Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation (46 page)

But in Harbin it wouldn’t be hot chocolate. It would be tea, hot tea, served in the Russian style. This is because it feels like Russia in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang, the northernmost province in China. It is surrounded by Russia. To the north, there is Russia. To the east, there is Russia. If you don’t like Russia, you can go to the west and find yourself in Mongolia. But still, Harbin seemed like a Russian city. Sure, the city is surrounded by the grim factories common to every city in China nowadays, and the downtown is rife with glitzy new high-rises, and the Songhua River is hideously polluted because of an explosion upstream at a benzene plant, but nevertheless in the Daoliqu District in Harbin, it feels like Russia. There is, for instance, Stalin Park. Yes, it’s true. A pretty riverside park full of inline skaters and waltzers is named after Joseph Stalin. Nobody names anything after Joseph Stalin anymore. Except in Harbin, apparently. And to complete this little tableau of yesteryear, there are also bread lines. I’d found a bakery selling bread, which was odd because the Chinese don’t eat bread, except apparently in Harbin. Odder still was the long line of customers waiting outside to purchase this bread. Normally, the Chinese are pretty good at matching supply with demand. But here there were bread lines.

And there were onion domes. Russians had moved into Harbin early in the nineteenth century when men such as Rasputin, Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas II began their fateful dance, making life just far too interesting for many Russians, and some found their way to Harbin, deep in Manchuria, where they built Orthodox churches and charming cafés that remain to this day, serving blintzes and borscht and sausages and demitasses of vodka. But I had not come to Harbin to eat blintzes and borscht washed down with a clarifying shot of vodka, though I did do that and it was good. Nor had I come to Harbin to meander among cobblestone lanes while humming the theme from Dr. Zhivago, nor had I come here because I thought I might like this city of 4 million, which I did. I actually liked it very much and hoped one day to return for the Ice Lantern Festival, when ice sculptures are shaped into fantastic, whimsical creations such as the Forbidden City itself.

No, I had come to Harbin to explore China’s peculiar relationship with the animal kingdom beyond the endangered-species markets of Guangzhou. Take the Yangtze Sturgeon, for instance. When I was in Chengdu, I’d seen an engrossing program about the Yangtze Sturgeon on CCTV’s nature show. Yangtze Sturgeons are, unsurprisingly, not particularly happy at present. It’s a migratory fish that lives in the Yangtze but returns to the ocean to do other fish-type business. It goes back and forth, freshwater to saltwater, doing fishy things, following a cycle that has lasted millennia. But now with the Three Gorges Dam the sturgeons could no longer go back and forth from river to ocean. So this is a problem. But the Chinese, naturally, have a solution: They’re going to train the Yangtze Sturgeon to remain content in the river, to give up its wandering ways, and to forgo its need to do business in the ocean. To that end, they’d captured a couple of Yangtze Sturgeons and put them in a tank where they would be trained to dispense with millions of years of evolutionary adaptations and learn how to live happily in this all-freshwater-all-the-time environment. Training consisted of, as far as I could tell, placing many divers in the tanks to pet these large Yangtze Sturgeons, to pull at their tails—in fun, surely—and to hold on to their fins so that they could catch a ride. Alas, the announcer informed me, despite all this love the Yangtze Sturgeons refused to feed. Typically, they feed in the ocean. But this wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the sturgeons were depressed. And that’s why they were listless and wasting away. Fish depression. That’s what they were working on now, a treatment for fish depression, and so the show ended on a hopeful note.

I found this an interesting approach to wildlife, and to learn more I headed toward the Siberian Tiger Park a short distance outside Harbin. There are only about 500 Siberian Tigers remaining in the wild, roaming across a vast terrain in Russia and northern China. To boost these numbers, China has a breeding program where tigers born on the grounds of the Siberian Tiger Park would eventually be released into the wild, free to live out their lives as nature intended. I’d bought a ticket at the park’s entrance and joined a handful of convivial Chinese tourists inside a minibus and spent the next ten minutes having my picture taken next to them. Soon, we set forth. We made our way through a fenced enclosure, meandered past a frozen pond and acres of high brown grass and scrubby trees, and I took note of mysterious piles of chicken feathers and—good Lord, those tigers are big. I did not know this, but the Siberian Tiger is immense. There were six of them, the largest nearly ten feet long. I had not seen ten-foot cats before. I’d always assumed lions, king of the jungle and all, to be the largest feline. But in comparison to a Siberian Tiger, a lion is a mere house cat. There was one, no two, three now, up on their hind legs, huge paws on our windows, their striped faces and teeth just inches away—

This was a minivan we were in. No cages. No bumpers. No reinforced glass. Nothing.

And I remembered that two people had already been killed by these tigers inside the Siberian Tiger Park, and when I’d read this, I’d wondered how this could happen, what circumstances had prevailed when these two people were killed, and suddenly a white, caged SUV shot past us.

The tigers went nuts. They leapt toward this SUV, which had skidded to a stop, sending dust billowing into the wind. And suddenly, quickly, so quickly, a door was opened, a hand was exposed, and it was clutching chickens, live chickens, and very quickly, desperately, these chickens were tossed into the air and the tigers, these enormous creatures, pounced. They surged upon the SUV. They leapt upon its roof and the chickens—the chickens were no more. Four times this happened. The SUV driver lurched here and there, sending forth plumes of dust, and the hand of a crazy man would emerge with live chickens, and the tigers, nearly as big as the SUV, growled and snarled and pounced and gobbled.

So today was chicken day. But it’s a varied diet that the tigers here at the Siberian Tiger Park receive. Sometimes live ox are deposited inside the park. At other times, it’s live cows. Sometimes pigs. They take care of the tigers here. Okay, true, they had developed a taste for farm animals, had come to associate human beings and SUVs with feeding time, and were thus forever doomed in the wild. They would gravitate toward people and they would kill people and they would be shot and their paws would end up in the market in Guangzhou. But the important thing here is that we were having fun. My fellow passengers oohed and aahed and snapped pictures. It was party time on the minibus. Never more so than when we retreated through the automatic gate and a tiger cleverly followed us out. A Siberian Tiger was loose here on the outskirts of Harbin. What would be the solution here, I wondered, to the problem of Siberian Tigers wandering outside the confines of the Siberian Tiger Park?

A demolition derby.

That is what we did. Our minibus charged at this Siberian Tiger. The horn blared. A moment later, the SUV returned, and together we charged at this tiger, backward, forward, we lurched at this tiger. We played chicken with him. The gate was reopened. The other tigers stood by impassively watching. They weren’t leaving; they knew where their meals were coming from. And soon we’d succeeded in haranguing this enormous animal back into its enclosure. The passengers on this minibus were thrilled. Such excitement.

But there would be more. We drove by cages of lions, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, and baby tigers, all gathered around another cage with a bird inside, a stork, a very nervous stork, and then we were taken to a concrete walkway, where we could walk just above an enclosure of tigers. We ambled past a baby tiger, lethargic and sleepy as it dozed upon a tiger skin. For an extra 30
kuai
we could pet it. On the walkway sat a woman in a uniform with a crate of live chickens before her. One of my fellow tourists approached her with some money. The woman dipped her hand inside this crate of chickens and took one out, tying it by its feet and attaching it to a four-foot stick, before handing it to him. The man took the fishing pole with the dangling chicken, squawking and ill-disposed, and lowered it out over the tigers, taunting them. He dipped it a little lower. A tiger leapt up and shredded a wing. The chicken wailed. Oh, the fun we have in China. He lowered the chicken again. A tiger shredded a leg. The chicken screamed. Everyone laughed. Because this is funny in China. Slowly, painfully, piece by piece, the chicken was shredded into oblivion. Finally, I approached this woman in the uniform and bought a chicken myself. She attached it to the fishing pole and I was ready now to fish for tigers. I took this shrieking chicken, flung it over the side, and reached down and watched a tiger quickly shred it to pieces.

And why, one may reasonably ask, did I do that?

I did it for the chicken.

24

T
he lunatic paced up and own the aisle, screaming. There was a crazy man on board this train to Dandong, walking up and down the aisles of the hard-seat car, yelling at all the devils around him. There were only a handful of people on this train to the last stop in China before North Korea. And there were devils. What would he make of the foreigner, the
laowai
?

I had boarded this train in Shenyang, a grim industrial city south of Harbin in Liaoning Province, a city notable for having one of the finest statues of Mao I’d yet seen, a monument that reflected the very apogee of Socialist Realism. But I had not lingered in Shenyang. Nothing about Shenyang encouraged lingering, and I’d boarded the slow train to Dandong. It had been a full train in Shenyang, and I sat in hard-seat class next to two workers who kindly shared an orange with me. It was moments like that, gestures of unexpected graciousness, that offered the yin to the yang of traveling in China, which is often difficult and exasperating, the yang of Chinese travel that was now manifesting itself as a deranged maniac stomping about the train. I sat and peeled my orange, marveling that there were, in fact, oranges way up here in northern China in December, and tried to ignore the man’s ranting. The train rumbled through the brown hills, stopping at every hamlet on the way, discharging passengers until only a handful remained. I had spent so very much of my time in China traveling—finding tickets, queuing among people who did not queue, flying on planes piloted by teenagers, rumbling on crowded buses, my guard ever up as I passed through train and bus stations where one moment of absentmindedness would lead to robbery or worse. It was nearly over, this trip of mine. I would go to Dandong, and then a night train to Beijing, and I would fly home and see my family, my wife, my boys, these boys who were probably men now. It had been a long trip. There is so very much to see in China. There is so very much that must be seen. I had traveled thousands and thousands of miles across this vast country. And I’d still seen little, all things considered. What is here cannot all be seen by one man. Not in a lifetime. And what you saw yesterday is always different today, and it will be different again tomorrow.
Everything is changing so fast.
Yes it is, in China.

Meanwhile, there was a lunatic on board this slow, far too slow, train to Dandong. The landscape here in the vicinity of North Korea reminded me of the opening credits to the show
M*A*S*H,
and this pleased me because, of course,
M*A*S*H
is the very best show ever made. As the lunatic rambled and screamed beside me, I thought of Hawkeye, and what Hawkeye would do in this situation with the dangerous-looking madman. He’d probably tell him to shut up, I thought. So scratch that. Hawkeye could not help me here. I wanted to be invisible to this lunatic, the invisible
laowai.

It was nighttime when we finally arrived in Dandong, and I bounced happily off the train, pleased to put some distance between myself and the crazy man. I’d splurged and found a room in a hotel overlooking the Yalu River and, across the way, North Korea. I stepped into the hotel, handed over my passport, checked in, dropped off my backpack, and stepped back out again and walked through an underpass beneath the Friendship Bridge, which spanned the distance between China and North Korea. It’s a strange, lively bridge with a laser show of green lights and strobe lights, a bridge that dances, that gets down, but only halfway—and then it dies at the halfway mark. And then there is darkness, nothing but a black void. That would be North Korea, lit only by the headlights of trucks streaming across the bridge.

I walked along a riverside park, Yalujiang Park, where groups of middle-aged people were playing hacky-sack with a feathered ball. Even though it was dark, they were able to play because there is so much light coming from the Friendship Bridge. It is a bridge in the style of Las Vegas, and the light that cascades from it illuminates everything—including people of middle years playing hacky-sack in Yalujiang Park. I stared at the enigmatic emptiness across the river. What is over there? I wondered. Where are those trucks on the bridge going? What are they bringing into North Korea? Are there not sanctions against North Korea? The little monster, Kim Jong-il, had been playing with his bombs recently. It should be quiet on this bridge, no?