Riding the Iron Rooster (46 page)

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.