Oracle Bones (12 page)

“But why didn’t he fight back? Why did you catch him so easily?” Li Peng sounded almost disappointed.

“I don’t know,” I said.

The police had followed a similar line of questioning, and it was beginning to annoy me. As we replayed the event, it passed through layers of insecurity: first and foremost, people were ashamed that a foreigner had been robbed in their city. But after that unfortunate fact had to be admitted, it seemed even more shameful that the foreigner had caught the thief. Only a criminal of unusual ineptitude would be beaten by a foreigner at two in the morning, and so there must have been something seriously wrong with him. The police had offered various excuses. He must have been a drunk, or a cripple, or a migrant who was desperately poor. Dandong, the police emphasized, was a modern, orderly city, with a growing tourist industry. It wasn’t the sort of place where a foreigner woke up in the middle of the night with a common thief in his room.

Nobody seemed to take seriously another possibility: that the man was a North Korean refugee. The police had assured me that there were few refugees along this part of the border, because Sinuiju, the North Korean city across the river, wasn’t as poor as the rest of the country. People in Sinuiju ate twice a
day, according to Dandong residents who had relatives there. But farther east, where the combination of famine and mindless economic policies had been particularly brutal, an estimated seventy thousand North Koreans were fleeing to China every year. It seemed likely that at least a handful of them had made their way to Dandong. This possibility bothered me: If the locals wanted the thief to be disabled, I preferred him to be perfectly fit. I wanted him to be experienced, savvy, and fleet of foot—a worthy adversary. I wanted him to be Chinese, not North Korean. It disturbed me to think that I had viciously punched a man who might have been starving.

Both Li Peng and I were silent for a while, and then he thought of another possibility.

“Probably he was a heroin addict. That would explain why he was so weak.”

“Are there a lot of heroin addicts around here?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” Li Peng said quickly. “I don’t think there are any in Dandong.”

THE MAIN ATTRACTION
in town was the Yalu River Broken Bridge, which had once connected Dandong and Sinuiju. In November of 1950, the first year of the Korean War, as General MacArthur’s troops made their push toward China’s border, American bombers destroyed most of the bridge. In 1993, after restoring their half of the structure, the Chinese opened it to tourism. Visitors could walk along the bridge, look at the bombed-out wreckage that ended in the middle of the river, and pay one yuan to stare through a telescope at the far side. The North Koreans hadn’t restored their part of the structure. A line of empty pediments punctuated the clear-flowing Yalu and ended at the far bank.

One morning, I stood on the Chinese bridge and asked the telescope man what the North Koreans were doing.

“They’re swimming,” he said.

I paid and looked through the eyepiece. On the far bank stood a pretty North Korean girl in an old-fashioned bathing suit, skirted and striped in red and white. She shivered as she stepped into the river. Behind her, a group of children gathered around an adult—a teacher, perhaps. I picked out one mischievous boy and followed him with the scope. He bumped another boy, skipped around the group, and tossed sand at a girl. The teacher scolded him. Nearby, a soldier stood with a rifle slung over his back. All of the figures were framed by the scope’s round lens, and for a minute I was lost in this compact world. Then the telescope man asked me what my nationality was. I stepped back from the eyepiece and answered him.

“If America and China had a war today, who do you think would win?” he said.

“I don’t think America and China will have a war today.”

“But if they did,” he said, “who do you think would win?”

“I really don’t know,” I said. It seemed like a good time to ask him how business was going. He said that it was fine; next to the telescope, he had a photography stand where tourists could dress up and have their pictures taken with the wrecked bridge in the background. They could wear either a traditional Korean folk costume or a full Chinese military uniform, complete with helmet and plastic rifle.

Another vendor on the bridge ran a café where tourists could buy
Titanic
ice cream bars, with pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet on the wrappers. The café manager explained that although the bridge was state-owned, private entrepreneurs were allowed to rent space for their telescopes and snack stands. Next to the bridge, I stopped to talk with another tourist photographer. “Do you think that China will be able to join the World Trade Organization?” he asked. “Back in April, when Zhu Rongji went to America, all of the newspapers said that it would happen. But after the Yugoslavia bombing, it doesn’t look so good.”

We chatted for a while, and the photographer kept bringing up the WTO. I asked him why he was so interested. “The newspapers say that if we join the WTO, we’ll have more foreign visitors coming to China,” he explained. “And of course if China’s economy improves, then there will be more Chinese tourists coming here, too. So it has an effect on me.”

I had always liked traveling to small cities like Dandong, which had few foreign visitors. Locals were eager to talk—from their perspective, there was something momentous about a simple conversation with an American. And often these discussions reminded me of China’s complex relationship with the outside world. It wasn’t unusual for people to speak about war or conflict with a sense of inevitability, and they fully believed that the United States and other countries deliberately bullied China. But at the same time, people were incredibly friendly to foreigners, and they spoke enthusiastically of international trade links.

Initially, these contradictions had mystified me—I thought that eventually I would figure out what the people really believed. But over time I realized that conflicting ideas could exist simultaneously, even in the mind of a single person. The news of a distant bombing might trigger one response, while a conversation with a Chinese-speaking foreigner sparked something else. The sheer complexity of the modern landscape had a lot to do with it. If you visited
a bridge that had been bombed out by Americans, restored by Chinese, and then rented out to small-scale entrepreneurs who sold
Titanic
ice cream bars, it wasn’t surprising that people reacted to the outside world in illogical ways.

The Yalu River Broken Bridge stood at one end of the Dandong Border Cooperative Economic Zone. Locals proudly called this the Development Zone, and the area illustrated how far Dandong had come during the past ten years, after Reform and Opening finally started to take hold in this part of the country. People told me that a decade ago the Development Zone had been nothing but peasant shacks and makeshift docks. Now there were restaurants, ice-cream parlors, karaoke halls, and a luxury apartment complex called the European Flower Garden. The eastern end of the Development Zone featured the Gateway to the Country Hunting Park and a new bridge that carried a thin stream of train and automobile traffic across the water to North Korea. Between the bridge and the luxury apartments, there was a twenty-four-hour venereal disease clinic and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center, a massage parlor whose marquee featured a photograph of a topless foreign woman taking a shower.

At the Gateway to the Country Hunting Park, tourists pursued “wild” quail, pigeon, pheasant, and rabbit. The birds were tethered to the ground, and for one yuan, tourists could shoot at them with either a .22-caliber rifle or a bow and arrow. For three yuan, they could take a potshot at a rabbit that was also tied to the ground. They were allowed to eat anything they killed.

One afternoon, I watched two visitors from Guangdong province hunt quail. The young couple were in their early twenties, nicely dressed, and the man was very drunk. He missed so badly that the quail didn’t even strain at their tethers. They just sat there in the sunshine. They were the most bored-looking quail I’d ever seen.

“I’m too drunk,” the man said. “I want you to shoot instead.” He had originally grown up in this part of the country and now he had brought his girlfriend back for a visit.

“I don’t want to shoot the gun,” she said. “It’s too loud.”

“Here,” he said. “You shoot it. I’m too drunk. I can’t shoot straight.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Go ahead. It’s easy.”

The man showed her how she could rest the gun on the fence so that it would be simpler to aim. Usually, customers weren’t allowed to do that, because it wasn’t sporting, but the park keepers were willing to make an exception for the woman. I sat nearby, listening to the conversation and trying to remember which Hemingway story it recalled. In the best stories there were always guns,
animals, women, and drunk people bickering. The only difference was that in Hemingway stories the animals were never tied to the ground.

Finally, the man persuaded his girlfriend to pick up the .22 and the keeper helped her prop the gun on the fence. She shot three bullets, and every time, after the gun sounded, she squealed and covered her ears. She missed badly. The quail appeared to have fallen asleep.

Later, after it got dark, the Development Zone was a riot of lights—neon and fluorescent blazing from the restaurants and karaoke bars and the Finland Bathing and Pleasure Center. Across the Yalu, there was complete darkness on the North Korean shore. There was no sign of electricity there and the North Koreans didn’t go swimming at night.

IN DANDONG, I
spent much of my time around the river. I got to know a couple of the local speedboat pilots, and several times a day they’d drive me along the banks of North Korea. We’d cruise by run-down tourist boats that were empty, and we’d pass factories that looked abandoned. On the sandy stretches, where the North Koreans swam, children smiled and waved when we passed. Armed soldiers stood stiffly at their posts, watching over the bathers. They were like lifeguards with guns.

Officially, China had good relations with North Korea, but the average people in Dandong were quick to say that their neighbors had bad leadership. When I pressed for more details, the Chinese shrugged.
“Meiyou yisi,”
they said. “It’s not interesting.” Even the photo vendor who was so enthusiastic about the WTO looked bored when I asked him about the possibility of traveling to North Korea. “What am I going to learn from them?” he asked. Nobody in Dandong seemed particularly intrigued by their neighbors’ poverty or isolation; the Chinese had already experienced enough of that themselves during the first thirty years of Communism.

To me, North Korea was tragic, and I was fascinated by the fact that this country had been closed for half a century. Cruising past the shore, I picked out details: an empty tour boat, an armed soldier, a swimming child. From my perspective, every glimpse was heavy with significance, the same way that my brief conversations seemed meaningful to the people in Dandong. But the Chinese and I stared across the river for different reasons: I was looking in; they were looking out. Chinese tourists buzzed the North Korean shore simply because it was the closest they could get to international travel.

If they had money, they could cross. My hotel ran tours that started at around two hundred dollars, and passports weren’t required; a Chinese identity card was adequate. It was easier for a Chinese citizen to visit North Korea
than Hong Kong, which had officially returned to the Motherland two years earlier. The Chinese government had established unusually lax rules in Dandong because it was pretty sure that anybody who crossed the Yalu River would want to come back.

Every morning, tour groups of middle- and upper-class Chinese met in front of my hotel before leaving for North Korea, and one day I watched a guide give a briefing. It reminded me of some of the things I had been told by the Peace Corps when I had first arrived in China. The guide explained that the Chinese tourists should be careful to show respect when they visited North Korean memorials, and they should avoid taking photographs of people laboring. The North Koreans are proud people, and the Chinese need to remember this. Also, when visiting the Demilitarized Zone, it was important that the Chinese not shout “Hello!” at any American soldiers on the other side.

“You’ll notice that it’s not as developed as China,” the guide said. “You shouldn’t tell the North Koreans that they need to Reform and Open, or that they should study the example of our China. And remember that many of their tour guides speak very good Chinese, so be careful what you say.”

THE KOREAN WAR
was the only conflict in which the People’s Republic of China and the United States had fought directly against each other. The war began in June of 1950, when North Korea invaded the south. Along with other members of the United Nations, the U.S. quickly came to the assistance of South Korea, and General MacArthur’s troops gained ground all the way to the Chinese border. In October of that year, Mao Zedong started sending “volunteer” soldiers to help their neighbors in the North. The war lasted three years, and claimed more than 54,000 American lives. Foreign historians estimated that Chinese casualties—injured and dead—were as high as nine hundred thousand. But it was impossible to know for certain, because Chinese accounts of the war were so unreliable. Dandong’s local museum claimed that only eleven thousand Chinese died.

While hanging out on the Yalu River docks, I told one of the boat pilots that I was interested in meeting a veteran of the war. The pilot knew a man who had served—the father of a friend—and he arranged for the three of us to have a meal together. When we met on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant, the old man’s eyes widened. “I thought you said he was an ethnic Chinese from America!” he said loudly, and then he spun on his heel. The pilot ran after him, trying to soothe the old man; after a long conversation, they returned. I explained that I was only interested in history, and I promised not to pub
lish the veteran’s name. Finally he agreed to join us in a private room at the restaurant.