know it could not be an ancient Chinese carving of the round earth? Elementary. Until about 1850 the Chinese believed the earth was flat.

It was a prewar Russian billiard ball, but I bought it just the same.